Bixiou.  “I’ll paraphrase my opinion.  To be anything at all you must begin by being everything.  It is quite certain that a reform of this service is needed; for on my word of honor, the State robs the poor officials as much as the officials rob the State in the matter of hours.  But why is it that we idle as we do? because they pay us too little; and the reason of that is we are too many for the work, and your late chief, the virtuous Rabourdin, saw all this plainly.  That great administrator,—­for he was that, gentlemen,—­saw what the thing is coming to, the thing that these idiots call the ’working of our admirable institutions.’  The chamber will want before long to administrate, and the administrators will want to legislate.  The government will try to administrate and the administrators will want to govern, and so it will go on.  Laws will come to be mere regulations, and ordinances will be thought laws.  God made this epoch of the world for those who like to laugh.  I live in a state of jovial admiration of the spectacle which the greatest joker of modern times, Louis XVIII., bequeathed to us” [general stupefaction].  “Gentlemen, if France, the country with the best civil service in Europe, is managed thus, what do you suppose the other nations are like?  Poor unhappy nations!  I ask myself how they can possibly get along without two Chambers, without the liberty of the press, without reports, without circulars even, without an army of clerks?  Dear, dear, how do you suppose they have armies and navies? how can they exist at all without political discussions?  Can they even be called nations, or governments?  It is said (mere traveller’s tales) that these strange peoples claim to have a policy, to wield a certain influence; but that’s absurd! how can they when they haven’t ‘progress’ or ’new lights’?  They can’t stir up ideas, they haven’t an independent forum; they are still in the twilight of barbarism.  There are no people in the world but the French people who have ideas.  Can you understand, Monsieur Poiret,” [Poiret jumped as if he had been shot] “how a nation can do without heads of divisions, general-secretaries and directors, and all this splendid array of officials, the glory of France and of the Emperor Napoleon,—­who had his own good reasons for creating a myriad of offices?  I don’t see how those nations have the audacity to live at all.  There’s Austria, which has less than a hundred clerks in her war ministry, while the salaries and pensions of ours amount to a third of our whole budget, a thing that was unheard of before the Revolution.  I sum up all I’ve been saying in one single remark, namely, that the Academy of Inscriptions and Belles-lettres, which seems to have very little to do, had better offer a prize for the ablest answer to the following question:  Which is the best organized State; the one that does many things with few officials, or the one that does next to nothing with an army of them?”

Poiret.  “Is that your last word?”