The world has neither pity nor respect, neither heart nor head; everybody forgets to-morrow the service of yesterday.

Now each one of you may be, like Monsieur Baudoyer, an administrative genius, a Chateaubriand of reports, a Bossouet of circulars, the Canalis of memorials, the gifted son of diplomatic despatches; but I tell you there is a fatal law which interferes with all administrative genius,--I mean the law of promotion by average.

This average is based on the statistics of promotion and the statistics of mortality combined.

It is very certain that on entering whichever section of the Civil Service you please at the age of eighteen, you can't get eighteen hundred francs a year till you reach the age of thirty.

Now there's no free and independent career in which, in the course of twelve years, a young man who has gone through the grammar-school, been vaccinated, is exempt from military service, and possesses all his faculties (I don't mean transcendent ones) can't amass a capital of forty-five thousand francs in centimes, which represents a permanent income equal to our salaries, which are, after all, precarious.