receiving a peerage under certain conditions.  Magistrates, learned bodies, officers of the lower grades found their services honorably rewarded; no man employed by the government failed to obtain great consideration through the value and extent of his labors and the excellence of his salary; every one was able to provide for his own future and France was delivered from the cancer of pensions.  As a result Rabourdin’s scheme exhibited only seven hundred millions of expenditures and twelve hundred millions of receipts.  A saving of five hundred millions annually had far more virtue than the accumulation of a sinking fund whose dangers were plainly to be seen.  In that fund the State, according to Rabourdin, became a stockholder, just as it persisted in being a land-holder and a manufacturer.  To bring about these reforms without too roughly jarring the existing state of things or incurring a Saint-Bartholomew of clerks, Rabourdin considered that an evolution of twenty years would be required.

Such were the thoughts maturing in Rabourdin’s mind ever since his promised place had been given to Monsieur de la Billardiere, a man of sheer incapacity.  This plan, so vast apparently yet so simple in point of fact, which did away with so many large staffs and so many little offices all equally useless, required for its presentation to the public mind close calculations, precise statistics, and self-evident proof.  Rabourdin had long studied the budget under its double-aspect of ways and means and of expenditure.  Many a night he had lain awake unknown to his wife.  But so far he had only dared to conceive the plan and fit it prospectively to the administrative skeleton; all of which counted for nothing,—­he must gain the ear of a minister capable of appreciating his ideas.  Rabourdin’s success depended on the tranquil condition of political affairs, which up to this time were still unsettled.  He had not considered the government as permanently secure until three hundred deputies at least had the courage to form a compact majority systematically ministerial.  An administration founded on that basis had come into power since Rabourdin had finished his elaborate plan.  At this time the luxury of peace under the Bourbons had eclipsed the warlike luxury of the days when France shone like a vast encampment, prodigal and magnificent because it was victorious.  After the Spanish campaign, the administration seemed to enter upon an era of tranquillity in which some good might be accomplished; and three months before the opening of our story a new reign had begun without any apparent opposition; for the liberalism of the Left had welcomed Charles X. with as much enthusiasm as the Right.  Even clear-sighted and suspicious persons were misled.  The moment seemed propitious for Rabourdin.  What could better conduce to the stability of the government than to propose and carry through a reform whose beneficial results were to be so vast?