Warcolier rolled his huge eyes in astonishment; then, with the self-satisfied smile of an expressionless beau, after passing his fat hand through his long whiskers, yellow and streaked with gray, that decorated his rosy cheeks, he remarked doctorally, that Monsieur le Ministre was entering on a path that, in all conscience, he could qualify as being only dangerous. Eh! _bon Dieu!_ one must do something for one's friends!--Vaudrey's accession to the Department of the Interior had given birth to many new hopes; on all grounds they must be satisfied. Vaudrey would never be forgiven for such deception. "What deception?" asked Sulpice. "I promised reforms and I am going to carry them out, but people laugh at my reforms and ask what?--Places." "Bless me!" replied Warcolier, "entirely logical." "Be it so! but there are places and places. I cannot, however, retire a whole staff of employes to give place to a new one. That's precisely what they want. There is not a deputy who has not one candidate to recommend to me." "That's very natural, Monsieur le Ministre, seeing that there is not a deputy who may not himself be a candidate." "Still, he should be independent of his electors, but in truth, it is not the rights of those who have elected them that my colleagues defend, it is their own interests." "Every man for himself, Monsieur le Ministre. Yesterday, even yesterday, one of my electors whose wife has just given birth to a child, wrote me, asking for a good nurse. That is like one of our colleagues, Perraud--of the Vosges.--One of his electors commissioned him to take back an umbrella with him upon his early return. The electors regard their deputies in the light of commission merchants." "And as tobacco bureaus! Well, I wish to have more morality than that in State affairs. I like giving, but I know how to refuse," said Vaudrey. "That will be easy enough so long as you are popular and solid in Parliament; but on the day that it is clearly proved that such and such a future minister can make himself more useful than you to the personal interests of everybody--and there are such ministers in sight--" "Granet, yes, I know! He promises more butter than bread, to cry quits later in giving more dry crusts than fresh butter. But I don't care to deceive any one." "As you please, Monsieur le Ministre, as you please," answered Warcolier, in a mocking and gentle tone.