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Bureaucracy by Honoré de Balzac
page 48 of 291 (16%)
discovery made by Falleix in smelting (patent of invention and gold
medal granted at the exposition of 1825). Madame Baudoyer, whose only
daughter was treading--to use an expression of old Saillard's--on the
tail of her twelve years, laid claim to Falleix, a thickset, swarthy,
active young fellow, of shrewd principles, whose education she was
superintending. The said education, according to her ideas, consisted
in teaching him to play boston, to hold his cards properly, and not to
let others see his game; to shave himself regularly before he came to
the house, and to wash his hands with good cleansing soap; not to
swear, to speak her kind of French, to wear boots instead of shoes,
cotton shirts instead of sacking, and to brush up his hair instead of
plastering it flat. During the preceding week Elisabeth had finally
succeeded in persuading Falleix to give up wearing a pair of enormous
flat earrings resembling hoops.

"You go too far, Madame Baudoyer," he said, seeing her satisfaction at
the final sacrifice; "you order me about too much. You make me clean
my teeth, which loosens them; presently you will want me to brush my
nails and curl my hair, which won't do at all in our business; we
don't like dandies."

Elisabeth Baudoyer, nee Saillard, is one of those persons who escape
portraiture through their utter commonness; yet who ought to be
sketched, because they are specimens of that second-rate Parisian
bourgeoisie which occupies a place above the well-to-do artisan and
below the upper middle classes,--a tribe whose virtues are well-nigh
vices, whose defects are never kindly, but whose habits and manners,
dull and insipid though they be, are not without a certain
originality. Something pinched and puny about Elisabeth Saillard was
painful to the eye. Her figure, scarcely over four feet in height, was
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