ess of people from the truth, there is another
cause which prevents people from seeing the obligation for them of the
simplest and most natural personal, physical labor for themselves: this
is the complication, the inextricability of the conditions, the advantage
of all the people who are bound together among themselves by money, in
which the rich man lives: My luxurious life feeds people. What would
become of my old valet if I were to discharge him? What! we must all do
every thing necessary,--make our clothes and hew wood? . . . And how
about the division of labor?"

[This morning I stepped out into the corridor where the fires were being
built. A peasant was making a fire in the stove which warms my son's
room. I went in; the latter was asleep. It was eleven o'clock in the
morning. To-day is a holiday: there is some excuse, there are no
lessons.

The smooth-skinned, eighteen-year-old youth, with a beard, who had eaten
his fill on the preceding evening, sleeps until eleven o'clock. But the
peasant of his age had been up at dawn, and had got through a quantity of
work, and was attending to his tenth stove, while the former slept. "The
peasant shall not make the fire in his stove to warm that smooth, lazy
body of his!" I thought. But I immediately recollected that this stove
also warmed the room of the housekeeper, a woman forty years of age, who,
on the evening before, had been making preparations up to three o'clock
in the morning for the supper which my son had eaten, and that she had
cleared the table, and risen at seven, nevertheless. The peasant was
building the fire for her also. And under her name the lazybones was
warming himself.

It is true that the interests of all are interwoven; but, even without
any prolonged reckoning, the conscience of each man will say on whose
side lies labor, and on whose idleness. But although conscience says
this, the account-book, the cash-book, says it still more clearly. The
more money any one spends, the more idle he is, that is to say, the more
he makes others work for him. The less he spends, the more he works.]
{142} But trade, but public undertakings, and, finally, the most
terrible of words, culture, the development of sciences, and the
arts,--what of them?

[If I live I will make answer to those points, and in detail; and until
such answer I will narrate the following.] {142}

CHAPTER XX.

LIFE IN THE CITY.

Last year, in March, I was retu