“Ah, bah! You are a philanthropist. What are a few thousand lives compared with the triumph of mind?”
“Not much to you, perhaps, but certainly something to the owners. But come, my dear friend, you are jesting. You don’t mean to insinuate that you possess any such power?”
“I do indeed.”
“But the means? Granting that you have the power—and all Europe acknowledges the extraordinary faculties of the author of Monte-Christo—some time would be required for their development. You cannot hope to inoculate the mind of a nation in a moment.”
“I did not say a moment—I said a month.”
“And dare I ask your recipe?”
“A very simple one. Two romances, each in ten volumes, and a couple of melodramas.”
“What! of your own?”
“Of mine,” replied the Marquis de la Pailleterie.