Z. Marcas (1836)

About a "political genius who refuses to serve the reigning mediocrity." (Robb, 315)

Two poor students have an equally poor but strangely well-dressed neighbor with an even stranger story named Z. Marcus. As a journalist Z. Marcus acted as the "ghost" behind a successful politician rather than getting a paid back for his efforts his patron ruined him. He was able to survive but only by becoming a free-lance hired gun, his ambitions for a political carreer crushed, he retires to a life as a legal copyist where his income is exactly equal to the amount he needs to survive. Like Rabourdin in "Bureaucracy" Z. Marcus stands for a type, "a victim of his devotion to a party, repaid by betrayal or neglect." He predicts that the thwarted ambitions of France's youth will end in a revolution: (cf 1968)

"Youth will explode like the boiler of a steam-engine. Youth has no outlet in France; it is gathering an avalanche of underrated capabilities, of legitimate and restless ambitions; young men are not marrying now; families cannot tell what to do with their children. What will the thunderclap be that will shake down these masses? I know not, but they will crash down into the midst of things, and overthrow everything. These are laws of hydrostatics which act on the human race; the Roman Empire had failed to understand them, and the Barbaric hordes came down."

The young students response: