and the next morning reappears smiling with an excellent bouillon.  No matter how high a statesman may stand, he is certain to have some household drudge, before whom he is weak, undecided, disputations with fate, self-questioning, self-answering, and buckling for the fight.  Such a familiar is like the soft wood of savages, which, when rubbed against the hard wood, strikes fire.  Sometimes great geniuses illumine themselves in this way.  Napoleon lived with Berthier, Richelieu with Pere Joseph; des Lupeaulx was the familiar of everybody.  He continued friends with fallen ministers and made himself their intermediary with their successors, diffusing thus the perfume of the last flattery and the first compliment.  He well understood how to arrange all the little matters which a statesman has no leisure to attend to.  He saw necessities as they arose; he obeyed well; he could gloss a base act with a jest and get the whole value of it; and he chose for the services he thus rendered those that the recipients were not likely to forget.

Thus, when it was necessary to cross the ditch between the Empire and the Restoration, at a time when every one was looking about for planks, and the curs of the Empire were howling their devotion right and left, des Lupeaulx borrowed large sums from the usurers and crossed the frontier.  Risking all to win all, he bought up Louis XVIII.’s most pressing debts, and was the first to settle nearly three million of them at twenty per cent—­for he was lucky enough to be backed by Gobseck in 1814 and 1815.  It is true that Messrs. Gobseck, Werdet, and Gigonnet swallowed the profits, but des Lupeaulx had agreed that they should have them; he was not playing for a stake; he challenged the bank, as it were, knowing very well that the king was not a man to forget this debt of honor.  Des Lupeaulx was not mistaken; he was appointed Master of petitions, Knight of the order of Saint Louis, and officer of the Legion of honor.  Once on the ladder of political success, his clever mind looked about for the means to maintain his foothold; for in the fortified city into which he had wormed himself, generals do not long keep useless mouths.  So to his general trade of household drudge and go-between he added that of gratuitous consultation on the secret maladies of power.

After discovering in the so-called superior men of the Restoration their utter inferiority in comparison with the events which had brought them to the front, he overcame their political mediocrity by putting into their mouths, at a crisis, the word of command for which men of real talent were listening.  It must not be thought that this word was the outcome of his own mind.  Were it so, des Lupeaulx would have been a man of genius, whereas he was only a man of talent.  He went everywhere, collected opinions, sounded consciences, and caught all the tones they gave out.  He gathered knowledge like a true and indefatigable political bee.  This walking Bayle