Ah! it was to throw off the shackles and to try the impossible!  Vaudrey found himself hemmed in between his dearest hopes and the most disheartening realities.  He was asked for offices, not reforms.  The men charged with the fate of the country were not straggling after progress, they were looking after their own interests, their landed and shopkeeping interests.  He felt nauseated by all this.  He held those deputies in contempt who besieged his cabinet and filled his antechamber in order to beg, claim and demand.  All of them sought something, and they were almost strangled by the solicitations of their own constituents.  They appeared to Sulpice to be rather the commissionaires of universal suffrage than the servants.  This abasement before the manipulators of the votes made Vaudrey indignant.  He felt that France was becoming by degrees a vast market for favors, a nation in which everyone asked office from those who to keep their own promised everything, and the thought filled him with terror.  The ministers, wedded to their positions, became the mere servants of the deputies, while the latter obeyed the orders of their constituents.  All was kept within a vast network of office-seeking and trafficking.  And with it all, a hatred of genuine talent, bitter selfishness and the crushing narrowness of ideas!

Vaudrey recalled a story that had been told him, how during the Empire, the Emperor, terrified, feeling himself isolated, asked and searched for a man, and how a certain little bell in the Tuileries was especially provided to warn the chamberlains of the entry into the chateau of a new face, of the visit of a stranger, in order that the camarilla, warned by the particular ring, would have time to place themselves on their guard, and to send the newcomer to the right about if he might become an aid to the master and a danger to the servants.  Well!  Sulpice did not hear that invisible and secret bell, but he guessed its presence, he divined its presence around him, warning the interested, always ready to chase away the stranger; he felt that its secret thread was everywhere thrown around the powerful, the mighty of four days or a quarter of a century and that, so long as influence existed in the world, there would be courtiers and that these courtiers, eager for a crumb, would prevent the stranger, that is to say, truth, from reaching the light, fearing that this stranger might play the part of the lion and chase the flies away from the honeycomb.

Thus, how much nausea and contempt he felt for that transient power which in spite of himself was rendered useless!  A power that placed him at the mercy of the bawling of a colleague or an enemy, and even at the mercy of that all-powerful master so readily dissatisfied:  everybody.  He had seen, at too close quarters, the vile intrigues, the depressing chafferings, the grinding of that political kitchen in which so many people,—­this Warcolier with his voluble rhetoric, this Granet with his conceited smile of superiority,—­were hungering to hold the handle of the saucepan.  He recalled a remark that Denis Ramel had often repeated to him:  “What is the use of putting one’s self out in order to bask in the sunshine?  The best are in the shade.”