EXCELSIOR

Our excellent colleague the Official Journal is undoubtedly the best collection to consult for the study of contemporary morals. Evil spirits have sometimes insinuated that this serious organ occasionally competes unfairly with humorous journals. In any case, this is where historians will later have to draw some of their most precious documents.
One of its recent issues reveals to us a hitherto unknown point in the history of diplomatic conferences. Our representatives at the Lausanne conference had, it seems, to suffer from the well-known parsimony of the French State towards its agents on mission, and we had to find a clever way to complete the clearly insufficient civilian list allocated to our delegates.
And here is Mr. Lebureau’s discovery. It was decided, by a measure registered with the Official, that each of our delegates would receive a “drink allowance.” This compensation was set at three francs per day per consumer, which, during the exchange rate, allowed General Pellé and his collaborators to drink approximately three “decis”, as the Swiss say, to the health of the generous princess.
Admit that this is a spicy addition to the list of remunerations. We already knew about the official allowance for working civil servants; work allowance, allocated to certain employees of the Ministry of Finance; the shoe allowance, which ministerial bailiffs formerly received. But we had not yet discovered this brilliant idea of the drink allowance, which undoubtedly represents, in the mind of our administration, in a noble and bureaucratic form, the ambassadors' tip...

EMILE.