Bureaucracy | Page 6

have
had the energy to make a rapid fortune for the sake of rendering an
adored wife happy! She reproached him for being too honest a man. In
the mouth of some women this accusation is a charge of imbecility. She
sketched out for him certain brilliant plans in which she took no
account of the hindrances imposed by men and things; then, like all
women under the influence of vehement feeling, she became in thought
as Machiavellian as Gondreville, and more unprincipled than Maxime
de Trailles. At such times Celestine's mind took a wide range, and she
imagined herself at the summit of her ideas.
When these fine visions first began Rabourdin, who saw the practical
side, was cool. Celestine, much grieved, thought her husband narrow-
minded, timid, unsympathetic; and she acquired, insensibly, a wholly
false opinion of the companion of her life. In the first place, she often
extinguished him by the brilliancy of her arguments. Her ideas came to
her in flashes, and she sometimes stopped him short when he began an
explanation, because she did not choose to lose the slightest sparkle of
her own mind. From the earliest days of their marriage Celestine,

feeling herself beloved and admired by her husband, treated him
without ceremony; she put herself above conjugal laws and the rules of
private courtesy by expecting love to pardon all her little wrong-doings;
and, as she never in any way corrected herself, she was always in the
ascendant. In such a situation the man holds to the wife very much the
position of a child to a teacher when the latter cannot or will not
recognize that the mind he has ruled in childhood is becoming mature.
Like Madame de Stael, who exclaimed in a room full of people,
addressing, as we may say, a greater man than herself, "Do you know
you have really said something very profound!" Madame Rabourdin
said of her husband: "He certainly has a good deal of sense at times."
Her disparaging opinion of him gradually appeared in her behavior
through almost imperceptible motions. Her attitude and manners
expressed a want of respect. Without being aware of it she injured her
husband in the eyes of others; for in all countries society, before
making up its mind about a man, listens for what his wife thinks of him,
and obtains from her what the Genevese term "pre-advice."
When Rabourdin became aware of the mistakes which love had led him
to commit it was too late,--the groove had been cut; he suffered and
was silent. Like other men in whom sentiments and ideas are of equal
strength, whose souls are noble and their brains well balanced, he was
the defender of his wife before the tribunal of his own judgment; he
told himself that nature doomed her to a disappointed life through his
fault; HIS; she was like a thoroughbred English horse, a racer
harnessed to a cart full of stones; she it was who suffered; and he
blamed himself. His wife, by dint of constant repetition, had inoculated
him with her own belief in herself. Ideas are contagious in a household;
the ninth thermidor, like so many other portentous events, was the
result of female influence. Thus, goaded by Celestine's ambition,
Rabourdin had long considered the means of satisfying it, though he
hid his hopes, so as to spare her the tortures of uncertainty. The man
was firmly resolved to make his way in the administration by bringing
a strong light to bear upon it. He intended to bring about one of those
revolutions which send a man to the head of either one party or another
in society; but being incapable of so doing in his own interests, he
merely pondered useful thoughts and dreamed of triumphs won for his

country by noble means. His ideas were both generous and ambitious;
few officials have not conceived the like; but among officials as among
artists there are more miscarriages than births; which is tantamount to
Buffon's saying that "Genius is patience."
Placed in a position where he could study French administration and
observe its mechanism, Rabourdin worked in the circle where his
thought revolved, which, we may remark parenthetically, is the secret
of much human accomplishment; and his labor culminated finally in
the invention of a new system for the Civil Service of government.
Knowing the people with whom he had to do, he maintained the
machine as it then worked, so it still works and will continue to work;
for everybody fears to remodel it, though no one, according to
Rabourdin, ought to be unwilling to simplify it. In his opinion, the
problem to be resolved lay in a better use of the same forces. His plan,
in its simplest form, was to revise taxation and lower it