national art at the Villa Medicis; he had seen this composer, now a millionaire, beg for a private rehearsal as he might ask alms, and slip into one’s hands concert tickets for the Herz hall.  He was the first to point out the verses of the poet who now wore l’habit vert.  He had first heralded the fame of the actor now in vogue, of the tenor who to-day had his villas at Nice, yes, Ramel was the first to say:  “He is one of the chosen few!”

Old, weary and knowing, very gentle and refined in his banter, and refusing to be blinded or irritated by the trickeries of destiny, Denis Ramel, when asked why, at his age and with his talents, he was neither a deputy, nor a millionaire, nor a member of the Institute, but only a Warwick living like a poor devil, smiled and said, with the tone of a man who has probed to the bottom the affairs of life: 

“Bah! what is the use?  All that is not so very desirable.  Ministers, academicians, millionaires, prefects, men of power, I know all about them.  I have made them all my life.  The majority of those who strut about at this very time, well! well! it is I who made them!”

And, like a philosopher allowing the rabble to pass him, who might have been their chief, but preferred to be their judge, he locked himself in his apartments with his books, his pictures, his engravings, his little collection slowly gathered year by year, article by article, smoking his pipe tranquilly, and at times reviewing the pages of his life, just as he might have fingered the leaves of a portfolio of engravings, thinking when he chanced to meet some notable person of the day who shunned him or merely saluted him curtly and stiffly: 

“You were not so proud when you came to ask me to certify your pay-slip for the cashier of the journal.”

Ramel had always greatly esteemed Sulpice Vaudrey.  This man seemed to him to be more refined and less forgetful than others.  Vaudrey had never “posed.”  As a minister, he recalled with deep emotion the period of his struggles.  Ramel, the former manager of the Nation Francaise, was one of the objects of his affection and admiration.  He would have been delighted to snatch this man from his seclusion and place him in the first rank, to make this sexagenarian who had created and moulded so many others, noteworthy by a sudden stroke.

Amid the tumultuous throng, and feeling overjoyed to find once more one whom he could trust, to whom he could abandon himself entirely, he repeated to him in all sincerity: 

“Come, Ramel!  Would you consent to be my secretary general?”

“No! your Excellency,” Ramel answered, as a kindly smile played beneath his white moustaches.

“To oblige me?—­To help me?”

“No—­Why, I am an egotist, my dear Vaudrey.  Truly, that would make me too jealous.  Take Navarrot,” he added, as he pointed to a fashionable man, elegantly cravatted, carrying his head high, who had just greeted Vaudrey, using the same phrase eight times:  “My dear minister—­your Excellency—­my minister—­”