Z. Marcas | Page 8

attacked; nay, by skilful tactics
he won him the applause of the opposition. To excuse himself for not
rewarding his subaltern, the chief pointed out the impossibility of
finding a place suddenly for a man on the other side, without a great
deal of manoeuvring. Marcas had hoped confidently for a place to
enable him to marry, and thus acquire the qualification he so ardently
desired. He was two-and-thirty, and the Chamber ere long must be
dissolved. Having detected his man in this flagrant act of bad faith, he
overthrew him, or at any rate contributed largely to his overthrow, and
covered him with mud.
A fallen minister, if he is to rise again to power, must show that he is to
be feared; this man, intoxicated by Royal glibness, had fancied that his
position would be permanent; he acknowledged his delinquencies;

besides confessing them, he did Marcas a small money service, for
Marcas had got into debt. He subsidized the newspaper on which
Marcas worked, and made him the manager of it.
Though he despised the man, Marcas, who, practically, was being
subsidized too, consented to take the part of the fallen minister.
Without unmasking at once all the batteries of his superior intellect,
Marcas came a little further than before; he showed half his shrewdness.
The Ministry lasted only a hundred and eighty days; it was swallowed
up. Marcas had put himself into communication with certain deputies,
had moulded them like dough, leaving each impressed with a high
opinion of his talent; his puppet again became a member of the
Ministry, and then the paper was ministerial. The Ministry united the
paper with another, solely to squeeze out Marcas, who in this fusion
had to make way for a rich and insolent rival, whose name was well
known, and who already had his foot in the stirrup.
Marcas relapsed into utter destitution; his haughty patron well knew the
depths into which he had cast him.
Where was he to go? The ministerial papers, privily warned, would
have nothing to say to him. The opposition papers did not care to admit
him to their offices. Marcas could side neither with the Republicans nor
with the Legitimists, two parties whose triumph would mean the
overthrow of everything that now is.
"Ambitious men like a fast hold on things," said he with a smile.
He lived by writing a few articles on commercial affairs, and
contributed to one of those encyclopedias brought out by speculation
and not by learning. Finally a paper was founded, which was destined
to live but two years, but which secured his services. From that moment
he renewed his connection with the minister's enemies; he joined the
party who were working for the fall of the Government; and as soon as
his pickaxe had free play, it fell.
This paper had now for six months ceased to exist; he had failed to find
employment of any kind; he was spoken of as a dangerous man,

calumny attacked him; he had unmasked a huge financial and
mercantile job by a few articles and a pamphlet. He was known to be a
mouthpiece of a banker who was said to have paid him largely, and
from whom he was supposed to expect some patronage in return for his
championship. Marcas, disgusted by men and things, worn out by five
years of fighting, regarded as a free lance rather than as a great leader,
crushed by the necessity of earning his daily bread, which hindered him
from gaining ground, in despair at the influence exerted by money over
mind, and given over to dire poverty, buried himself in a garret, to
make thirty sous a day, the sum strictly answering to his needs.
Meditation had leveled a desert all round him. He read the papers to be
informed of what was going on. Pozzo di Borgo had once lived like this
for some time.
Marcas, no doubt, was planning a serious attack, accustoming himself
to dissimulation, and punishing himself for his blunders by
Pythagorean muteness. But he did not tell us the reasons for his
conduct.
It is impossible to give you an idea of the scenes of the highest comedy
that lay behind this algebraic statement of his career; his useless
patience dogging the footsteps of fortune, which presently took wings,
his long tramps over the thorny brakes of Paris, his breathless chases as
a petitioner, his attempts to win over fools; the schemes laid only to fail
through the influence of some frivolous woman; the meetings with men
of business who expected their capital to bring them places and a
peerage, as well as large interest. Then the hopes rising in a towering
wave only to break in foam on the shoal; the wonders wrought in
reconciling adverse interests which,