Poiret [his eyes wide open]. “Monsieur, a government clerk is, logically speaking, a man who needs the salary to maintain himself, and is not free to get out of his place; for he doesn’t know how to do anything but copy papers.” Bixiou. “Ah! now we are coming to a conclusion. So the bureau is the clerk’s shell, husk, pod. No clerk without a bureau, no bureau without a clerk. But what do you make, then, of a customs officer?” [Poiret shuffles his feet and tries to edge away; Bixiou twists off one button and catches him by another.] “He is, from the bureaucratic point of view, a neutral being. The excise-man is only half a clerk; he is on the confines between civil and military service; neither altogether soldier nor altogether clerk--Here, here, where are you going?” [Twists the button.] “Where does the government clerk proper end? That’s a serious question. Is a prefect a clerk?” Poiret [hesitating]. “He is a functionary.” Bixiou. “But you don’t mean that a functionary is not a clerk? that’s an absurdity.” Poiret [weary and looking round for escape]. “I think Monsieur Godard wants to say something.” Godard. “The clerk is the order, the functionary the species.” Bixiou [laughing]. “I shouldn’t have thought you capable of that distinction, my brave subordinate.” Poiret [trying to get away]. “Incomprehensible!” Bixiou. “La, la, papa, don’t step on your tether. If you stand still and listen, we shall come to an understanding before long. Now, here’s an axiom which I bequeath to this bureau and to all bureaus: Where the clerk ends, the functionary begins; where the functionary ends, the statesman rises. There are very few statesmen among the prefects. The prefect is therefore a neutral being among the higher species. He comes between the statesman and the clerk, just as the custom-house officer stands between the civil and the military. Let us continue to clear up these important points.” [Poiret turns crimson with distress.] “Suppose we formulate the whole matter in a maxim worthy of Larochefoucault: Officials with salaries of twenty thousand francs are not clerks. From which we may deduce mathematically this corollary: The statesman first looms up in the sphere of higher salaries; and also this second and not less logical and important corollary: Directors-general may be statesmen. Perhaps it is in that sense that more than one deputy says in his heart, ‘It is a fine thing to be a director-general.’ But in the interests of our noble French language and of the Academy--” Poiret [magnetized by the fixity of Bixiou’s eye]. “The French language! the Academy!”