It looked like a legation, this office managed by Roumestan. The first secretary, his right-hand man, his counsellor and friend, was a very good legal man of business named Méjean, a Southerner, as were all Numa’s following; but from the Cévennes, the rocky region of the South, which is more like Spain than Italy, where the inhabitants have retained in their manners and speech the prudent reserve and level-headed common-sense of the renowned Sancho.
Vigorous, robust, already a little bald, with the sallow complexion of sedentary workers, Méjean alone did all the work of the office, clearing away papers, preparing speeches, trying to reconcile facts with his friend’s sonorous phrases—some say his future brother-in-law’s. The other secretaries, Messieurs de Rochemaure and de Lappara, two young graduates related to the noblest families in the province, are only there for show, in training for political life under Roumestan’s guidance.
Lappara, a handsome tall fellow with a neat leg, a ruddy complexion and a blond beard, son of the old Marquis de Lappara, chief of the Right in the Bordeaux district, is a fair type of that Creole South; he is a gabbler and adventurer, with a love for duels and prodigalities (escampatives). Five years of life in Paris, one hundred thousand francs gone in “bucking the tiger” at the clubs, paid for with his mother’s diamonds, had sufficed to give him a good boulevard accent and a fine crusty tone of gold on his manners.
Viscount Charlexis de Rochemaure, a compatriot of Numa, is of a very different kind. Educated by the Fathers of the Assumption, he had made his law studies at home under the superintendence of his mother and an abbé; he still retained from that early education a candid look and the timid manners of a theological student that contrasted vividly with his goatee in the style of Louis XIII, the combination making him seem at one and the same time foxy and a muff.
Big Lappara tries hard to initiate this young Tony Lumpkin into the mysteries of Parisian life. He teaches him how to dress himself, what is chic and what is not chic, to walk with his neck forward and his mouth drawn down and to seat himself all of a piece, as it were, with his legs extended in order not to wrinkle his trousers at the knees. He would like to shake his simple faith in men and things, to cure him of that love of superstitions which simply classes him among the quill-drivers.
Not a bit of it! the viscount likes his work and when he is not at the Palace or the Chamber with Roumestan, as to-day for instance, he sits for hours at the secretaries’ table in the office next to the chief’s and practises engrossing. The Bordeaux man, on the contrary, has drawn an arm-chair up to the window, and in the twilight, with a cigar in his mouth and his legs stretched out, lazily watches through the falling rain and the steaming asphalt the long procession of carriages driving up to the doors with every whip in the air; for to-day is Mme. Roumestan’s Thursday.
What a lot of people! and still they come; more and more carriages! Lappara, who boasts of knowing thoroughly the liveries of the great people in Paris, calls out the names as he recognizes them: “Duchesse de San Donnino, Marquis de Bellegarde—hello! the Mauconseils, too! Now I’d like to know what that means?” and turning towards a tall, thin person who stands by the mantelpiece drying his worsted gloves and his light-colored trousers, too thin for the season, carefully turned up over his cloth shoes: “Have you heard anything, Bompard?”
“Heard anythink? Sartainly I have,” was the answer in a broad accent.
Bompard, Roumestan’s mameluke, has the honorary position of a fourth secretary who does outside business, goes to look for news and sings his patron’s praises about the streets. This occupation does not seem to be a lucrative one, judging from his appearance, but that is really not Numa’s fault. Aside from the midday meal and an occasional half-louis, this singular kind of parasite could never be induced to accept anything; and how he supported existence remained as great a mystery as ever to his best friends. To ask him if he knows anything, to doubt the imagination of Bompard, is to show a fine simplicity of soul!
“Yes, gentlemen, and somethink vary serious.”