uncle and aunt Rogron, in Provins, to whom they wrote. These Rogrons
were dead. The letter might, therefore, have easily been lost; but if
anything here below can take the place of Providence, it is the post.
Postal spirit, incomparably above public spirit, exceeds in brilliancy
of resource and invention the ablest romance-writers. When the post
gets hold of a letter, worth, to it, from three to ten sous, and does
not immediately know where to find the person to whom that letter is
addressed, it displays a financial anxiety only to be met with in very
pertinacious creditors. The post goes and comes and ferrets through
all the eighty-six departments. Difficulties only arouse the genius of
the clerks, who may really be called men-of-letters, and who set about
to search for that unknown human being with as much ardor as the
mathematicians of the Bureau give to longitudes. They literally
ransack the whole kingdom. At the first ray of hope all the
post-offices in Paris are alert. Sometimes the receiver of a missing
letter is amazed at the network of scrawled directions which covers both
back and front of the missive,--glorious vouchers for the administrative
persistency with which the post has been at work. If a man undertook
what the post accomplishes, he would lose ten thousand francs in
travel, time, and money, to recover ten sous. The letter of the old
Lorrains, addressed to Monsieur Rogron of Provins (who had then been
dead a year) was conveyed by the post in due time to Monsieur Rogron,
son of the deceased, a mercer in the rue Saint-Denis in Paris. And
this is where the postal spirit obtains its greatest triumph. An heir
is always more or less anxious to know if he has picked up every scrap
of his inheritance, if he has not overlooked a credit, or a trunk of
old clothes. The Treasury knows that. A letter addressed to the late
Rogron at Provins was certain to pique the curiosity of Rogron, Jr.,
or Mademoiselle Rogron, the heirs in Paris. Out of that human interest
the Treasury was able to earn sixty centimes.