His Excellency the Minister | Page 3

side of
Law and Order. He enters into the Cabinet with the determination to
reform every abuse, to recast everything; to seek for honest men, to
make merit and not faction, the touchstone of advancement. In short, to
apply in his political life the glorious principles which--and the noble
maxims that--He is only, however, forty-eight hours in office when he
becomes quite demoralized, paralyzed and stultified for the rest of his
ministerial life. It is the phenomenon of crushing demoralization and of
complete enervation of which the public, from the situation in which it
is placed, sees only the results of which Monsieur Claretie, with a
skilful hand describes for us the mechanism and the cause. This
Minister of State, supposed to be omnipotent in office, has not even the
power to choose an undersecretary of State for himself. The Minister
who only the day before, from his seat upon one of the benches of the
Opposition, sat with his head held aloft, his long body erect, with rigid
dignity, as if made of triple brass, cannot now take the initiative in the
appointment of a 'garde champêtre.' His undersecretaries of State, his
gardes champêtres, he himself, his whole environment, in fact, are only
painted dummies and the meek puppets that a director of the staff, a
chief of a division, or a chief of a bureau sets in motion, to the tune he
grinds out of his hand-organ, or moves them about at his will like

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. He will break the heart of the one, while for the other, he
will bring before the councils of administration suspected schemes,
blackmailings, concessions, treachery and ruin. Monsieur Claretie had
shown us the Vaudrey of his romance involved in all these
degradations, although he has checked him as to some, and in his novel,
at least, with due submission to the exalted truth of art, he has not
shrunk from punishing this false, great man and pretended tribune of

the people, by the very vices he espoused.
"I do not stop to inquire if even in the story, Monsieur Claretie's
'Marianne Kayser' is frequently self-contradictory, and if in some
features I clearly recognize his Guy de Lissac; two characters that play
an important part in the narrative! But after all, what does it matter? It
suffices for me that his Excellency the Minister and all his Excellency's
entourage are fully grasped and clearly described. Granet, the low
intriguer of the lobbies; Molina, the stock-company cut-throat and
Bourse ruffian; Ramel, the melancholy and redoubtable publicist, who
has made emperors without himself desiring to become one, who will
die in the neighborhood of Montmartre and the Batignolles, forgotten
but proud, poor, and unsullied by money, true to his ideals, among the
ingrates enriched by his