seeking, therefore, to be your rival; I judge myself, and I know I
couldn't succeed there. But, as you are so powerful, and as we are
almost brothers, having played together in childhood, I count upon you
to launch me in a career and to protect me-- Oh, you _must_; I want a
place, a place suitable to my capacity, to such as I am, a place were
I can make my fortune.' Massol was just about to put his compatriot
neck and crop out of the door with some brutal speech, when the rustic
ended his appeal thus: 'I don't ask to enter the administration where
people advance like tortoises--there's your cousin, who has stuck in
one post for twenty years. No, I only want to make my debut.'--'On the
stage?' asked Massol only too happy at that conclusion.--'No, though I
have gesture enough, and figure, and memory. But there's too much wear
and tear; I prefer the career of _porter_.' Massol kept his countenance,
and replied: 'I think there's more wear and tear in that, but as your
choice is made I'll see what I can do'; and he got him, as
Ravenouillet says, his first 'cordon.'"

"I was the first master," said Leon, "to consider the race of porter.
You'll find knaves of morality, mountebanks of vanity, modern
sycophants, septembriseurs, disguised in philanthropy, inventors of
palpitating questions, preaching the emancipation of the negroes,
improvement of little thieves, benevolence to liberated convicts, and
who, nevertheless, leave their porters in a condition worse than that
of the Irish, in holes more dreadful than a mud cabin, and pay them
less money to live on than the State pays to support a convict. I have
done but one good action in my life, and that was to build my porter a
decent lodge."

"Yes," said Bixiou, "if a man, having built a great cage divided into
thousands of compartments like the cells of a beehive or the dens of a