‘What became of him?’ asked Le Petit Saint Thomas, between slow puffs of his cigarette.
‘Poor fellow! He has fallen upon grief.’
‘Naturally; it is the great result of birth. A love affair?’
‘Worse.’
‘Blasphemy, Professor! ’Tis the sole sorrow of life. The rest are but the trifling ills of humanity.’ Gaston spoke with all the authority of a young man who is perpetually in and out of love, is backed upon the thorny path of literature by rich and devoted relatives, and has never known a day’s illness upon his road.
‘It can’t be marriage, for that violent resource would merely drift him into deeper depths of Pessimism, which would be a gratifying confirmation of his theories.’
‘It can’t be love either,’ I suggested. ‘Pessimism and love don’t mate. Marriage it might be; for even a pessimist may be conceded the weakness of objecting to a demonstration of the nothingness of marriage in the person of his own wife.’
‘It might be debt, if that were not a modified trouble since the inhuman law of imprisonment was abolished.’
‘Behold the force of imagination, Professor,’ exclaimed Gaston, pointing to a visionary perspective with his cigarette, in answer to Rameau’s glance of contemplative irony. ‘I see our monster married to an unvirtuous grisette, or an amiable young laundress, who discovers the superior attractiveness of an optimist poet on the opposite side of the way. She can hardly be blamed for the discovery; for though we may applaud the courage of a woman who marries a monster, it would be both rash and cruel to expect her to add fidelity to her courage. Where women are concerned, it is a wise precaution to count upon a single virtue.’
‘Your wit, the outcome of natural perversity, flies beyond the mark,’ said Rameau, shrugging his shoulders. ‘The real sorrows of life are very simple, and command respect by their simplicity. The others are the complications, the depravities of civilisation at which we cavil and laugh. Krowtosky has not stumbled in double life, but he has just lost a baby girl.’