PRES. If everyone was like you the country would soon go to the dogs. But you don’t trouble yourself much about the country, I expect.
TUPIN. Someone said ‘A man’s country is the place where he’s well off.’ I’m badly off everywhere.
PRES. You are perfectly indifferent to the good of humanity.
TUPIN. Humanity had better come to an end if it can’t get on without a set of miserable wretches like me.
PRES. The jury thoroughly appreciate your moral sense. You can sit down.
Evening has come. The ushers bring lamps.
PRES [to Madame Tupin] Have you anything more to say?
MME. TUPIN. I have to say that all this is not my fault. My husband and I worked like beasts; we did without every kind of pleasure to try and bring up our children. If we had wanted to slave more I declare to you we couldn’t have done it. And now that we’ve given our lives for them, the oldest is in hospital ruined and done for because he worked in a ‘dangerous trade’ as they call it!
PRES. Why didn’t you put him into something else?
MME. TUPIN. Because there’s no work anywhere else. They’re full up everywhere else. There are too many people in the world. My little girl is a woman now like lots of others in Paris. She had to choose between that and starving. She chose that. I’m only a poor woman, and I know what it means to have nothing to eat, so I forgave her. The worst of it is that sometimes she’s hungry all the same.