during a shower, are the preoccupations of his mind.  The street pavements, the flaggings of the quays and the boulevards, when first laid down, were a boon to him.  If, for some extraordinary reason, you happen to be in the streets of Paris at half-past seven or eight o’clock of a winter’s morning, and see through piercing cold or fog or rain a timid, pale young man loom up, cigarless, take notice of his pockets.  You will be sure to see the outline of a roll which his mother has given him to stay his stomach between breakfast and dinner.  The guilelessness of the supernumerary does not last long.  A youth enlightened by gleams by Parisian life soon measures the frightful distance that separates him from the head-clerkship, a distance which no mathematician, neither Archimedes, nor Leibnitz, nor Laplace has ever reckoned, the distance that exists between 0 and the figure 1.  He begins to perceive the impossibilities of his career; he hears talk of favoritism; he discovers the intrigues of officials:  he sees the questionable means by which his superiors have pushed their way,—­one has married a young woman who made a false step; another, the natural daughter of a minister; this one shouldered the responsibility of another’s fault; that one, full of talent, risks his health in doing, with the perseverance of a mole, prodigies of work which the man of influence feels incapable of doing for himself, though he takes the credit.  Everything is known in a government office.  The incapable man has a wife with a clear head, who has pushed him along and got him nominated for deputy; if he has not talent enough for an office, he cabals in the Chamber.  The wife of another has a statesman at her feet.  A third is the hidden informant of a powerful journalist.  Often the disgusted and hopeless supernumerary sends in his resignation.  About three fourths of his class leave the government employ without ever obtaining an appointment, and their number is winnowed down to either those young men who are foolish or obstinate enough to say to themselves, “I have been here three years, and I must end sooner or later by getting a place,” or to those who are conscious of a vocation for the work.  Undoubtedly the position of supernumerary in a government office is precisely what the novitiate is in a religious order,—­a trial.  It is a rough trial.  The State discovers how many of them can bear hunger, thirst, and penury without breaking down, how many can toil without revolting against it; it learns which temperaments can bear up under the horrible experience —­or if you like, the disease—­of government official life.  From this point of view the apprenticeship of the supernumerary, instead of being an infamous device of the government to obtain labor gratis, becomes a useful institution.