TUPIN. What’s that prove?
PRESIDENT. Your eldest daughter is known to the police of Paris as a prostitute. One of your sons has been sentenced to a year’s imprisonment for theft. Is that true?
TUPIN. Possibly.
PRESIDENT. A little less proud now? That’s right. Well, now, you took your wife to this woman. Why?
TUPIN. Because I thought it was enough to have brought seven wretched creatures into the world.
PRESIDENT. If you had continued to be the honest and industrious workman you were once, you might have had another child without its necessarily growing up wretched.
TUPIN. No, sir. Not with five. It’s impossible.
PRESIDENT. I don’t understand.
TUPIN. I say that a working man’s family, however much they work and economize, can’t support itself when there are five children.
PRESIDENT. If that is true, there are—and it is to the credit of the Society that you despise—there are, I say, numerous charitable organizations which are, so to speak, on the watch for the victims of misfortune and make it a point of honor to leave none without succor.