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All the sub-prefects, all the syndics, all the officials in this province, will be richly rewarded; the people defrauded of the soil and the river will get what may be given them by an enforced valuation. I have conversed with all kinds and conditions of men; and I have heard only one statement in the mouths of all: the matter is beyond all alteration.
All that gathering of insignificant, grave and pretentious young men, who, while they crowded, made their progress in the ranks of the sub-prefects, councillors of prefectures, picking up nominations under the feet of the influential guests as they would cigar stumps, disgusted him; men of twenty years, born, as it were, with white cravats, pretentious and pensive, creatures of office and not of work, haunting the Chambers and the antechambers, mere collectors of ideas, repeaters of serious commonplaces, salon democrats who would not offer their ungloved hand to a workman on the street; staff-majors ambitious of honors and not of devotion, whom he felt crowding around him, with smiles on their lips and applications in their pockets.
He had the direct and sole nomination of the members of the general administration, of those of the departmental and municipal councils, and of the administrators, afterwards called prefects and sub-prefects.
Sitting in the centre of the porch, as if it were the proscenium of his theatre, Cardailhac, while superintending the rehearsals, issued his commands to a multitude of workmen and gardeners, ordered trees to be felled which obstructed the view, drew sketches of the triumphal arches, sent despatches and messengers to mayors, to sub-prefects, to Arles to procure a deputation of girls of the province in the national costume, to Barbantane, where the most skilful dancers of the farandole are to be found, to Faraman renowned for its herds of wild bulls and Camarguese horses; and as Jansoulet's name blazed forth at the foot of all these despatches, as the name of the Bey of Tunis also figured in them, everybody acquiesced with the utmost eagerness, the telegraphic messages arrived in an endless stream, and that little Sardanapalus from Porte-Saint-Martin, who was called Cardailhac, was forever repeating: "There is something to work with;" delighted to throw gold about like handfuls of seed, to have a stage fifty leagues in circumference to arrange, all Provence, of which country that fanatical Parisian was a native, and thoroughly familiar with its resources in the direction of the picturesque.
He then said to me, "Bourrienne, I give up your department to you. Name whom you please for the appointments; but remember you must be responsible to me." What a list would have been which should contain the names of all the prefects, sub-prefects, receivers-general, and other civil officers to whom I gave places!
The men of business whom Don Silverio had seen in Rome did not trouble themselves with the rustic proprietors of either water or land; they treated with the great officials of the department, with the deputies, the prefects, and sub-prefects, the syndics and assessors; so a perfect silence on the question reigned from the rise of the river to its mouth, and many of the men said over their wood-fires that they had been scared for nothing.
Special careers, such as civil and military engineering, the navy, mining, and the professorial chair were all fenced about by strict regulations or to be obtained only by competition; whereas in the civil service the revolving wheel which turned clerks into prefects, sub-prefects, assessors, and collectors, like the figures in a magic lantern, was subjected to no such rules and entailed no drudgery.
But those in power desired to shield culprits of high rank and to defend the effete organisation of the French War-office. But I am forgetting the prefects and sub-prefects. I mentioned them partly because M. Zola himself might have been one of them.
'Then it didn't count against me, Winton gasped as soon as they were out of hearing. A Captain of Games can jest with a sub-prefect publicly. 'You utter ass! said Mullins, and caught him by the back of his stiff neck and ran him down to the hall where the sub-prefects, who sit below the salt, made him welcome with the economical bloater-paste of mid-term.
Prout's pets," said McTurk a little bitterly. "We aren't even sub-prefects." "I've considered that, but on the other hand, since most bullying is mere thoughtlessness " "Not one little bit of it, Padre," said McTurk. "Bullies like bullyin'. They mean it. They think it up in lesson and practise it in the quarters." "Never mind. If the thing goes up to the prefects it may make another house-row.
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