HULIN. I see no shame in it. Each of us serves, in one way or another. Are you not a doctor, Monsieur Marat? You spend your days examining people's wounds, and dressing them as well as you can. You go to bed very late, and you get up at night when your patients call you. Are you not then a servant?
MARAT. I serve no master: I serve humanity. But you are the valet of a corrupt man, a miserable aristocrat.
HULIN. I don't serve him because he is corrupt. You don't ask of your patients whether they are good or bad; they are men, poor devils like you and me. When they need help, you must give it and not stop to consider. Like many another, my master is corrupted by wealth. He cannot help himself: he needs a score of people to serve him. Now, I have three times as much strength as I need, and I don't know what use to make of it. Occasionally, I feel I would like to break something just to ease my feelings. If that idiot needs my power, I am willing to sell it to him. We are then quits. I do him good, and myself, too.
MARAT. You also sell him your free soul, your conscience.
HULIN. Who says anything about that? I defy any one to take that from me.
MARAT. And yet you submit. You don't tell all you think.
HULIN. What need I say? I know what I think. It's all very well for those who don't know to cry it aloud from the house-tops! I don't think for others; I think for myself.
MARAT. Nothing that is in you belongs to you. You do not belong to yourself; you are a part of every one. You owe your strength to others, your will-power, your intelligence—no matter how little you possess.
HULIN. Will-power and intelligence are not currency that one may give. Work done for others is work ill done. I have made myself free. Let the others do likewise!
MARAT. There, in those words, I recognize my odious compatriots! Simply because Nature has given them six feet of body and the muscles of an animal, they think they have a right to despise those who are weak and ill. And when after they have reaped their harvests and worked in their fields, they sit down satisfied before their own doors, smoking a vile pipe the nasty smoke of which calms their tiny consciences, they think they have done their duty, and tell their less fortunate brothers who ask for help to "go and do likewise."