To make one's way, get ahead, and succeed in the world is now the dominant thought in the minds of men. Before 1789, this thought had not acquired sovereign control in their minds; it found that there were rival ideas to contend with, and it had only half-developed itself; its roots had not sunk down deep enough to monopolize the activity of the imagination, to absorb the will and possess the mind entirely; and the reason is that it lacked both air and victuals. Promotion, under the old monarchy, was slow, and in the first place, because the monarchy was old and because in every order which is not new each new generation finds that every office is filled, and next, because, in this old order founded on tradition and heredity, future vacancies were supplied long beforehand. The great social staircase led to several stories; each man could ascend every step of his own flight, but he could not mount above it; the landing reached, he found closed doors and nearly insurmountable barriers. The story above was reserved to its own inhabitants; they occupied it now and were still to occupy it in time to come; the inevitable successors of the titular possessor were seen around him on each step, his equals, peers and neighbors, one or the other often designated by name as his legal heir, the purchaser of his survivorship. In those days, not only was the individual himself considered, his merits and his services, but likewise his family and ancestry, his state and condition, the society he entered into, the "salon" he maintained, his fortune and his followers; these antecedents and surroundings composed the quality of the personage; without this requisite quality, he could not go beyond the landing-place. Strictly speaking, a personage born on the upper steps of one story might sometimes succeed in mounting the lowest steps of the next story, but there he stopped. In short, it was always considered by those on the lower story that the upper story was inaccessible and, moreover, uninhabitable.

Accordingly, most of the public offices, in the finances, in the administration, in the judiciary, in the parliaments, in the army, at court, were private property as is now the case with the places of advocates, notaries and brokers; they had to be bought to enable one to follow these pursuits, and were very dear; one had to possess a large capital and be content beforehand to derive only a mediocre revenue from it, 10, 5 and sometimes 3 % on the purchase-money.3311 The place once acquired, especially if an important one, involved official parade, receptions, an open table, a large annual outlay;3312 it often ran the purchaser in debt; he knew that his acquisition would bring him more consideration than crowns. On the other hand, to obtain possession of it, he had to secure the good-will of the body of which he became a member, or of the patron who bestowed the office. That is to say, he must be regarded by his future colleagues as acceptable, or by the patron as a guest, invited, and feasible friend, in other words, provide sponsors for himself, furnish guarantees, prove that he was well-off and well-educated, that his ways and manners qualified him for the post, and that, in the society he was about to enter, he would not turn out unsuitable. To maintain one's self in office at court one was obliged to possess the tone of Versailles, quite different from that of Paris and the provinces.3313 To maintain one's self in a high parliamentary position, one was expected to possess local alliances, moral authority, the traditions and deportment handed down from father to son in the old magistrate families, and which a mere advocate, an ordinary pleader, could not arrive at.3314 In short, on this staircase, each distinct story imposed on its inmates a sort of distinct costume, more or less costly, embroidered and gilded, I mean a sum of outward and inward habits and connections, all obligatory and indispensable, comprising title, particle and name: the announcement of any bourgeois name by a lackey in the ante-chamber would be considered a discord; consequently, one had one's self ennobled in the current coin, or assumed a noble name gratis. Caron, son of a watchmaker, became Beaumarchais; Nicolas, a foundling, called himself M. de Champfort; Danton, in public documents, signed himself d'Anton; in the same way, a man without a dress-coat hires or borrows one, no matter how, on going out to dine; all this was tolerated and accepted as a sign of good behavior and of final conformity with custom, as in testimony of respect for the usages of good society.

Through this visible separation of stories, people had acquired the habit of remaining in the condition in which they were placed; they were not irritated by being obliged to stay in it; the soldier who enlisted did not aspire to become an officer; the young officer of the lower noblesse and of small means did not aspire to the post of colonel or lieutenant-general; a limited perspective kept hopes and the imagination from fruitlessly launching forth into a boundless future: ambition, humbled to the ground at the start, walked instead of flying; it recognized at the outset that the summits were beyond its reach; to be able to mount upward one or two steps was enough.—In general, a man obtained promotion on the spot, in his town, corporation or parliament. The assistant-counselor who pleaded his first case in the court of Grenoble or of Rennes calculated that, in twenty years, he would become first judge at Grenoble or at Rennes, rest twenty years or more in office, and he aimed at nothing better. Alongside of the counselor of a (court) presidency, or of an "election" magistrate, of a clerk in the salt-tax bureau, or in the frontier custom-house, or in the bureau of "rivers and forests," alongside of a clerk in the treasury or ministry of foreign affairs, or of a lawyer or prosecuting attorney, there was always some son, son-in-law or nephew, fitted by domestic training, by a technical apprenticeship, by moral adaptation, not only to perform the duties of the office, but to be contented in it, pretend to nothing beyond it, not to look above himself with regret or envy, satisfied with the society around him, and feel, moreover, that elsewhere he would be out of his element and uncomfortable.

Life, thus restricted and circumscribed, was more cheerful then than at the present day; souls, less disturbed and less strained, less exhausted and less burdened with cares, were healthier. The Frenchman, exempt from modern preoccupations, followed amiable and social instincts, inclined to take things easily, and of a playful disposition owing to his natural talent for amusing himself by amusing others, in mutual enjoyment of each other's company and without calculation, through easy and considerate intercourse, smiling or laughing, in short, in a constant flow of inspiration, good-humor and gayety.3315 It is probable that, if the Revolution had not intervened, the great parvenus of the time and of the Empire would, like their forerunners, have submitted to prevailing necessities and readily accommodated themselves to the discipline of the established RÉgime. CambacÉrÈs, who had succeeded to his father as counselor at the bar of Montpellier, would have become president (of the tribunal) in his turn; meanwhile, he would have composed able jurisprudential treatises and invented some new pÂtÉ de becfigues; Lebrun, former collaborator with Maupeou, might have become counselor in the court of excise at Paris, or chief-clerk in the Treasury department; he would have kept up a philosophical salon, with fashionable ladies and polished men of letters to praise his elegant and faulty translations. Amongst the future marshals, some of them, pure plebeians, MassÉna, Augereau, Lannes, Ney, Lefebvre, might have succeeded through brilliant actions and have become "officers of fortune," while others, taking in hand specially difficult services, like commandant Fischer who undertook the destruction of Mandrin's band, and again, like the hero Chevert, and the veteran LÜckner, might have become lieutenant-generals. Rough as these men were, they would have found, even in the lower ranks, if not full employment for their superior faculties, at least sufficient food for their strong and coarse appetites; they would have uttered just the same oaths, at just as extravagant suppers, with mistresses of just the same caliber.3316 Had their temperament, character and genius been indomitable, had they reared and pranced to escape bridle and harness and been driven like ordinary men, they need not have broken out of the traces for all that; there were plenty of openings and issues for them on either side of the highway on which others were trotting along. Many families often contained, among numerous children, some hot-headed, imaginative youth, some independent nature rebellious in advance, in short, a refractory spirit, unwilling or incapable of being disciplined; a regular life, mediocrity, even the certainty of getting ahead, were distasteful to him; he would abandon the hereditary homestead or purchased office to the docile elder brother, son-in-law or nephew, by which the domain or the post remained in the family; as for himself, tempted by illimitable prospects, he would leave France and go abroad; Voltaire says3317 that "Frenchmen were found everywhere," in Canada, in Louisiana, as surgeons, fencing-masters, riding-masters, officers, engineers, adventurers especially, and even filibusters, trappers and backwoodsmen, the supplest, most sympathetic and boldest of colonizers and civilizers, alone capable of bringing the natives under assimilation by assimilating with them, by adopting their customs and by marrying their women, mixing bloods, and forming new and intermediary races, like Dumas de La Pailleterie, whose descendants have furnished original and superior men for the past three generations, and like the Canada half-breeds by which the aboriginal race succeeds in transforming itself and in surviving. They were the first explorers of the great lakes, the first to trace the Mississippi to its mouth, and found colonial empires with Champlain and Lasalle in North America and with Dupleix and La Bourdonnais in Hindustan. Such was the outlet for daring, uncontrollable spirits, restive temperaments under constraint and subject to the routine of an old civilization, souls astray and unclassed from their birth, in which the primitive instincts of the nomad and barbarian sprouted afresh, in which insubordination was innate, and in which energy and capacity to take the initiative remained intact.—Mirabeau, having compromised his family by scandals, was on the point of being dispatched by his father to the Dutch Indies, where deaths were common; it might happen that he would be hanged or become governor of some large district in Java or Sumatra, the venerated and adored sovereign of five hundred thousand Malays, both ends being within the compass of his merits. Had Danton been well advised, instead of borrowing the money with which to buy an advocate's place in the Council at about seventy thousand livres, which brought him only three cases in four years and obliged him to hang on to the skirts of his father-in-law, he would have gone to Pondicherry or to the palace of some indigenous rajah or king as agent, councilor or companion of his pleasures; he might have become prime-minister to Tippoo Sahib, or other potentate, lived in a palace, kept a harem and had lacs of rupees; undoubtedly, he would have filled his prisons and occasionally emptied them by a massacre, as at Paris in September, but it would have been according to local custom, and operating only on the lives of Sheikhs and Mahrattas. Bonaparte, after the fall of his protectors, the two Robespierres, finding his career arrested, wanted to enter the Sultan's service; accompanied by Junot, Muiron, Marmont and other comrades, he could have carried to Constantinople rarer commodities, much better compensated in the Orient than in the Occident, namely military honor and administrative talent; he would have dealt in these two products, as he did in Egypt, at the right time and in the right place, at the highest price, without our conscientious scruples and without our European refinements of probity and humanity. No imagination can picture what he would have become there: certainly some pasha, like Djezzar in Syria, or a khedive like Mahomet-Ali, afterwards at Cairo; he already saw himself in the light of a conqueror, like Ghengis-Khan,3318 a founder like Alexander or Baber, a prophet like Mahomet; as he himself declares, "one could work only on a grand scale in the Orient," and there he would have worked on a grand scale; Europe, perhaps, would have gained by it, and especially France.