Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: May 31, 2025
Fandor with difficulty repressed his desire to laugh and congratulated himself that he had escaped the danger of being shown up by the sub-director who knew the real King. The Secretary brought with him a large sum of money which he placed at the disposal of the sovereign. For a moment Fandor was tempted to accept the money but his scruples held him back.
"If you had not come here now for a full understanding, I shouldn't respect you as I do," replied la Peyrade, smiling. "You have been a sub-director, and therefore you must have the remains of ambition which is deucedly legitimate in your case!
That is how Thuillier became sub-director. Mademoiselle Thuillier, knowing that her brother abhorred reading, and could substitute no business for the bustle of a public office, had wisely resolved to plunge him into the cares of property, into the culture of a garden, in short, into all the infinitely petty concerns and neighborhood intrigues which make up the life of the bourgeoisie.
He calculated, shrewdly enough, that his pension would be honorably and readily given by the new-comers, glad to have another office at their disposal. He was right; for a pension of seventeen hundred francs was paid to him immediately. When the prudent sub-director first talked of resigning, his sister, who was far more the companion of his life than his wife, trembled for his future.
Your Majesty will excuse our sub-director for not having come himself to take your orders as it is his pleasure and honor generally to do, but he has been ill for several days and that is why I have begged permission for this audience with your Majesty."
The old man died in 1814, leaving Jerome on the point of becoming sub-director, but with no other fortune than that prospect. The influence of the Restoration on the bureaucracy is well known. From the forty and one suppressed departments a crowd of honorable employees returned to Paris with nothing to do, and clamorous for places inferior to those they had lately occupied.
"You shall know in good time; but you must let me conduct this long and difficult affair; if you commit the slightest indiscretion as to what is said, or planned, or agreed between us, I shall have to drop the whole matter, and good-bye to you!" "Oh! you can rely on the absolute dumbness of a former sub-director; I've had secrets to keep."
At the fall of the Villele ministry, Monsieur Louis-Jerome Thuillier, who had then seen twenty-six years' service as a clerk in the ministry of finance, became sub-director of a department thereof; but scarcely had he enjoyed the subaltern authority of a position formerly his lowest hope, when the events of July, 1830, forced him to resign it.
His ignorance, however, taught him to keep silence, and silence served him well. He accustomed himself to practise, under the imperial regime, a passive obedience which pleased his superiors; and it was to this quality that he owed at a later period his promotion to the rank of sub-director.
Two months had now passed without a sign of that glorious rattle; and the former sub-director, who would have felt such joy in parading his red ribbon on the boulevard of the Madeleine, of which he was now one of the most assiduous promenaders, had nothing to adorn his buttonhole but the flowers of the earth, the privilege of everybody, of which he was far less proud than Beranger.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking