chess-board.  The Minister will read with smiling confidence the reports by which his subordinates who are his masters, inform him—­what no one until then had thought of—­that he has been called by the voice of the nation to his high office, and that he can in future count upon the entire and complete confidence of the country.  To please these obliging persons, the hangers-on of governments that he has passed a quarter of his life infighting against and whom he will call gravely, and upon certain occasions, very drolly, the hierarchy, he will betray without any scruples all those whose disinterested efforts and great sacrifices have brought about the triumph of the cause which he represents._

"Monsieur le Ministre is from the Provinces!  You understand.  Solemn and pedantic, if his youth has been passed upon the banks of the Isere, a puppy with his muzzle held aloft and giddy, if Garonne has nourished him, broad faced and vulgarly pedantic if his cradle has been rocked in upper Limousin.  But whether he comes from Correze, from Garonne or Isere, it is always as a Provincial that he arrives in Paris, the air of which intoxicates him.  He is in the same situation and carries with him the same sentiments as Monsieur Jourdain when invited to visit the Countess Dorimene.  For the first adventuress who comes along, a born princess who has strayed into a house of ill fame, or one who frequents such a house, who masquerades as a princess in her coquettish house in Rue Bremontier, he will forsake father, mother, children, state documents, cabinet, councils, Chamber of Deputies, everything in fact.  He will break away from his young wife who has grown up under his eyes in the same town with him, among all the sweet domestic graces, moulded amid all the fresh and sapid delicacies of the provinces, but pshaw! too provincial for a noble of his importance, and he will go in pursuit of some flower, no matter what, be it only redolent of Parisian patchouli.  He will break the heart of the one, while for the other, he will bring before the councils of administration suspected schemes, blackmailings, concessions, treachery and ruin.  Monsieur Claretie had shown us the Vaudrey of his romance involved in all these degradations, although he has checked him as to some, and in his novel, at least, with due submission to the exalted truth of art, he has not shrunk from punishing this false, great man and pretended tribune of the people, by the very vices he espoused.

"I do not stop to inquire if even in the story, Monsieur Claretie’s ‘Marianne Kayser’ is frequently self-contradictory, and if in some features I clearly recognize his Guy de Lissac; two characters that play an important part in the narrative!  But after all, what does it matter?  It suffices for me that his Excellency the Minister and all his Excellency’s entourage are fully grasped and clearly described.  Granet, the low intriguer_ of the lobbies; Molina, the stock-company cut-throat