Options: Bossuet was under 21 when his father died, and his mother is the postal director in Meaux until he finishes his education. Bossuet has siblings; one of them (or a brother in law) is postal director in Meaux. Bossuet mortgaged the position as well as the house and the field. Bossuet sold the position outright, and mortgaged the house and the field. Victor Hugo did less research than I did into postal directors.
An excerpt from Mme. Bahorel’s excellent writeup on post offices in canon era, written around Legle’s family history. The most thorough English-language source on the subject of the post-office and how it would have worked that I’ve come across, and there’s lots of extra historical/cultural info about post offices and regional business patterns, and some really interesting plotbunnies and what-ifs, too! Some of the most essential Post Office-y info under the cut, but for real, do go check out the whole post!
(though I do wonder who was going around saying Bossuet doesn’t seem interesting, how very dare ;P)
France was behind the curve on post offices: it was not until 1829 that Charles X decreed that every commune must have postal service, and at that same period, while the US had 74 post offices for every 100,000 in population, and Britain had 17, France had 4. A town thus served the nearby villages as well as the people inside the walls or customs barriers. Mail volume nationally was only 64 million letters and 40 million packages in 1830. This volume was concentrated predominantly in the Paris basin and in the Mediterranean south, and it is estimated that 85% of that volume was business correspondence rather than personal. The postal service was run under the farm system – as tax farming under the ancien régime, postal directors received a portion of the fees they collected, seemingly around 10% on average (though this does not appear to have been directly legislated – none of the postal laws mention specific levels of remuneration for directors).
The postal service itself was thrown into disarray as the allied armies marched across France in 1814, as all government services did. Men loyal to the regime fled from the occupiers; those who were indifferent to regime but frightened of an occupying army suspended service until they could see which way the wind was blowing. This general disarray had hardly been put down with new appointments and direction from Paris when Napoleon escaped Elba and positions shifted. The same men who had given up their jobs or were sacked demanded them back or were able to take them as the royalists fled into hiding. 1814 and 1815 were not good years for administration.
The directorship of a post office, then, was something of a reward: it required the appointee to initially pay a guarantee, but it would secure an income based on mail volume generally for the rest of the appointee's life – or until the regime changed. Moreover, just like the tax farms, the directorship of a post office was a thing to be passed down through the family. When a postal director died, his position was pretty much his son's to lose rather than to earn. Women were also postal directors: most often, this was because the widow took over the position until the eldest son turned 21 and was able to assume it himself, but daughters did occasionally inherit the position and generally handed it to their husbands at marriage. The directorship of a post office would make a nice dowry.
Why? The director was paid a percentage of all the postal revenues he generated. The postal service also collected the stamp taxes on printed goods, so revenues came from certain taxes as well as postage. Income thus rested on mail volume, so that the director of a post office in the Paris basin, like Meaux, would have had a higher income than one based in a similarly sized town in Brittany, like Dinan. Meaux was almost certainly a bureau simple: the director is the sole employee. Once a post office brought in a mail volume of 20,000 francs or more in receipts, it would hire at least an additional clerk and become a bureau composé. The bureaux composés of Normandy, in this era, were towns with at least twice the population of Meaux, though Normandy generally produced less per-capita mail volume than the Paris basin. It seems most reasonable to assume that Meaux is a bureau simple. The director of a bureau simple was expected to take on the post office as a supplemental income: if he was a lawyer or notary, he would simply maintain his business. As mail volumes grew later in the century, the part-time nature declined, but it was not until 1827 that any law considered conflict of interest implications to a postal director's other job. As rural post offices expanded, the position was not infrequently given to a tavern keeper for obvious logistical reasons as well as the ability to read and write. The director of a bureau composé was a true director, a manager, and his yearly income would fall in the range of 2200 to 3200 francs in 1841. It is obvious from even the pay differential that a bureau simple is not a full time job unless it was bumping up against the income limit to transition to the higher level.
M. Lesgle would have had an additional source of income, but the prospect of a steady 400-1500 was compelling to him and his family in 1814, when he made his petition. He had a son of an age to start school, and perhaps there were other children. We do not know what his trade was, but he was an educated man willing to up stakes for the prospect of a supplemental income from an untried government. Yet he had enough money (or his family or his wife's family did) to pay the caution money to secure that position. This supplemental income must have enabled him to invest in the real estate he left behind at his death.
