Hippolyte Ceres informed them in a circular that their action was strictly legal.  The following day he sent out a second circular forbidding all associations of government employees as illegal.  He dismissed one hundred and eighty postmen, reinstated them, reprimanded them—­and awarded them gratuities.  At Cabinet councils he was always on the point of bursting forth.  The presence of the Head of the State scarcely restrained him within the limits of the decencies, and as he did not dare to attack his rival he consoled himself by heaping invectives upon General Debonnaire, the respected Minister of War.  The General did not hear them, for he was deaf and occupied himself in composing verses for the Baroness Bildermann.  Hippolyte Ceres offered an indistinct opposition to everything the Prime Minister proposed.  In a word, he was a madman.  One faculty alone escaped the ruin of his intellect:  he retained his Parliamentary sense, his consciousness of the temper of majorities, his thorough knowledge of groups, and his certainty of the direction in which affairs were moving.

VIII.  FURTHER CONSEQUENCES

The session ended calmly, and the Ministry saw no dangerous signs upon the benches where the majority sat.  It was visible, however, from certain articles in the Moderate journals, that the demands of the Jewish and Christian financiers were increasing daily, that the patriotism of the banks required a civilizing expedition to Nigritia, and that the steel trusts, eager in the defence of our coasts and colonies, were crying out for armoured cruisers and still more armoured cruisers.  Rumours of war began to be heard.  Such rumours sprang up every year as regularly as the trade winds; serious people paid no heed to them and the government usually let them die away from their own weakness unless they grew stronger and spread.  For in that case the country would be alarmed.  The financiers only wanted colonial wars and the people did not want any wars at all.  It loved to see its government proud and even insolent, but at the least suspicion that a European war was brewing, its violent emotion would quickly have reached the House.  Paul Visire was not uneasy.  The European situation was in his view completely reassuring.  He was only irritated by the maniacal silence of his Minister of Foreign Affairs.  That gnome went to the Cabinet meetings with a portfolio bigger than himself stuffed full of papers, said nothing, refused to answer all questions, even those asked him by the respected President of the Republic, and, exhausted by his obstinate labours, took a few moments’ sleep in his arm-chair in which nothing but the top of his little black head was to be seen above the green tablecloth.