pawns upon a 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 Isère, 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 Corrèze, from Garonne or
Isère, 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 Dorimène. 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 Brèmontier, 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.