“Queer customers!” said Merlin.
“Fulgence used to be a good fellow,” added Lousteau, “before they perverted his morals.”
“Who are ‘they’?” asked Claude Vignon.
“Some very serious young men,” said Blondet, “who meet at a philosophico-religious symposium in the Rue des Quatre-Vents, and worry themselves about the meaning of human life——”
“Oh! oh!”
“They are trying to find out whether it goes round in a circle, or makes some progress,” continued Blondet. “They were very hard put to it between the straight line and the curve; the triangle, warranted by Scripture, seemed to them to be nonsense, when, lo! there arose among them some prophet or other who declared for the spiral.”
“Men might meet to invent more dangerous nonsense than that!” exclaimed Lucien, making a faint attempt to champion the brotherhood.
“You take theories of that sort for idle words,” said Félicien Vernou; “but a time comes when the arguments take the form of gunshot and the guillotine.”
“They have not come to that yet,” said Bixiou; “they have only come as far as the designs of Providence in the invention of champagne, the humanitarian significance of breeches, and the blind deity who keeps the world going. They pick up fallen great men like Vico, Saint-Simon, and Fourier. I am much afraid that they will turn poor Joseph Bridau’s head among them.”
“Bianchon, my old schoolfellow, gives me the cold shoulder now,” said Lousteau; “it is all their doing——”