"For my part I consider him chimerical," Pécuchet ended by declaring. "He believes in the occult sciences, in monarchy, in rank; is dazzled by rascals; turns up millions for you like centimes; and middle-class people are not with him middle-class people at all, but giants. Why inflate what is unimportant, and waste description on silly things? He wrote one novel on chemistry, another on banking, another on printing-machines, just as one Ricard produced The Cabman, The Water-Carrier and The Cocoa-Nut Seller. We should soon have books on every trade and on every province; then on every town and on the different stories of every house, and on every individual—which would be no longer literature but statistics or ethnography."
The process was of little consequence in Bouvard's estimation. He wanted to get information—to acquire a deeper knowledge of human nature. He read Paul de Kock again, and ran through the Old Hermits of the Chaussée d'Antin.
"Why lose one's time with such absurdities?" said Pécuchet.
"But they might be very interesting as a series of documents."
"Go away with your documents! I want something to lift me up, and take me away from the miseries of this world."
And Pécuchet, craving for the ideal, led Bouvard unconsciously towards tragedy.
The far-off times in which the action takes place, the interests with which it is concerned, and the high station of its leading personages impressed them with a certain sense of grandeur.
One day Bouvard took up Athalie, and recited the dream so well that Pécuchet wished to attempt it in his turn. From the opening sentence his voice got lost in a sort of humming sound. It was monotonous and, though strong, indistinct.
Bouvard, full of experience, advised him, in order to render it well-modulated, to roll it out from the lowest tone to the highest, and to draw it back by making use of an ascending and descending scale; and he himself went through this exercise every morning in bed, according to the precept of the Greeks. Pécuchet, at the time mentioned, worked in the same fashion: each had his door closed, and they went on bawling separately.
The features that pleased them in tragedy were the emphasis, the political declamations, and the maxims on the perversity of things.