Vaudrey saw much less of these daily little wounds.  He lived in an atmosphere of constant flattery, favor-begging cloaked under complimentary phrases.  Had he leisure, he would have been able to calculate with mathematical exactitude how many angles the human form would describe in the process of bowing and scraping.  In his department, everybody asked for something or got someone else to ask. Promotion, that insatiable hunger, was the greedy dream of all that little world of intriguing, underhand, begging employes, who opened up around the new minister so many approaches, like military lines around a redoubt.

Sulpice felt himself besieged and the target for a crowd of greedy ambitions.  The sub-heads of departments cast bitterly envious glances at the offices of chiefs, like hungry beggars hypnotized by the display at Chevet’s.  Commendatory letters rained on him.  This shower of begging-missives nauseated the minister to such an extent that he endeavored to arrest the stream, ordering Warcolier, the Under Secretary of State, to be called and requesting him to reply to the deputies, to the senators, to everybody, in fact:  that he had no influence to use, that the era of favoritism was over; that he, Vaudrey, understood that only merit would receive official gifts.  “Merit only.  You understand, Monsieur Warcolier?”

Warcolier rolled his huge eyes in astonishment; then, with the self-satisfied smile of an expressionless beau, after passing his fat hand through his long whiskers, yellow and streaked with gray, that decorated his rosy cheeks, he remarked doctorally, that Monsieur le Ministre was entering on a path that, in all conscience, he could qualify as being only dangerous.  Eh! bon Dieu! one must do something for one’s friends!—­Vaudrey’s accession to the Department of the Interior had given birth to many new hopes; on all grounds they must be satisfied.  Vaudrey would never be forgiven for such deception.

“What deception?” asked Sulpice.  “I promised reforms and I am going to carry them out, but people laugh at my reforms and ask what?—­Places.”

“Bless me!” replied Warcolier, “entirely logical.”

“Be it so! but there are places and places.  I cannot, however, retire a whole staff of employes to give place to a new one.  That’s precisely what they want.  There is not a deputy who has not one candidate to recommend to me.”

“That’s very natural, Monsieur le Ministre, seeing that there is not a deputy who may not himself be a candidate.”

“Still, he should be independent of his electors, but in truth, it is not the rights of those who have elected them that my colleagues defend, it is their own interests.”

“Every man for himself, Monsieur le Ministre.  Yesterday, even yesterday, one of my electors whose wife has just given birth to a child, wrote me, asking for a good nurse.  That is like one of our colleagues, Perraud—­of the Vosges.—­One of his electors commissioned him to take back an umbrella with him upon his early return.  The electors regard their deputies in the light of commission merchants.”