The notary bethought himself a moment, but soon fell to drinking again, with a gesture peculiar to himself; it was quite impossible, it seemed to say to secure in his clientele the cities of Valence and Byzantium, the Emperor Valens, Mahmoud, and the house of Valentinois.
"Should not the destruction of those ant-hills, Babylon, Tyre, Carthage, and Venice, each crushed beneath the foot of a passing giant, serve as a warning to man, vouchsafed by some mocking power?" said Claude Vignon, who must play the Bossuet, as a sort of purchased slave, at the rate of fivepence a line.
"Perhaps Moses, Sylla, Louis XI., Richelieu, Robespierre, and Napoleon were but the same man who crosses our civilizations now and again, like a comet across the sky," said a disciple of Ballanche.
"Why try to fathom the designs of Providence?" said Canalis, maker of ballads.
"Come, now," said the man who set up for a critic, "there is nothing more elastic in the world than your Providence."
"Well, sir, Louis XIV. sacrificed more lives over digging the foundations of the Maintenon's aqueducts, than the Convention expended in order to assess the taxes justly, to make one law for everybody, and one nation of France, and to establish the rule of equal inheritance," said Massol, whom the lack of a syllable before his name had made a Republican.
"Are you going to leave our heads on our shoulders?" asked Moreau (of the Oise), a substantial farmer. "You, sir, who took blood for wine just now?"
"Where is the use?
Aren't the principles of social order worth some sacrifices, sir?"
"Hi!
Bixiou!
What's-his-name, the Republican, considers a landowner's head a sacrifice!" said a young man to his neighbor.
"Men and events count for nothing," said the Republican, following out his theory in spite of hiccoughs; "in politics, as in philosophy, there are only principles and ideas."
"What an abomination!
Then you would ruthlessly put your friends to death for a shibboleth?"
"Eh, sir! the man who feels compunction is your thorough scoundrel, for he has some notion of virtue; while Peter the Great and the Duke of Alva were embodied systems, and the pirate Monbard an organization."
"But can't society rid itself of your systems and organizations?" said Canalis.
"Oh, granted!" cried the Republican.
"That stupid Republic of yours makes me feel queasy.
We sha'n't be able to carve a capon in peace, because we shall find the agrarian law inside it."
"Ah, my little Brutus, stuffed with truffles, your principles are all right enough.
But you are like my valet, the rogue is so frightfully possessed with a mania for property that if I left him to clean my clothes after his fashion, he would soon clean me out."
"Crass idiots!" replied the Republican, "you are for setting a nation straight with toothpicks.
To your way of thinking, justice is more dangerous than thieves."
"Oh, dear!" cried the attorney Deroches.
"Aren't they a bore with their politics!" said the notary Cardot.
"Shut up. That's enough of it. There is no knowledge nor virtue worth shedding a drop of blood for.
If Truth were brought into liquidation, we might find her insolvent."
"It would be much less trouble, no doubt, to amuse ourselves with evil, rather than dispute about good.
Moreover, I would give all the speeches made for forty years past at the Tribune for a trout, for one of Perrault's tales or Charlet's sketches."
"Quite right!...
Hand me the asparagus. Because, after all, liberty begets anarchy, anarchy leads to despotism, and despotism back again to liberty.
Millions have died without securing a triumph for any one system.
Is not that the vicious circle in which the whole moral world revolves?
Man believes that he has reached perfection, when in fact he has but rearranged matters."
"Oh! oh!" cried Cursy, the vaudevilliste; "in that case, gentlemen, here's to Charles X., the father of liberty."
"Why not?" asked Emile.
"When law becomes despotic, morals are relaxed, and vice versa.
"Let us drink to the imbecility of authority, which gives us such an authority over imbeciles!" said the good banker.
"Napoleon left us glory, at any rate, my good friend!" exclaimed a naval officer who had never left Brest.
"Glory is a poor bargain; you buy it dear, and it will not keep.
Does not the egotism of the great take the form of glory, just as for nobodies it is their own well-being?"
"You are very fortunate, sir——"
"The first inventor of ditches must have been a weakling, for society is only useful to the puny.
The savage and the philosopher, at either extreme of the moral scale, hold property in equal horror."
"All very fine!" said Cardot; "but if there were no property, there would be no documents to draw up."
"These green peas are excessively delicious!"
"And the cure was found dead in his bed in the morning...."
"Who is talking about death?
Pray don't trifle, I have an uncle."