“If you give me twenty francs,” said one of them to Julien, “I will tell you the story of my life in detail. It’s rich.”
“But you will lie,” said Julien.
“Not me,” he answered, “my friend there, who is jealous of my twenty francs will give me away if I say anything untrue.”
His history was atrocious. It was evidence of a courageous heart which had only one passion—that of money.
After their departure Julien was no longer the same man. All his anger with himself had disappeared. The awful grief which had been poisoned and rendered more acute by the weakness of which he had been a victim since madame de Rênal’s departure had turned to melancholy.
“If I had been less taken in by appearances,” he said to himself, “I would have had a better chance of seeing that the Paris salons are full of honest men like my father, or clever scoundrels like those felons. They are right. The men in the salons never get up in the morning with this poignant thought in their minds, how am I going to get my dinner? They boast about their honesty and when they are summoned on the jury, they take pride in convicting the man who has stolen a silver dish because he felt starving.
“But if there is a court, and it’s a question of losing or winning a portfolio, my worthy salon people will commit crimes exactly similar to those, which the need of getting a dinner inspired those two felons to perpetrate.
“There is no such thing as natural law, the expression is nothing more than a silly anachronism well worthy of the advocate-general who harried me the other day, and whose grandfather was enriched by one of the confiscations of Louis XIV. There is no such thing as right, except when there is a law to forbid a certain thing under pain of punishment.
“Before law existed, the only natural thing was the strength of the lion, or the need of a creature who was cold or hungry, to put it in one word, need. No, the people whom the world honours are merely villains who have had the good fortune not to have been caught red-handed. The prosecutor whom society put on my track was enriched by an infamous act. I have committed a murder, and I am justly condemned, but the Valenod who has condemned me, is by reason alone of that very deed, a hundred times more harmful to society.
“Well,” added Julien sadly but not angrily, “in spite of his avarice, my father is worth more than all those men. He never loved me. The disgrace I bring upon him by an infamous death has proved the last straw. That fear of lacking money, that distorted view of the wickedness of mankind, which is called avarice, make him find a tremendous consolation and sense of security in a sum of three or four hundred louis, which I have been able to leave him. Some Sunday, after dinner, he will shew his gold to all the envious men in Verrières. ‘Which of you would not be delighted to have a son guillotined at a price like this,’ will be the message they will read in his eyes.”