“Yet you saw how she got up without assistance when the barn was opened for her.”
“That is true, and I am still astonished at it,” replied Mathéus. “These gipsies must have very tough lives! It comes of the sober and primitive existence they lead in the midst of forests. They know nothing of the excesses of the table, neither of drink nor of labour, so injurious to other men. Thus lived our first parents.”
Coucou Peter could not help smiling.
“Maître Frantz,” he said, “with all due respect to you, I know enough of the gipsies to know that they never disdain anything good to eat, and that they drink a great deal more brandy than we do. As to working, you are right; they like better doing nothing than making themselves useful to humankind; not like we, who work for the future generations. Do you know what I think of that old woman?”
“What do you think of her, my friend?”
“I think she is no more ill than you or I; that, after trying all the doors in the town to see whether they were well fastened, this old swindler, finding there was nothing to take, has shammed ill for the purpose of getting into the mill. During the night she and the boy with her will get up quietly, creep into the fowl-house, wring the necks of the fowls, turkeys, and ducks, and to-morrow, before daylight, she’ll have vanished! That’s my notion.”
“How can you bring yourself to think such things?” cried the illustrious philosopher. “Oh, Coucou Peter! Coucou Peter! it’s very wrong to conceive such ideas against an entire race of men because those men have a skin a little yellower than our own, thicker lips, and brighter eyes!”
“No, Maître Frantz; it’s because they all without exception belong to the family of foxes,” said Coucou Peter, gravely.
“But will—cannot will change their evil instincts?” cried Mathéus, surprised to find himself embarrassed by his own system. “Are not all men perfectible? Are they to be considered as brutes? Doubtless they have animal appetites, which come to them from their original nature, but the Great Demiourgos has given them at birth a superior faculty—moral sense—which enables them to distinguish the just from the unjust, and to combat instincts incompatible with the dignity of man.”