He.—What do you mean by anybody? It is the sentiment and language of the whole of society.
I.—Those of you who are not great rascals must be great fools.
He.—Fools! I assure you there is only one, and that is he who feasts us to cheat him.
I.—But how can people allow themselves to be cheated in such gross fashion? For surely the superiority of the Dangeville and the Clairon is a settled thing.
He.—We swallow until we are full to the throat any lie that flatters us, and take drop by drop a truth that is bitter to us. And then we have the air of being so profoundly penetrated, so true.
I.—Yet you must once, at any rate, have sinned against the principles of art, and let slip, by an oversight, some of those bitter truths that wound; for, in spite of the wretched, abject, vile, abominable part you play, I believe you have at bottom some delicacy of soul.
He.—I! not the least in the world. Deuce take me if I know what I am! In a general way, I have a mind as round as a ball, and a character fresh as a water-willow. Never false, little interest as I have in being true; never true, little interest as I have in being false. I say things just as they come into my head; sensible things, then so much the better; impertinent things, then people take no notice. I let my natural frankness have full play. I never in all my life gave a thought, either beforehand, what to say, or while I was saying it, or after I had said it. And so I offend nobody.
I.—Still that did happen with the worthy people among whom you used to live, and who were so kind to you.
He.—What would you have? It is a mishap, an unlucky moment, such as there always are in life; there is no such thing as unbroken bliss: I was too well off, it could not last. We have, as you know, the most numerous and the best chosen company. It is a school of humanity, the renewal of hospitality after the antique. All the poets who fall, we pick them up; all decried musicians, all the authors who are never read, all the actresses who are hissed, a parcel of beggarly, disgraced, stupid, parasitical souls, and at the head of them all I have the honour of being the brave chief of a timorous flock. It is I who exhort them to eat the first time they come, and I who ask for drink for them—they are so shy. A few young men in rags who do not know where to lay their heads, but who have good looks; a few scoundrels who bamboozle the master of the house, and put him to sleep, for the sake of gleaning after him in the fields of the mistress of the house. We seem gay, but at bottom we are devoured by spleen and a raging appetite. Wolves are not more famishing, nor tigers more cruel. Like wolves when the ground has been long covered with snow, we raven over our food, and whatever succeeds we rend like tigers. Never was seen such a collection of soured, malignant, venomous beasts. You hear nothing but the names of Buffon, Duclos, Montesquieu, Rousseau, Voltaire, D’Alembert, Diderot; and God knows the epithets that bear them company! Nobody can have any parts if he is not as stupid as ourselves. That is the plan on which Palissot’s play of The Philosophers has been conceived. And you are not spared in it, any more than your neighbours.
I.—So much the better. Perhaps they do me more honour than I deserve. I should be humiliated if those who speak ill of so many clever and worthy people took it into their heads to speak well of me.