“Some,” Colleville used to say, “are victims to a sort of ‘spleen’ peculiar to the government clerk; they die of a checked circulation; a red-tapeworm is in their vitals.  That little Poiret couldn’t see the well-known white carton without changing color at the beloved sight; he used to turn from green to yellow.”

Mademoiselle Thuillier was considered the moving spirit of her brother’s household; she was not without decision and force of character, as the following history will show.  This superiority over those who immediately surrounded her enabled her to judge her brother, although she adored him.  After witnessing the failure of the hopes she had set upon her idol, she had too much real maternity in her feeling for him to let herself be mistaken as to his social value.

Thuillier and his sister were children of the head porter at the ministry of finance.  Jerome had escaped, thanks to his near-sightedness, all drafts and conscriptions.  The father’s ambition was to make his son a government clerk.  At the beginning of this century the army presented too many posts not to leave various vacancies in the government offices.  A deficiency of minor officials enabled old Pere Thuillier to hoist his son upon the lowest step of the bureaucratic hierarchy.  The old man died in 1814, leaving Jerome on the point of becoming sub-director, but with no other fortune than that prospect.  The worthy Thuillier and his wife (who died in 1810) had retired from active service in 1806, with a pension as their only means of support; having spent what property they had in giving Jerome the education required in these days, and in supporting both him and his sister.

The influence of the Restoration on the bureaucracy is well known.  From the forty and one suppressed departments a crowd of honorable employees returned to Paris with nothing to do, and clamorous for places inferior to those they had lately occupied.  To these acquired rights were added those of exiled families ruined by the Revolution.  Pressed between the two floods, Jerome thought himself lucky not to have been dismissed under some frivolous pretext.  He trembled until the day when, becoming by mere chance sub-director, he saw himself secure of a retiring pension.  This cursory view of matters will serve to explain Monsieur Thuillier’s very limited scope and knowledge.  He had learned the Latin, mathematics, history, and geography that are taught in schools, but he never got beyond what is called the second class; his father having preferred to take advantage of a sudden opportunity to place him at the ministry.  So, while the young Thuillier was making his first records on the Grand-Livre, he ought to have been studying his rhetoric and philosophy.