general-secretary he would certainly have been a journalist. Thus, in
that fifteen years' struggle in which the harlequin sabre of epigram
opened a breach by which insurrection entered the citadel, des Lupeaulx
never received so much as a scratch.

As the young fry of clerks looked at this man playing bowls in the
gardens of the ministry with the minister's children, they cracked
their brains to guess the secret of his influence and the nature of
his services; while, on the other hand, the aristocrats in all the
various ministries looked upon him as a dangerous Mephistopheles,
courted him, and gave him back with usury the flatteries he bestowed
in the higher sphere. As difficult to decipher as a hieroglyphic
inscription to the clerks, the vocation of the secretary and his
usefulness were as plain as the rule of three to the self-interested.
This lesser Prince de Wagram of the administration, to whom the duty
of gathering opinions and ideas and making verbal reports thereon was
entrusted, knew all the secrets of parliamentary politics; dragged in
the lukewarm, fetched, carried, and buried propositions, said the Yes
and the No that the ministers dared not say for themselves. Compelled
to receive the first fire and the first blows of despair and wrath, he
laughed or bemoaned himself with the minister, as the case might be.
Mysterious link by which many interests were in some way connected
with the Tuileries, and safe as a confessor, he sometimes knew
everything and sometimes nothing; and, in addition to all these
functions came that of saying for the minister those things that a
minister cannot say for himself. In short, with his political
Hephaestion the minister might dare to be himself; to take off his wig
and his false teeth, lay aside his scruples, put on his slippers,
unbutton his conscience, and give way to his trickery. However, it was
not all a bed of roses for des Lupeaulx; he flattered and advised his