“Spare us your sentimental sermons,” cried the president angrily. His boarlike eye shone with a savage brilliance. “Go on,” he said to the man with the waistcoats. The cheeks and the forehead of the president became purple.
“Noble England,” replied the advocate-general, “is crushed to-day: for each Englishman before paying for his own bread is obliged to pay the interest on forty milliards of francs which were used against the Jacobins. She has no more Pitt.”
“She has the Duke of Wellington,” said a military personage looking very important.
“Please, gentlemen, silence,” exclaimed the president. “If we are still going to dispute, there was no point in having M. Sorel in.”
“We know that monsieur has many ideas,” said the duke irritably, looking at the interrupter who was an old Napoleonic general. Julien saw that these words contained some personal and very offensive allusion. Everybody smiled, the turncoat general appeared beside himself with rage.
“There is no longer a Pitt, gentlemen,” went on the speaker with all the despondency of a man who has given up all hope of bringing his listeners to reason. “If there were a new Pitt in England, you would not dupe a nation twice over by the same means.”
“That’s why a victorious general, a Buonaparte, will be henceforward impossible in France,” exclaimed the military interrupter.
On this occasion neither the president nor the duke ventured to get angry, though Julien thought he read in their eyes that they would very much like to have done so. They lowered their eyes, and the duke contented himself with sighing in quite an audible manner. But the speaker was put upon his mettle.
“My audience is eager for me to finish,” he said vigorously, completely discarding that smiling politeness and that balanced diction that Julien thought had expressed his character so well. “It is eager for me to finish, it is not grateful to me for the efforts I am making to offend nobody’s ears, however long they may be. Well, gentlemen, I will be brief.
“I will tell you in quite common words: England has not got a sou with which to help the good cause. If Pitt himself were to come back he would never succeed with all his genius in duping the small English landowners, for they know that the short Waterloo campaign alone cost them a milliard of francs. As you like clear phrases,” continued the speaker, becoming more and more animated, “I will say this to you: Help yourselves, for England has not got a guinea left to help you with, and when England does not pay, Austria, Russia and Prussia—who will only have courage but have no money—cannot launch more than one or two campaigns against France.