Chazelle [continuing his philippic].  “You may not be, but I am!  We have no chances at all.  Time was when nothing was more encouraging than a civil-service career.  So many men were in the army that there were not enough for the government work; the maimed and the halt and the sick ones, like Paulmier, and the near-sighted ones, all had their chance of a rapid promotion.  But now, ever since the Chamber invented what they called special training, and the rules and regulations for civil-service examiners, we are worse off than common soldiers.  The poorest places are at the mercy of a thousand mischances because we are now ruled by a thousand sovereigns.”

Bixiou [returning].  “Are you crazy, Chazelle?  Where do you find a thousand sovereigns?—­not in your pocket, are they?”

Chazelle.  “Count them up.  There are four hundred over there at the end of the pont de la Concorde (so called because it leads to the scene of perpetual discord between the Right and Left of the Chamber); three hundred more at the end of the rue de Tournon.  The court, which ought to count for the other three hundred, has seven hundred parts less power to get a man appointed to a place under government than the Emperor Napoleon had.”

Fleury.  “All of which signifies that in a country where there are three powers you may bet a thousand to one that a government clerk who has no influence but his own merits to advance him will remain in obscurity.”

Bixiou [looking alternately at Chazelle and Fleury].  “My sons, you have yet to learn that in these days the worst state of life is the state of belonging to the State.”

Fleury.  “Because it has a constitutional government.”

Colleville.  “Gentlemen, gentlemen! no politics!”

Bixiou.  “Fleury is right.  Serving the State in these days is no longer serving a prince who knew how to punish and reward.  The State now is everybody.  Everybody of course cares for nobody.  Serve everybody, and you serve nobody.  Nobody is interested in nobody; the government clerk lives between two negations.  The world has neither pity nor respect, neither heart nor head; everybody forgets to-morrow the service of yesterday.  Now each one of you may be, like Monsieur Baudoyer, an administrative genius, a Chateaubriand of reports, a Bossouet of circulars, the Canalis of memorials, the gifted son of diplomatic despatches; but I tell you there is a fatal law which interferes with all administrative genius,—­I mean the law of promotion by average.  This average is based on the statistics of promotion and the statistics of mortality combined.  It is very certain that on entering whichever section of the Civil Service you please at the age of eighteen, you can’t get eighteen hundred francs a year till you reach the age of thirty.  Now there’s no free and independent career in which, in the course of twelve years, a young man who has gone through the grammar-school, been vaccinated, is exempt from military service,