“Presently! Do you know to what you exposed yourself? Didn’t you see anything in the corner, on the left, on the third shelf? Speak, answer, articulate something.”
“I—don’t—know,” stammered the young fellow.
“Ah! you don’t know! Well, then, I do know! You saw a bottle of blue glass, sealed with yellow wax, that contains a white powder, on which I have even written ‘Dangerous!’ And do you know what is in it? Arsenic! And you go and touch it! You take a pan that was next to it!”
“Next to it!” cried Madame Homais, clasping her hands. “Arsenic! You might have poisoned us all.”
And the children began howling as if they already had frightful pains in their entrails.
“Or poison a patient!” continued the druggist. “Do you want to see me in the prisoner’s dock with criminals, in a court of justice? To see me dragged to the scaffold? Don’t you know what care I take in managing things, although I am so thoroughly used to it? Often I am horrified myself when I think of my responsibility; for the Government persecutes us, and the absurd legislation that rules us is a veritable Damocles’ sword over our heads.”
Emma no longer dreamed of asking what they wanted her for, and the druggist went on in breathless phrases—
“That is your return for all the kindness we have shown you! That is how you recompense me for the really paternal care that I lavish on you! For without me where would you be? What would you be doing? Who provides you with food, education, clothes, and all the means of figuring one day with honour in the ranks of society? But you must pull hard at the oar if you’re to do that, and get, as, people say, callosities upon your hands. Fabricando fit faber, age quod agis.”[[18]]
[18] The worker lives by working, do what he will.
He was so exasperated he quoted Latin. He would have quoted Chinese or Greenlandish had he known those two languages, for he was in one of those crises in which the whole soul shows indistinctly what it contains, like the ocean, which, in the storm, opens itself from the seaweeds on its shores down to the sands of its abysses.