"What! you refuse me that—me—the first thing I have ever asked of you?"
And M. Pascal put such an emphasis on the word me that the whole family suddenly trembled; they felt, as is vulgarly said, their master, and knowing of the strange caprice of the capitalist, they submitted sadly rather than offend the dreadful man upon whom their fate depended. They gave up the visit and improvised a dinner. They tried to smile, to have a cheerful air, and not to appear to regret the family festivity which they had renounced. But soon another fear begins to oppress their hearts; the dinner is becoming more and more sad and constrained. M. Pascal professes a sort of pathetic astonishment, as he complains with a sigh:
"Come, now, I have interfered with your plans; you feel bitterly toward me, alas! I see it."
"Ah, M. Pascal!" cried the unhappy family, more and more disquieted, "how can you conceive such a thought?"
"Oh, I am not mistaken. I see it, I feel it, because my heart tells me so. Eh, my God! just to think of it! It is always a great wrong to put friendship to the proof, even in the smallest things, because they serve sometimes to measure great ones. I,—yes, I,—who counted on you as true and good friends!—yet it was a deception, perhaps."
And Satan-Pascal put his hand over his eyes, got up from the table, and went out of the house with a grieved and afflicted air, leaving the miserable inmates in unspeakable anguish, because he no longer believed in their friendship, and thought them ungrateful,—he who could in one moment plunge them in an abyss of woe by demanding the money he had so generously offered. The gratitude that he expected from them was their only assurance of his continued assistance.
We have insisted on these circumstances, trifling as they may seem perhaps, but whose result was so cruel, because we wished to give an example of how M. Pascal tortured his victims.
Let one judge after that of the degrees of torture to which he was capable of subjecting them, when so insignificant a fact as we have mentioned offered such food to his calculating cruelty.
He was a monster, it must be admitted.
There are Neros, unhappily, everywhere and in every age, but who would dare say that Pascal could have reached such a degree of perversity without the pernicious influences and terrible resentments which his soul, irritated by a degrading servitude, had nourished for so long a time?