'Unfortunately for the Seigneur Gremion,' said the banker Jonas, 'he arrives in Judea at a most unhappy time.'
'Why so, seigneur?' inquired Gremion.
'Are not civil troubles always bad times?' replied the banker.
'No doubt, seigneur Jonas; but what troubles do you refer to?'
'My friend Jonas,' observed Baruch, the learned doctor, 'alludes to the deplorable disorders which that vagabond of Nazareth everywhere draws after him, and which increase every day.'
'Ah! yes,' said Gremion, 'that ancient journeyman carpenter of Galilee, born in a stable, and son of a plough maker? He is running about the country, they say, and you call him....'
'If we give him the name he deserves,' exclaimed the learned doctor in an angry tone, 'he would be called the vagabond, the impious, the seditious; but he bears the name of Jesus.'
'Right. A boaster,' said Pontius Pilate, shrugging his shoulders after emptying his cup, 'a fool, who talks to geese: nothing more.'
'Seigneur Pontius Pilate!' exclaimed the doctor of law in a tone of reproach: 'I do not comprehend you! What! You who represent here the august Emperor Tiberius, our protector, among us honest and peaceable people, for without your troops, the populace would long ago have risen against Herod; but prince, you pretend to be indifferent to the words and acts of this Nazarene; you treat him as a madman. Ah! Seigneur Pontius Pilate, to-day is not the first time I have told you this; madmen like this one are public pests!'
'And I repeat to you, seigneurs,' replied Pontius Pilate, extending his empty cup to his slave standing behind him, 'I repeat that you are wrong to alarm yourselves; let the Nazarene speak, and his words will pass like the wind.'