ACT I
The doctor’s consulting room. To the right a large stained glass window representing a religious subject. In front of this, on pedestals, bronzes and statues. Parallel to it a large Louis XIV writing table littered with papers and statuettes. Between the desk and the window the doctor’s chair. On the other side an armchair nearly facing the footlights and a stool. To the left the entrance door, which, when opened, reveals a corridor lined with tapestries, statues, and paintings. Beyond the door a large glass bookcase, above which hang portraits of Wallace, Dupuytren, and Ricord. Busts of celebrated physicians. A small table and two chairs. At the back a small door. The room is sumptuously furnished and literally encumbered with works of art.
George Dupont, in great distress and ill at ease, enters by the door at the back, takes his stick, gloves, and hat from the stool, and sits down on the sofa before the writing table. He is a big fellow of twentysix, with large, round eyes, and simple, but not ludicrous appearance. A heavy sigh escapes him. The doctor, a man of forty, with the ribbon of the Legion of Honor in the buttonhole of his frock coat, follows and takes his seat. He gives the impression of a man of strength and intellect.
GEORGE. Well, doctor?
DOCTOR. Well! There is no doubt about your case.
GEORGE [wiping his forehead] No doubt—How do you mean no doubt?
DOCTOR. I mean it in the bad sense. [He writes. George turns pale, and stays silent for a moment in terror. He sighs again]. Come, come, you must have thought as much.
GEORGE. No, no.
DOCTOR. All the same!
GEORGE [utterly prostrated] Good God!
DOCTOR [stops writing and observes him] Don’t be frightened. Out of every seven men you meet in the street, or in society, or at the theatre, there is at least one who is or has been in your condition. One in seven, fifteen per cent.
GEORGE [quietly, as if to himself] Anyhow, I know what to do.
DOCTOR. Certainly. Here is your prescription. You will take it to the chemist’s and have it made up.
GEORGE [taking the prescription] No.
DOCTOR. Yes: you will do just what everyone else does.
GEORGE. Everyone else is not in my position. I know what to do. [He raises his hand to his temple].
DOCTOR. Five times out of six the men who sit in that chair before me do that, perfectly sincerely. Everyone thinks himself more unfortunate than the rest. On second thoughts, and after I have talked to them, they realize that this disease is a companion with which one can live; only, as in all households, domestic peace is to be had at the price of mutual concessions. Come now, I repeat, there is nothing in all this beyond the ordinary. It is simply an accident that might happen to anybody. I assure you it is far too common to merit the name ‘French disease.’ There is, in fact, none that is more universal. If you wanted to find a motto for the creatures who make a trade of selling their love, you could almost take the famous lines, ‘There is your master.... It is, it was, or it must be.’
GEORGE [putting the prescription in the outer pocket of his coat] But I at least ought to have been spared.
DOCTOR. Why? Because you are a man of good position? Because you are rich? Look round you. Look at these works of art; five are copies of John of Bologna’s Mercury, six of Pigallo’s, three are reproductions—in wax, to be sure—of the lost Wounded Love by Paccini; do you think that all these have been presented to me by beggars?
GEORGE [groaning] I’m not a rake, doctor. My life might be held up as an example to all young men. I assure you, no one could possibly have been more prudent, no one. See here; supposing I told you that in all my life I have only had two mistresses, what would you say to that?
DOCTOR. That one would have been enough to bring you here.
GEORGE. No, doctor, not one of those two. No one in the world has dreaded this so much as I have; no one has ever taken such infinite precautions to avoid it. My first mistress was the wife of my best friend. I chose her on account of him; and him, not because I cared most for him, but because I knew he was a man of the most rigid morals, who watched his wife jealously and didn’t let her go about forming imprudent connections. As for her, I kept her in absolute terror of this disease. I told her that almost all men were taken with it, so that she mightn’t dream of being false to me. My friend died in my arms: that was the only thing that could have separated me from her. Then I took up with a young seamstress.
DOCTOR. None of your other friends had sufficiently reassuring morals?
GEORGE. No. You know what morals are nowadays.
DOCTOR. Better than anyone.
GEORGE. Well, this was a decent girl with a family in needy circumstances to support. Her grandmother was an invalid, and there was an ailing father and three little brothers. It was by my means that they all lived. They used to call me Uncle Raoul—I was not so green as to give my real name, you see.
DOCTOR. Oh! Your Christian name, well—besides, it is always safer.
GEORGE. Why, of course. I told her and I let the others know that if she played me false I should leave her at once. So then they all watched her for me. It became a regular thing that I should spend Sunday with them, and in that sort of way I was able to give her a lift up. Church-going was a respectable kind of outing for her. I rented a pew for them and her mother used to go with her to church; they liked seeing their name engraved on the card. She never left the house alone. Three months ago, when the question of my marriage came up, I had to leave her. They all cried over my going. I’m not inventing or exaggerating: they all cried. You see, I’m not a bad sort. People do regret me.
DOCTOR. You were very happy. Why did you want to change?
GEORGE [surprised at the question] I wanted to settle down. My father was a notary, and before his death he expressed the wish that I should marry my cousin. It was a good match; her dowry will help to get me a practice. Besides, I simply adore her. She’s fond of me too. I had everything one could want to make life happy. My acquaintances all envied me. [Miserably] And then a lot of idiots must give me a farewell dinner and make me gad about with them. See what has come of it! I haven’t any luck, I’ve never had any luck! I know fellows who lead the most racketty lives: nothing happens to them, the beasts! But I—for a wretched lark—What is there left for a leper like me? My future is ruined, my whole life poisoned. Well then, isn’t it better for me to clear out of it? Anyway I shan’t suffer any more. You see now, no one could be more wretched than I am. [Crying] No one, doctor, I tell you, no one! [He buries his face in his handkerchief] Oh, oh, oh!
DOCTOR [rising and going to him with a smile] You must be a man, and not cry like a child.
George [still in tears] If I had led a wild life and spent my time in bars and going about with women, I should understand: I should say I deserved it.
Doctor. No.
GEORGE. No?
Doctor. No. You would not say so: but it doesn’t matter. Go on.
George. Yes, I know I should. I should say I deserved it. But for nothing! nothing! I have cut myself off from all pleasures. I have resisted attractions as you would the devil. I wouldn’t go with my friends to places of amusement: ladies I knew actually pointed me out to their boys as an example. I stuck to my work: I forced myself to be more regular in my habits. Why, my two friends helped me to prepare for my law exams. I taught them to make me cram, and it’s thanks to them that I got through. Oh, I should have liked to come home at four o’clock in the morning with my coat-collar turned up, smoking a cigar lit in some ballet-girl’s rooms! I’ve longed as much as anyone for the taste of rouged lips and the glitter of blacked eyes and pale faces! I should have liked larks and jolly suppers and champagne and the rustle of lace and all the rest of it! I’ve sacrificed all that to my health, and see what I’ve got for it. Ah, if I had known! If I had only known! Then I should have let myself go; yes, altogether! That would have been something to the good, anyway! When I think of it! When I think of the beastliness, the frightful horrors in store for me!
Doctor. What’s all that nonsense?
George. Yes, yes, I know—hair falling out, camomile for a cocktail, and a bath chair for a motor car with a little handle for the steering wheel and a fellow shoving behind instead of the engine; and I shall go, Gug, gug, gug, gug! [Crying] That’s what will be left of handsome Raoul—that’s what they called me, handsome Raoul!
Doctor. My dear sir, kindly dry your eyes for the last time, blow your nose, put your handkerchief in your pocket, and listen to me without blubbering.
George [doing so] Yes, doctor; but I warn you, you are wasting your time.
Doctor. I assure you—
George. I know what you are going to tell me.
Doctor. In that case you have no business here. Be off with you!
George. As I am here, I’ll listen, doctor. It’s awfully good of you.
Doctor. If you have the will and the perseverance, none of the things you are dreading will happen to you.
George. Of course. You are bound to tell me that.
Doctor. I tell you that there are a hundred thousand men in Paris like you, sound and in good health, I give you my word. Come now. Bath chairs! You don’t see quite so many as that.
George [struck] Nor you do.
Doctor. Besides, those who are in them are not all there for the reason you think. Come, come! You will not be the victim of a catastrophe any more than the other hundred thousand. The thing is serious: nothing more.
George. There, you see. It is a serious disease.
Doctor. Yes.
George. One of the most serious.
Doctor. Yes; but you have the good luck—
GEORGE. Good luck?
Doctor. Relatively, if you like; but you have the good luck to have contracted just that one among serious diseases which we have the most effective means of combating.
George. I know; remedies worse than the disease.
Doctor. You are mistaken.
George. You’re not going to tell me that it can be cured?
Doctor. It can.
George. And that I am not condemned to—
Doctor. I give you my word on it.
George. You’re not—you’re not making some mistake? I have been told—
Doctor [shrugging his shoulders] You have been told! You have been told! No doubt you know all the ins and outs of the law of property.
George. Yes, certainly; but I don’t see what connection—
Doctor. Instead of being taught that, it would have been much better if you had been told the nature of the disease from which you are suffering. Then, perhaps, you would have been sufficiently afraid to avoid contracting it.
George. But this woman was so—well, who could have thought such a thing of her? I didn’t take a woman off the streets, you know. She lives in the Rue de Berne—not exactly a low part of the town, is it?
Doctor. The part of the town has nothing to do with it. This disease differs from many others; it has no preference for the unfortunate.
George. But this woman lives almost straight. One of my chums has a mistress who’s a married woman. Well, it was a friend of hers. Her mother—she lives with her mother—was abroad at the time. At first she wouldn’t listen to me; then, finally, after I had spent a whole half-hour persuading her I had to promise her a ring like one of her friend’s before she would give way. She even made me take off my boots before going upstairs so that the porter mightn’t hear.
Doctor. Well; if you had been taught, you would have known that these circumstances are no guarantee.
George. That’s true; we ought to be taught.
Doctor. Yes.
George. At the same time it’s not a subject that can be broached in the papers.
Doctor. Why not?
George. I can speak of my own knowledge, for my father used to own a small provincial paper. If we had ever printed that word, the circulation would have dropped like a stone.
DOCTOR. Yet you publish novels about adultery.
GEORGE. Of course. That’s what the public wants.
DOCTOR. You are right; it is the public that needs to be educated. A respectable man will take his wife and daughters to a music-hall, where they hear things to make a doctor blush. His modesty is only alarmed by serious words.
GEORGE. And then, after all, what would one gain by being posted up about this disease?
DOCTOR. If it were better understood it would be more often avoided.
GEORGE. What one wants is some means of avoiding it altogether.
DOCTOR. Oh! That is quite simple.
GEORGE. Tell me.
DOCTOR. It is no longer any concern of yours; but when you have a son you will be able to tell him what to do.
GEORGE. What’s that?
DOCTOR. To love only one woman, to be her first lover, and to love her so well that she will never be false to you.
GEORGE. That’s easy, isn’t it! And if my son does not marry till he is twenty-eight, what then?
DOCTOR. Then, that he may run the least risk, you will tell him to go to the licensed dealers—
GEORGE. With a guarantee from the government.
DOCTOR. And to choose them a little stale.
GEORGE. Why so?
DOCTOR. Because at a certain age they have all paid their toll. The prettiest girl in the world can give all she has, not what she has no longer. That is what you will tell your sons.
GEORGE. But do you mean that I can have children?
DOCTOR. Certainly.
GEORGE. Healthy ones?
DOCTOR. Perfectly healthy. I repeat: if you take proper and reasonable care of yourself for the necessary length of time, you have little to fear.
GEORGE. Is that certain?
DOCTOR. Ninety-nine times out of a hundred.
GEORGE. Then I shall be able to marry?
DOCTOR. You will be able to marry.
GEORGE. You’re not deceiving me, are you? You wouldn’t give me false hopes? You wouldn’t—How soon shall I be able to marry?
DOCTOR. In three or four years.
GEORGE. What, three or four years? Not before?
DOCTOR. Not before.
GEORGE. Why? Am I going to be ill all that time? You said just now—
DOCTOR. The disease will no longer be dangerous to you yourself, but you will be dangerous to others.
GEORGE. But, doctor, I am going to be married in a month!
DOCTOR. Impossible.
GEORGE. I can’t help it. The contract is all ready; the banns have been published. I have given my word.
DOCTOR. Here’s a pretty patient! A moment ago you were feeling for your pistol: now you want to be married in a month!
GEORGE. But I must!
DOCTOR. I forbid you.
GEORGE. You can’t mean that seriously. If this disease is not what I imagined and if I can be cured, I shan’t commit suicide. If I don’t kill myself, I must take up the ordinary course of my life. I must fulfill my engagements: I must be married.
DOCTOR. No.
GEORGE. If my engagement were broken off it would be absolutely disastrous. You talk of it like that because you don’t know. I didn’t want to get married. I have told you—I had almost a second family; the children adored me. It is my old aunt, who owns all the property, who has pushed on the match. Then my mother wants to see me ‘settled’ as she says. The only thing in the world she wants is to see her baby grandchildren, and she wonders twenty times a day whether she will live long enough. Since the question first came up she simply hasn’t thought of anything else; it’s the dream of her life. And then I tell you I have begun to adore Henriette. If I draw back now my mother would die of grief and I should be disinherited by my aunt. Even that isn’t all. You don’t know my father-in-law’s character! He is a man of regular high old principles; and he has a temper like the devil. What’s more, he simply worships his daughter. It would cost me dear, I can assure you. He would call me to account—I don’t know what would happen. So there are my mother’s health, my aunt’s fortune, my future, my honor, perhaps my life, all at stake. Besides, I tell you I have given my word.
DOCTOR. You must take it back.
GEORGE. Well, since you stick to it, even if that were possible, I could not take back my signature to the contract for the purchase of a notary’s practice in two months time.
DOCTOR. All these—
GEORGE. You won’t tell me that I have been imprudent because I have not disposed of my wife’s dowry till after the honeymoon—
DOCTOR. All these considerations are foreign to me. I am a physician, nothing but a physician. I can only tell you this: if you marry before three or four years have elapsed you will be a criminal.
GEORGE. No, no, you are more than a physician: you are a confessor as well. You are not only a man of science. You can’t observe me as you would something in your laboratory and then simply say: ‘You have this, science says that. Now be off with you.’ My whole life depends upon you. You must listen to me; because when you know everything you will understand the situation and will find the means to cure me in a month.
DOCTOR. I can only tell you over and over again that no such means exist. It is impossible to be certain of your cure—as far as one can be certain—under three or four years.
GEORGE. I tell you that you must find one. Listen to me: if I am not married, I shall not get the dowry. Will you kindly tell me how I am to carry out the contract I have signed?
DOCTOR. Oh, if that is the question, it is very simple. I can easily shew you the way out of the difficulty. Get into touch with some rich man, do everything you can to gain his confidence, and when you have succeeded, rook him of all he has.
GEORGE. I’m not in the mood for joking.
DOCTOR. I am not joking. To rob that man, or even to murder him, would not be a greater crime than you would commit in marrying a young girl in good health to get hold of her dowry, if to do so you exposed her to the terrible consequences of the disease you would give her.
GEORGE. Terrible?
DOCTOR. Terrible; and death is not the worst of them.
GEORGE. But you told me just now—
DOCTOR. Just now I did not tell you everything. This disease, even when it is all but suppressed, still lies below the surface ready to break out again. Taken all round, it is serious enough to make it an infamy to expose a woman to it in order to avoid even the greatest inconvenience.
GEORGE. But is it certain that she would catch it?
DOCTOR. Even with the best intentions, I won’t tell you lies. No; it is not absolutely certain. It is probable. And there is something else I will tell you. Our remedies are not infallible. In a certain number of cases—a very small number, scarcely five per cent.—they have no effect. You may be one of these exceptions or your wife may be. In that case—I will use an expression you used just now—in that case the result would be the most frightful horrors.
GEORGE. Give me your advice.
DOCTOR. The only advice I can give you is not to marry. To put it in this way, you owe a debt. Perhaps its repayment will not be exacted; but at the same time your creditor may come down on you suddenly, after a long interval, with the most pitiless brutality. Come, come! You are a man of business. Marriage is a contract. If you marry without saying anything, you will be giving an implied warranty for goods which you know to be bad. That is the term, isn’t it? It would be a fraud which ought to be punishable by law.
GEORGE. But what can I do?
DOCTOR. Go to your father-in-law and tell him the unvarnished truth.
GEORGE. If I do that, it will not be a delay of three or four years that he will impose on me. He will refuse his consent for good.
DOCTOR. In that case, tell him nothing.
GEORGE. If I don’t give him a reason, I don’t know what he won’t do. He is a man of the most violent temper. Besides, it will be still worse for Henriette than for me. Look here, doctor; from what I have said to you, no doubt you think I simply care for the money. Well, I do think it is one’s primary duty to make certain of a reasonable amount of comfort. From my youth upwards I have always been taught that. Nowadays one must think of it, and I should never have engaged myself to a girl without money. It’s perfectly natural. [With emotion] But she is so splendid, she is so much better than I am that I love her—as people love one another in books. Of course it would be a frightful disappointment not to have the practice that I have bought, but that would not be the worst for me. The worst would be losing her. If you could see her, if you knew her, you would understand. [Taking out his pocket book] Look here, here’s her photograph. Just look at it. [The doctor gently refuses it]. Oh, my darling, to think that I must lose you or else—Ah! [He kisses the photograph, then puts it back in his pocket]. I beg your pardon. I am being ridiculous. I know I am sometimes. Only put yourself in my place. I love her so.
DOCTOR. It is on that account that you must not marry her.
GEORGE. But how can I get out of it? If I draw back without saying anything the truth will leak out and I shall be dishonored.
DOCTOR. There is nothing dishonorable about being ill.
GEORGE. Ah, yes. But people are such idiots. Even yesterday I myself should have laughed at anyone I knew who was in the position that I am in now. Why, I should have avoided him as if he had the plague. Oh, if I were the only one to suffer! But she—she loves me, I swear she does, she is so good. It will be dreadful for her.
DOCTOR. Less so than it would be later.
GEORGE. There’ll be a scandal.
DOCTOR. You will avoid a bigger one.
George quietly puts two twenty-franc pieces on the desk, takes his gloves, hat and stick, and gets up.
GEORGE. I will think it over. Thank you, doctor. I shall come back next week as you told me to—probably. [He goes towards the door].
DOCTOR [rising] No: I shall not see you next week, and what is more you will not think it over. You came here knowing what you had, with the express intention of not acting by my advice unless it agreed with your wishes. A flimsy honesty made you take this chance of pacifying your conscience. You wanted to have someone on whom you could afterwards throw the responsibility of an act you knew to be culpable. Don’t protest. Many who come here think as you think and do what you want to do. But when they have married in opposition to my advice the results have been for the most part so calamitous that now I am almost afraid of not having been persuasive enough. I feel as though in spite of everything I were in some sort the cause of their misery. I ought to be able to prevent such misery. If only the people who are the cause of it knew what I know and had seen what I have seen, it would be impossible. Give me your word that you will break off your engagement.
GEORGE. I can’t give you my word. I can only repeat: I will think it over.
DOCTOR. Think over what?
GEORGE. What you have told me.
DOCTOR. But what I have told you is true. You cannot make any fresh objections. I have answered those you have made. You must be convinced.
GEORGE. Well, of course you are right in thinking that I posted myself up a bit before coming to see you. In the first place, is it certain that I have the disease you think? You say so, and perhaps it is true. But even the greatest doctors are sometimes deceived. Haven’t I heard that Ricord, your master, used to maintain that this disease was not always contagious? He produced cases to prove his point. Now you produce fresh cases to disprove it. Very well. But I have the right to think it over. And when I think it over, I realize the results you threaten me with are only probable. In spite of your desire to frighten me, you have been compelled to admit that my marriage will quite possibly produce no ill results for my wife.
DOCTOR [restraining himself with difficulty] Go on. I will answer you.
GEORGE. You tell me that your drugs are powerful, and that for the catastrophes you speak of to happen I must be one of the five exceptions per cent. you allow, and that my wife must be an exception too. Now, if a mathematician calculated the probabilities of the case, the chance of a catastrophe would prove so small that, when the slight probability of a disaster was set against the certainty of all the disappointments and the unhappiness and perhaps the tragedies which my breaking off the match would cause, he would undoubtedly come to the conclusion that I was right and you were wrong. After all, mathematics is more scientific than medicine.
DOCTOR. Ah, you think so! Well, you are wrong. Twenty cases identical with yours have been carefully observed—from the beginning to the end. Nineteen times—you hear, nineteen times in twenty—the woman was contaminated by her husband. You think that the danger is negligeable: you think you have the right to make your wife take her chance, as you said, of being one of the exceptions for which we can do nothing! Very well: then you shall know what you are doing. You shall know what sort of disease it is that your wife will have five chances per cent. of contracting without so much as having her leave asked. Take this book—it is my master’s work—here, read for yourself, I have marked the passage. You won’t read it? Then I will. [He reads passionately] ‘I have seen an unfortunate young woman changed by this disease into the likeness of a beast. The face, or I should rather say, what remained of it, was nothing but a flat surface seamed with scars.’
GEORGE. Stop, for pity’s sake, stop!
DOCTOR. I shall not stop. I shall read to the end. I shall not refrain from doing right merely for fear of upsetting your nerves. [He goes on] ‘Of the upper lip, which had been completely eaten away, not a trace remained.’ There, that will do. And you are willing to run the risk of inflicting that disease on a woman whom you say you love, though you cannot support even the description of it yourself? And pray, from whom did that woman catch syphilis? It is not I who say all this: it is this book. ‘From a man whose criminal folly was such that he was not afraid to enter into marriage in an eruption, as was afterwards established, of marked secondary symptoms, and who had further thought fit not to have his wife treated for fear of arousing suspicion.’ What that man did is what you want to do.
GEORGE. I should deserve all those names and worse still, if I were to be married with the knowledge that my marriage would bring about such horrors. But I do not believe that it would. You and your masters are specialists. Consequently you fix the whole of your attention on the subject of your studies, and you think that these dreadful, exceptional cases never have enough light thrown on them. They exercise a sort of fascination over you.
DOCTOR. I know that argument.
GEORGE. Let me go on, I beg. You have told me that one man in every seven is a syphilitic, and further that there are a hundred thousand such men going about the streets of Paris in perfect health.
DOCTOR. It is the fact that there are a hundred thousand who are not for the moment visibly affected by their complaint. But thousands have passed through our hospitals, victims to the most frightful ravages that our poor bodies can endure. You do not see them: they do not exist for you. Again, if it were only yourself who was in question, you might take that line well enough. But what I affirm, and repeat with all the strength of my conviction, is that you have no right to expose a human being to this appalling chance. The chance is rare, I know: I know still better how terrible it is. What have you to say now?
GEORGE. Nothing. I suppose you are right. I don’t know what to think.
DOCTOR. Is it as if I were forbidding you ever to marry when I forbid you to marry now? Is it as if I were telling you that you will never be cured? On the contrary, I give you every hope. Only I ask a delay of three or four years, because in that time I shall be able to ascertain whether you are one of those unhappy wretches for whom there is no hope, and because during that time you will be a source of danger to your wife and children. The children: I have not spoken to you about them. [Very gently and persuasively] Come, my dear sir, you are too young and too generous to be insensible to pity. There are things that cannot fail to move you: it is incredible that I should not be able to touch or to convince you. Indeed, I feel most deeply for you; but on that account I implore you all the more earnestly to consider what I say. You have admitted you have no right to expose your wife to such torture: but there is not only your wife—there are her children, your children, whom you may contaminate too. For the moment I will not think of you or of her: it is in the name of those innocent little ones that I appeal to you; it is the future of the race that I am defending. Listen to me. Of the twenty marriages I spoke of only fifteen produced children. They produced twenty-eight. Do you know how many of them survived? Three: three out of twenty-eight. Above all else syphilis is a child-murderer. Ah, yes! Every year produces a fresh massacre of the innocents: Herod still reigns in France and all the world over. And though it is my business to preserve life, I tell you that those who die are the lucky ones. If you want to see the children of syphilitic parents, go round the children’s hospitals. We know the type: it has become classical. Any doctor can pick them out from the rest; little creatures old from their birth, stamped with the marks of every human infirmity and decay. You will find children with every kind of affliction: hump-backed, deformed, club-footed, hare-lipped, ricketty, with heads too big and bodies too small, with congenital hip-disease. A large proportion of all these are the victims of parents who were married in ignorance of what you now know. If I could, I would cry it aloud from the housetops. [A slight pause] I have told you all this without the slightest exaggeration. Think it over. Weigh the pro and the con: tot up the sum of possible suffering and certain misery. But remember that on the one side is your own suffering—and on the other the suffering of other people. Remember that. Distrust yourself.
GEORGE. Very well. I give in. I will not be married. I will invent some excuse. I will get it put off for six months. More than that is impossible.
DOCTOR. I must have three years at least, if not four.
GEORGE. No, no. For pity’s sake! You can cure me before that.
DOCTOR. No, no, no!
GEORGE. Yes, you can. I implore you. Science can do everything.
DOCTOR. Science is not God Almighty. The day of miracles is past.
GEORGE. Oh, you could, if you wanted to. I know you could. Invent something, discover something! Try some new treatment on me. Double the doses! Give me ten times the ordinary ones, if you like! I’ll stand anything, absolutely. Only there must be some way of curing me in six months. Look here, I can’t be responsible for myself after that. For the sake of my wife and her children, do something.
DOCTOR. Nonsense.
GEORGE. If only you’ll cure me, I don’t know what I won’t do for you. I’ll be grateful to you all my life. I’ll give you half my fortune. For God’s sake, do something for me!
DOCTOR. You want me to do more for you than for all the rest?
GEORGE. Yes.
DOCTOR. Let me tell you, sir, that everyone of our patients, whether he is the richest man in the land or the poorest, has everything done for him that we can do. We have no secrets in reserve for the rich or for people who are in a hurry to be cured.
GEORGE. Good-bye, doctor.
DOCTOR. Good-day.