As
for regrets, they are the annoyances of his office; he neither
breakfasts nor dines without first wiping off the rain of an
inconsolable affliction. He is kind and tender to other feelings; he
will weep over a stage-hero, over Monsieur Germeuil in the "Auberge
des Adrets," the man with the butter-colored breeches, murdered by
Macaire; but his heart is ossified in the matter of real dead men.
Dead men are ciphers, numbers, to him; it is his business to organize
death. Yet he does meet, three times in a century, perhaps, with an
occasion when his part becomes sublime, and then he _is_ sublime
through every hour of his day,--in times of pestilence.
When Jacquet approached him this absolute monarch was evidently out of
temper.
"I told you," he was saying, "to water the flowers from the rue
Massena to the place Regnault de Saint-Jean-d'Angely. You paid no
attention to me! _Sac-a-papier_! suppose the relations should take it
into their heads to come here to-day because the weather is fine, what
would they say to me? They'd shriek as if they were burned; they'd say
horrid things of us, and calumniate us--"
"Monsieur," said Jacquet, "we want to know where Madame Jules is
buried."
"Madame Jules _who_?" he asked. "We've had three Madame Jules within
the last week. Ah," he said, interrupting himself, "here comes the
funeral of Monsieur le Baron de Maulincour! A fine procession, that!
He has soon followed his grandmother. Some families, when they begin
to go, rattle down like a wager.
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