"All that is decisively at an end. The bourgeoise has taken the place forfeited by a wastrel nobility which now subsists only to set ignoble fashions and whose sole contribution to our 'civilization' is the establishment of gluttonous dining clubs, so-called gymnastic societies, and pari-mutuel associations. Today the business man has but these aims, to exploit the working man, manufacture shoddy, lie about the quality of merchandise, and give short weight.
"As for the people, they have been relieved of the indispensable fear of hell, and notified, at the same time, that they are not to expect to be recompensed, after death, for their sufferings here. So they scamp their ill-paid work and take to drink. From time to time, when they have ingurgitated too violent liquids, they revolt, and then they must be slaughtered, for once let loose they would act as a crazed stampeded herd.
"Good God, what a mess! And to think that the nineteenth century takes on airs and adulates itself. There is one word in the mouths of all. Progress. Progress of whom? Progress of what? For this miserable century hasn't invented anything great.
"It has constructed nothing and destroyed everything. At the present hour it glorifies itself in this electricity which it thinks it discovered. But electricity was known and used in remotest antiquity, and if the ancients could not explain its nature nor even its essence, the moderns are just as incapable of identifying that force which conveys the spark and carries the voice—acutely nasalized—along the wire. This century thinks it discovered the terrible science of hypnotism, which the priests and Brahmins in Egypt and India knew and practised to the utmost. No, the only thing
this century has invented is the sophistication of products. Therein it is passed master. It has even gone so far as to adulterate excrement. Yes, in 1888 the two houses of parliament had to pass a law destined to suppress the falsification of fertilizer. Now that's the limit."
The doorbell rang. He opened the door and nearly fell over backward.
Mme. Chantelouve was before him.
Stupefied, he bowed, while Mme. Chantelouve, without a word, went straight into the study. There she turned around, and Durtal, who had followed, found himself face to face with her.
"Won't you please sit down?" He advanced an armchair and hastened to push back, with his foot, the edge of the carpet turned up by the cat. He asked her to excuse the disorder. She made a vague gesture and remained standing.
In a calm but very low voice she said, "It is I who wrote you those mad letters. I have come to drive away this bad fever and get it over with in a quite frank way. As you yourself wrote, no liaison between us is possible. Let us forget what has happened. And before I go, tell me that you bear me no grudge."