Until he acts out the part he spouts it, and grows excited over his own tirades; his common sense gives way to the bombastic jargon of the revolution and to declamation, which completes the Utopian performance and eases his brain of its last modicum of ballast. It is not merely ideas which the new regime has disturbed, but it has also disordered sentiments. "Authority is transferred from the Château of Versailles and the courtier's antechamber, with no intermediary or counterpoise, to the proletariat and its flatterers."[1114] The whole of the staff of the old government is brusquely set aside, while a general election has brusquely installed another in is place, offices not being given to capacity, seniority, and experience, but to self-sufficiency, intrigue, and exaggeration. Not only are legal rights reduced to a common level, but natural grades are transposed; the social ladder, overthrown, is set up again bottom upwards; the first effect of the promised regeneration is "to substitute in the administration of public affairs pettifoggers for magistrates, ordinary citizens for cabinet ministers, ex-commoners for ex-nobles, rustics for soldiers, soldiers for captains, captains for generals, curés for bishops, vicars for curés, monks for vicars, brokers for financiers, empiricists for administrators, journalists for political economists, stump-orators for legislators, and the poor for the rich."--Every species of covetousness is stimulated by this spectacle. The profusion of offices and the anticipation of vacancies "has excited the thirst for command, stimulated self-esteem, and inflamed the hopes of the most inept. A rude and grim presumption renders the fool and the ignoramus unconscious of their insignificance. They have deemed themselves capable of anything, because the law granted public functions merely to capacity. There has appeared in front of one and all an ambitious perspective; the soldier thinks only of displacing his captain, the captain of becoming general, the clerk of supplanting the chief of his department, the new-fledged attorney of being admitted to the high court, the curé of being ordained a bishop, the shallow scribbler of seating himself on the legislative bench. Offices and professions vacated by the appointment of so many upstarts afford in their turn a vast field for the ambition of the lower classes."--Thus, step by step, owing to the reversal of social positions, is brought about a general intellectual fever.