advanced than we are.  Politics have nothing to do with that, my dear fellow.  Politics consist in giving the nation an impetus by creating an oligarchy embodying a fixed theory of government, and able to direct public affairs along a straight path, instead of allowing the country to be pulled in a thousand different directions, which is what has been happening for the last forty years in our beautiful France—­at once so intelligent and so sottish, so wise and so foolish; it needs a system, indeed, much more than men.  What are individuals in this great question?  If the end is a great one, if the country may live happy and free from trouble, what do the masses care for the profits of our stewardship, our fortune, privileges, and pleasures?

I am now standing firm on my feet.  I have at the present moment a hundred and fifty thousand francs a year in the Three per Cents, and a reserve of two hundred thousand francs to repair damages.  Even this does not seem to me very much ballast in the pocket of a man starting left foot foremost to scale the heights of power.

A fortunate accident settled the question of my setting out on this career, which did not particularly smile on me, for you know my predilection for the life of the East.  After thirty-five years of slumber, my highly-respected mother woke up to the recollection that she had a son who might do her honor.  Often when a vine-stock is eradicated, some years after shoots come up to the surface of the ground; well, my dear boy, my mother had almost torn me up by the roots from her heart, and I sprouted again in her head.  At the age of fifty-eight, she thinks herself old enough to think no more of any men but her son.  At this juncture she has met in some hot-water cauldron, at I know not what baths, a delightful old maid —­English, with two hundred and forty thousand francs a year; and, like a good mother, she has inspired her with an audacious ambition to become my wife.  A maid of six-and-thirty, my word!  Brought up in the strictest puritanical principles, a steady sitting hen, who maintains that unfaithful wives should be publicly burnt.  ‘Where will you find wood enough?’ I asked her.  I could have sent her to the devil, for two hundred and forty thousand francs a year are no equivalent for liberty, nor a fair price for my physical and moral worth and my prospects.  But she is the sole heiress of a gouty old fellow, some London brewer, who within a calculable time will leave her a fortune equal at least to what the sweet creature has already.  Added to these advantages, she has a red nose, the eyes of a dead goat, a waist that makes one fear lest she should break into three pieces if she falls down, and the coloring of a badly painted doll.  But—­she is delightfully economical; but—­she will adore her husband, do what he will; but—­she has the English gift; she will manage my house, my stables, my servants, my estates better than any steward.