debt, played many a trick on his creditors.  Expert in legal matters, he never signed a promissory note; and had prudently attached his own salary under the names of fictitious creditors, so that he was able to draw nearly the whole of it himself.  He played ecarte, was the life of evening parties, tossed off glasses of champagne without wetting his lips, and knew all the songs of Beranger by heart.  He was proud of his full, sonorous voice.  His three great admirations were Napoleon, Bolivar, and Beranger.  Foy, Lafitte, and Casimir Delavigne he only esteemed.  Fleury, as you will have guessed already, was a Southerner, destined, no doubt, to become the responsible editor of a liberal journal.

Desroys, the mysterious clerk of the division, consorted with no one, talked little, and hid his private life so carefully that no one knew where he lived, nor who were his protectors, nor what were his means of subsistence.  Looking about them for the causes of this reserve, some of his colleagues thought him a “carbonaro,” others an Orleanist; there were others again who doubted whether to call him a spy or a man of solid merit.  Desroys was, however, simple and solely the son of a “Conventionel,” who did not vote the king’s death.  Cold and prudent by temperament, he had judged the world and ended by relying on no one but himself.  Republican in secret, an admirer of Paul-Louis Courier and a friend of Michael Chrestien, he looked to time and public intelligence to bring about the triumph of his opinions from end to end of Europe.  He dreamed of a new Germany and a new Italy.  His heart swelled with that dull, collective love which we must call humanitarianism, the eldest son of deceased philanthropy, and which is to the divine catholic charity what system is to art, or reasoning to deed.  This conscientious puritan of freedom, this apostle of an impossible equality, regretted keenly that his poverty forced him to serve the government, and he made various efforts to find a place elsewhere.  Tall, lean, lanky, and solemn in appearance, like a man who expects to be called some day to lay down his life for a cause, he lived on a page of Volney, studied Saint-Just, and employed himself on a vindication of Robespierre, whom he regarded as the successor of Jesus Christ.

The last of the individuals belonging to these bureaus who merits a sketch here is the little La Billardiere.  Having, to his great misfortune, lost his mother, and being under the protection of the minister, safe therefore from the tyrannies of Baudoyer, and received in all the ministerial salons, he was nevertheless detested by every one because of his impertinence and conceit.  The two chiefs were polite to him, but the clerks held him at arm’s length and prevented all companionship by means of the extreme and grotesque politeness which they bestowed upon him.  A pretty youth of twenty-two, tall and slender, with the manners of an Englishman, a dandy in dress, curled and perfumed,