Bureaucracy | Page 3

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Etext prepared by John Bickers, [email protected] Bonnie
Sala and Dagny, [email protected]

BUREAUCRACY
BY
HONORE DE BALZAC

Translated By Katharine Prescott Wormeley

DEDICATION
To the Comtesse Seraphina San Severino, with the respectful homage
of sincere and deep admiration. De Balzac.

BUREAUCRACY

CHAPTER I
THE RABOURDIN HOUSEHOLD
In Paris, where men of thought and study bear a certain likeness to one
another, living as they do in a common centre, you must have met with
several resembling Monsieur Rabourdin, whose acquaintance we are
about to make at a moment when he is head of a bureau in one of our
most important ministries. At this period he was forty years old, with
gray hair of so pleasing a shade that women might at a pinch fall in
love with it for it softened a somewhat melancholy countenance, blue
eyes full of fire, a skin that was still fair, though rather ruddy and
touched here and there with strong red marks; a forehead and nose a la
Louis XV., a serious mouth, a tall figure, thin, or perhaps wasted, like
that of a man just recovering from illness, and finally, a bearing that
was midway between the indolence of a mere idler and the
thoughtfulness of a busy man. If this portrait serves to depict his
character, a sketch of this man's dress will bring it still further into
relief. Rabourdin wore habitually a blue surcoat, a white cravat, a
waistcoat crossed a la Robespierre, black trousers without straps, gray
silk stockings and low shoes. Well-shaved, and with his stomach
warmed by a cup of coffee, he left home at eight in the morning with
the regularity of clock-work, always passing along the same streets on
his way to the ministry: so neat was he, so formal, so starched that he
might have been taken for an Englishman on the road to his embassy.
From these general signs you will readily discern a family man,
harassed by vexations in his own household, worried by annoyances at
the ministry, yet philosopher enough to take life as he found it; an
honest man, loving his country and serving it, not concealing from
himself the obstacles in the way of those who seek to do right; prudent,
because he knew men; exquisitely courteous with women, of whom he
asked nothing,--a man full of acquirements, affable with his inferiors,
holding his equals at great distance, and dignified towards his superiors.

At the epoch of which we write, you would have noticed in him the
coldly resigned air of one who has buried the illusions of his youth and
renounced every secret ambition; you would have recognized a
discouraged, but not disgusted man, one who still clings to his first
projects,--more perhaps to employ his faculties than in the hope of a
doubtful success. He was not decorated with any order, and always
accused himself of weakness for having worn that of the Fleur-de-lis in
the early days of the Restoration.
The life of this man was marked by certain mysterious peculiarities. He
had never known his father; his mother, a woman to whom luxury was
everything, always elegantly dressed, always on pleasure bent, whose
beauty seemed to him miraculous and whom he very seldom saw, left
him little at her death; but she had given him that too common and
incomplete education which produces so much ambition and so little
ability. A few days before his mother's death, when he was just sixteen,
he left the Lycee Napoleon to enter as supernumerary a government
office, where an unknown protector had provided him with a place. At
twenty-two years of age Rabourdin became under-head-clerk; at
twenty-five, head-clerk, or, as it was termed, head of the bureau. From
that day the hand that assisted the young man to start in life was never
felt again in his career, except as to a single circumstance; it led him,
poor and friendless, to the house of a Monsieur Leprince, formerly an
auctioneer,