“I am listening.”
“I am a man of great tact; and I believe that you are in love with the girl who was here just now.”
“Indeed? you didn’t need any great tact to discover that.”
“But it’s essential to find out whether she likes you.”
“Why shouldn’t she?”
“You are so young!”
“She thinks I am thirty.”
“True! I had forgotten that. Then you must try to enlist her in our interest; you understand, my dear Jacques, that to have a great success in a town, I must make, or find, accomplices.”
“What! can’t you do without them? You are not very clever, so far as I can see.”
“My little Jacques, you are just beginning your pranks and your travels; you don’t know the world as yet; if you had studied it as I have, you would know that even the most cunning people often require the help of others to succeed; and that is what I call complicity. The tradesmen enter into agreements with one another, in order to get better prices for their wares; the steward makes a bargain with the tradesmen about paying their bills; the courtiers put their heads together to flatter the prince and conceal the truth from him; the young dandy plots with a dancer at the Opéra to ruin a farmer-general; the doctor has an understanding with the druggist, the tailor with the dealer in cloth, the dressmaker with the lady’s maid, the author with the claqueurs, who also have an understanding with one another about selling the tickets they receive for applauding; stockbrokers make agreements to raise and lower quotations, cabals to ruin the sale of a work by a man who is not of their coteries, musicians to play badly the music of a confrère, actors to prevent the production of a play in which they do not act; and wives have a most excellent understanding with their husbands’ friends. All this, my dear boy, is complicity. Need you be surprised then, that a sleight-of-hand man, a manipulator of goblets, requires accomplices?—So much the worse for the idiots who allow themselves to be tricked! or rather, so much the better; for if there were no illusion, there would be very little enjoyment.—As for myself, I require to know beforehand who the people are who come to consult me; for you understand that I am no more of a sorcerer than other men. In order that you, while playing the somnambulist, may divine the pains that people are feeling, as well as those that they have felt, I must teach you your lesson in advance. That won’t prevent our making cures, please God! but we must impose on the multitude; and men are so constituted that the marvelous delights and always will delight them. Now then, this little servant seems to me very sly and very wide awake, and we must make her our accomplice; you will give her love, and I money. With the two, we shall be very unlucky or very bungling if we do not enlist her in our cause.”