I had just about concluded my play, after two months' peace and encouragement in my humble post in the Archives Office, when I received notice from the Secretariat that, as my position was almost a sinecure, it had been done away with, and that I must hold myself ready to enter the Forestry Department--under M. Deviolaine. So the storm that had been hanging over my head for long had burst at last. I said good-bye to old father Bichet with tears in my eyes, and to his two friends MM. Pieyre and Parseval de Grandmaison, who promised to follow my career with sympathetic interest wherever I might be. The reader knows M. Deviolaine. During the five years I had been in the Government offices I had been looked upon as a _bête-noir_, so I entered upon my new official work under no very favourable auspices.
The struggle began immediately I took up my new duties. They wanted to herd me together with five or six of my fellow-clerks in one large room, and I revolted against the proceeding. My companions were good enough to explain to me in all innocence that they found it an advantageous way of killing time--that deadly enemy to employés--to sit together, for then they could talk. Now, talk was just what I most dreaded; to them it was a pleasure, to me a torture, for chattering distracted my own ever-increasing imaginative ideas. No, instead of wanting to be in this big office, strewn thick with supernumeraries, clerks and assistants, I had my eye on a sort of recess separated by a simple partition from the office-boy's cubicle, and in which he kept the ink-bottles that were returned to him empty. I asked if I might take possession of this place. I might as well have asked for the archbishopric of Cambrai, which was just vacant. A fearful clamour went up at this demand, from the office boy to the head of the department _(directeur général)._ The office boy asked the clerks in the big room where he could put his empty bottles henceforth; the clerks in the big room asked the assistant head clerk (the one who had never heard of Byron) whether I thought myself too good to work with them; the assistant head clerk asked the chief clerk whether I had come to the Forestry Department to give or to receive orders; the chief clerk asked the head of the department if it were usual for a clerk paid fifteen hundred francs to have an office to himself, as though he were a head clerk at four thousand. The head of the department replied that it was not only absolutely contrary to administrative customs, but that no such precedent would be allowed me, and that my claim was most presumptuous! I was trying to fit myself into the unlucky recess which, for the moment, formed the sum of my ambition, when the head clerk walked haughtily from the office of the head of the department, bearing the verbal command that the rebellious employé, who had dared for one moment to entertain the ambitious hope of leaving the ordinary ranks, should at once return to his place there. He transmitted the order immediately to the assistant head clerk, who passed it on to the ordinary clerks of the large office, who transmitted it to the office boy! There was joy throughout the department: a fellow-clerk was to be humiliated and, if he did not take his humiliation in a humble spirit, he I would lose his situation! The office boy opened the door between his cubicle and mine; he had just come from making a general clearance throughout the office and had brought back all the empty bottles he could manage to unearth.