let impressed him as a pale, slimy toad. He was more considerate for
Roudier, a fat sheep, and for the commander, an old toothless mastiff.
But the prodigious Granoux was a perpetual cause of astonishment to him.
He spent a whole evening measuring this imbecile's facial angle. When he
heard him mutter indistinct imprecations against those blood-suckers
the Republicans, he always expected to hear him moan like a calf; and
he could never see him rise from his chair without imagining that he was
about to leave the room on all fours.

"Talk to them," his mother used to say in an undertone; "try and make a
practice out of these gentlemen."

"I am not a veterinary surgeon," he at last replied, exasperated.

One evening Felicite took him into a corner and tired to catechise
him. She was glad to see him come to her house rather assiduously.
She thought him reconciled to Society, not suspecting for a moment the
singular amusement that he derived from ridiculing these rich people.
She cherished the secret project of making him the fashionable doctor
of Plassans. It would be sufficient if men like Granoux and Roudier
consented to give him a start. She wished, above all, to impart to
him the political views of the family, considering that a doctor had
everything to gain by constituting himself a warm partisan of the regime
which was to succeed the Republic.

"My dear boy," she said to him, "as you have now become reasonable,
you must give some thought to the future. You are accused of being a
Republican, because you are foolish enough to attend all the beggars
of the town without making any charge. Be frank, what are your real
opinions?"

Pascal looked at his mother with naive astonishment, then with a smile
replied: "My real opinions? I don't quite know--I am accused of being a
Republican, did you say? Very well! I don't feel at all offended. I
am undoubtedly a Republican, if you understand by that word a man who
wishes the welfare of everybody."

"But you will never attain to any position," Felicite quickly
interrupted. "You will be crushed. Look at your brothers, they are
trying to make their way."

Pascal then comprehended that he was not called upon to defend his
philosophic egotism. His mother simply accused him of not speculating
on the political situation. He began to laugh somewhat sadly, and then
turned the conversation into another channel. Felicite could never
induce him to consider the chances of the various pa