“No.”
“My opponent has got the place.”
“Is it possible!”
“It was settled beforehand,” said Julião, with a grimace. “I was going to make a scandal, but—” and he smiled—“but they pacified me by giving me another position. They threw me a bone.”
“Indeed!” responded Sebastião. “I am very glad; I congratulate you. And now?”
“Now, I will gnaw it.”
They had promised it to him at the first vacancy. The place was not a bad one. In short, he had bettered his condition. He was sick of medicine, he continued; it was a lane that led nowhere. He ought to have been a lawyer, a politician, a diplomat; he was born for it. He rose, and taking long strides up and down the room, he began, with shrill voice, his cigar between his teeth, to disclose his ambitious projects.
“The country is ruled by an intriguer who has strength of will; the people are degenerate, diseased, full of chronic catarrhs, of hereditary ailments, rotten within and without. The old constitutional society will fall to pieces. New men are needed!”
He planted himself in front of Sebastião.
“This country, my friend,” he said, “thus far has been governed by expedients. When the reaction against these comes, the country will look for some one who will give it fundamental truths. But who has fundamental truths? No one. They have debts, secret vices, artificial teeth; but fundamental truths, no one! If there were a few brave spirits who would take the trouble to expound half a dozen serious, rational, modern truths, the country would go on its knees to them and would say to them, ‘Gentlemen, do me the favor to put the bit in my mouth;’ I ought to be one of those men. I was born for it, and it makes me angry to think that while others, astuter or less scrupulous, are basking in the sun,—‘the beautiful Portuguese sun,’ as the farces say,—I should be prescribing poultices for devout old women, or curing the ailments of decayed clerks.”