"Abbé, you are immoral!"
"If it be only at such a price one can afford to be indulgent, Mr. Rockstrong, do not blame me too severely."
"I have no use, my fat Abbé, for an indulgence that you share between me, the victim, and the scoundrels in Parliament, who condemned me with such revolting injustice."
"It is amusing to hear you talk of the injustice of the lords, Mr. Rockstrong."
"Is it not a crying injustice?"
"It is quite true, Mr. Rockstrong, that you were convicted, on a ridiculous charge, by the Lord-Chancellor for a collection of libels, none of which came in particular under the ban of the English law; it is true that in a country where one is allowed to write anything and everything, you were punished for some pungent writings; it is true that they used, as weapons, obsolete and out-of-the-way forms whose imposing hypocrisy poorly dissimulated the impossibility of getting at you by legal methods; it is true that the milords who judged you were interested in your ruin, since Monmouth's, and your success would infallibly have dragged them from their seats. It is true your ruin was decided on beforehand in the royal Councils. It is true you escaped by flight, from a mediocre kind of martyrdom in truth, but a painful one. For imprisonment for life is a penalty even if one may reasonably hope to escape from it soon. But there is no justice nor injustice there. You were condemned for State reasons—which is extremely honourable. And more than one of the lords who condemned you had conspired with you twenty years before. Your crime was to have frightened those in office—and it is an unpardonable one. Ministers and their friends invoke the safety of the State when danger threatens their fortunes or their posts. And they are willing to believe themselves necessary for the preservation of the empire, for they are for the most part interested parties and no philosophers. But that does not make bad men of them. They are human beings and that is quite enough to explain their pitiable mediocrity, their stupidity and their avarice. But whom do you set up against them, Mr. Rockstrong? Other men of equal mediocrity, and yet more greedy, because they are hungrier. The people of London would have borne with them as they bear with the others. They awaited your victory or your defeat to declare themselves, wherein they gave proof of remarkable sagacity. The people are well advised when they judge that they have nothing to gain or lose by change of masters."
Thus spoke Abbé Coignard, and Mr. Rockstrong with inflamed countenance, eyes on fire, and wig starting from his head, shouted at him with gestures from the top of his ladder: "Abbé, I understand thieves and all types of rogues in Chancery and Parliament. But I do not understand you, who, without any personal interest in the matter, out of pure malice, propound maxims that they themselves profess but for their own profit. You must be wickeder than they, for you have nothing to gain in the matter. It is beyond me, Abbé!"
"It is a sign of my being a philosopher," gently replied my good master. "It is in the nature of wise men to irritate the rest of mankind. Anaxagoras was a celebrated example of it. I do not speak of Socrates who was but a sophist. But we see that in all times and in all countries the opinions of meditative minds were subjects of scandal. You think yourself very different from your enemies, Mr. Rockstrong, and that you are as lovable as they are odious. Allow me to tell you that this is but the effect of your pride and of your high courage. In actual fact, you share in common with those who condemned you, all human weaknesses and passions. If you are more honest than many of them, and even if you are a man of incomparable vivacity of mind, you are filled with a talent for hatred and discord which renders you very inconvenient in a well-regulated country. The calling of a journalist, in which you excel, has raised to the highest degree of perfection the wonderful partiality of your mind, and though a victim of injustice, you are yourself not just. What I have just said embroils me both with you and with your enemies, and I am very certain I shall never obtain a fat living from the minister who has them in his gift. But I prize freedom of mind more highly than a fat abbey or a cosy priory. I shall have succeeded in vexing all the world, but I shall die in peace, and in contentment of heart."
"Abbé," half-laughingly, replied Mr. Rockstrong, "I forgive you, because I think you a little mad. You make no difference between rogues and honest men, and you would not rather have a free country than a despotic and shuffling government. You are a lunatic, and of no ordinary kind."
"Let us go and drink a pot of wine at the Petit Bacchus, Mr. Rockstrong," said my good master, "and I will explain to you, while emptying my glass, why I am totally indifferent to forms of government, and why I do not trouble myself about any change of masters."