Madame Colleville was, as a woman, the most distinguished member of this society, just as Minard junior and Professor Phellion were superior among the men.  All the others, without ideas or education, and issuing from the lower ranks, presented the types and the absurdities of the lesser bourgeoisie.  Though all success, especially if won from distant sources, seems to presuppose some genuine merit, Minard was really an inflated balloon.  Expressing himself in empty phrases, mistaking sycophancy for politeness, and wordiness for wit, he uttered his commonplaces with a brisk assurance that passed for eloquence.  Certain words which said nothing but answered all things, —­progress, steam, bitumen, National guard, order, democratic element, spirit of association, legality, movement, resistance,—­seemed, as each political phase developed, to have been actually made for Minard, whose talk was a paraphrase on the ideas of his newspaper.  Julien Minard, the young lawyer, suffered from his father as much as his father suffered from his wife.  Zelie had grown pretentious with wealth, without, at the same time, learning to speak French.  She was now very fat, and gave the idea, in her rich surroundings, of a cook married to her master.

Phellion, that type and model of the petty bourgeois, exhibited as many virtues as he did absurdities.  Accustomed to subordination during his bureaucratic life, he respected all social superiority.  He was therefore silent before Minard.  During the critical period of retirement from office, he had held his own admirably, for the following reason.  Never until now had that worthy and excellent man been able to indulge his own tastes.  He loved the city of Paris; he was interested in its embellishment, in the laying out of its streets; he was capable of standing for hours to watch the demolition of houses.  He might now have been observed, stolidly planted on his legs, his nose in the air, watching for the fall of a stone which some mason was loosening at the top of a wall, and never moving till the stone fell; when it had fallen he went away as happy as an academician at the fall of a romantic drama.  Veritable supernumeraries of the social comedy, Phellion, Laudigeois, and their kind, fulfilled the functions of the antique chorus.  They wept when weeping was in order, laughed when they should laugh, and sang in parts the public joys and sorrows; they triumphed in their corner with the triumphs of Algiers, of Constantine, of Lisbon, of Sainte-Jean d’Ulloa; they deplored the death of Napoleon and the fatal catastrophes of the Saint-Merri and the rue Transnonnain, grieving over celebrated men who were utterly unknown to them.  Phellion alone presents a double side:  he divides himself conscientiously between the reasons of the opposition and those of the government.  When fighting went on in the streets, Phellion had the courage to declare himself before his neighbors; he went to the Place Saint-Michel, the place where his battalion assembled;