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Almost all who held office or had been in the service, were of this number, either ambassadors, general officers or former ministers, from Marshal de Brogue down to Machaut and Malesherbes; resident bishops, like Monseigneur de Durfort, at Besancon; vicars-general and canons who really governed their dioceses on the spot; prelates, like those in Provence, Languedoc and Brittany, who, by right, had seats in the provincial "Etats", agents and representatives of the clergy at Paris; heads of Orders and Congregations; the chief and lieutenant commandants of the seventeen military departments, intendants of each generalite head-clerks of each ministry, magistrates of each parliament, farmers-general, collectors-general, and, more particularly in each province, the dignitaries and local proprietors of the two first orders, and all leading manufacturers, merchants, ship-owners, bankers and prominent bourgeois; in short, that elite of the nobles, clergy, and Third Estate, which, from 1778 to 1789, constituted the twenty-one provincial assemblies, and which certainly formed in France the great social staff.
Every body knew that when des Lupeaulx was interested in any person or in any thing he attended to the matter personally. He allowed the head-clerks to converse privately about affairs of delicacy, but he listened to their gossip. From time to time he went to the Tuileries to get his cue.
One so often reads in stories of roguish, or hard-hearted, or narrow-minded head-clerks, that it is pleasant to be able to record from my own experience an example of a very different character. I believe that clerks are often made hard-hearted or selfish, if not rogues, by the unsympathising or supercilious way in which they are treated by their employers.
Madame Marneffe particularly wished to be invited to Mademoiselle Hulot's wedding. To enable him to receive his future mistress in his drawing-room, the great official was obliged to invite all the clerks of his division down to the deputy head-clerks inclusive. Thus a grand ball was a necessity.
The clerks, few in number, were under the orders of a prime minister who communicated with the sovereign; thus they directly served the king. The superiors of these zealous servants were simply called head-clerks. Thus, all points of the circumference were fastened to the centre and derived their life from it. The result was devotion and confidence.
This last-named dealer generally demands the soul of the contracting party in return for the powers and privileges conferred; and in very many cases he must get decidedly the worst of the bargain, for some of his precious adopted children never had soul enough to pay for the ink to sign it away with; but there is no doubt, in case a brisk competition should arise for customers, that some of his cashiers and head-clerks would contrive to under-sell him even at this price.
'Because, don't you know, we will say, tittering, 'when you live with wolves, you must howl like a wolf. By God, it wasn't in vain that some minister called the Russian students future head-clerks!" "Or professors," Lichonin put in.
A play is troublesome on account of the narrowness of its framework, but the novel has more freedom. In order to write one they searched among their personal recollections. Pécuchet recalled to mind one of the head-clerks in his own office, a very nasty customer, and he felt a longing to take revenge on him by means of a book.
I ought to have said that I had not had much communication with him, for he was of a somewhat eccentric character; and although my father had frequently invited him, he would never come down and dine with us, as it is the custom of many head-clerks to do with their principals.
At Lyons there is a class of men who, under cover of the monopoly given them by the city government, receive higher pay than college professors or the head-clerks of the government ministers: I mean the porters. The price of loading and unloading at certain wharves in Lyons, according to the schedule of the Rigues or porters' associations, is thirty centimes per hundred kilogrammes.
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