“Crass idiots!” replied the Republican, “you are for setting a nation straight with toothpicks. To your way of thinking, justice is more dangerous than thieves.”
“Oh, dear!” cried the attorney Deroches.
“Aren’t they a bore with their politics!” said the notary Cardot. “Shut up. That’s enough of it. There is no knowledge nor virtue worth shedding a drop of blood for. If Truth were brought into liquidation, we might find her insolvent.”
“It would be much less trouble, no doubt, to amuse ourselves with evil, rather than dispute about good. Moreover, I would give all the speeches made for forty years past at the Tribune for a trout, for one of Perrault’s tales or Charlet’s sketches.”
“Quite right!... Hand me the asparagus. Because, after all, liberty begets anarchy, anarchy leads to despotism, and despotism back again to liberty. Millions have died without securing a triumph for any one system. Is not that the vicious circle in which the whole moral world revolves? Man believes that he has reached perfection, when in fact he has but rearranged matters.”
“Oh! oh!” cried Cursy, the vaudevilliste; “in that case, gentlemen, here’s to Charles X., the father of liberty.”
“Why not?” asked Emile. “When law becomes despotic, morals are relaxed, and vice versa.
“Let us drink to the imbecility of authority, which gives us such an authority over imbeciles!” said the good banker.
“Napoleon left us glory, at any rate, my good friend!” exclaimed a naval officer who had never left Brest.
“Glory is a poor bargain; you buy it dear, and it will not keep. Does not the egotism of the great take the form of glory, just as for nobodies it is their own well-being?”