ur horse, and your lands seem to me to be on their last
legs.

De la Brive
Not so loud!

Mericourt
So you have quite made up your mind?

De la Brive
Yes, and all the more decidedly in that I am going into politics.

Mericourt
Really--but you are too clever for that!

De la Brive
As a preparation I shall take to journalism.

Mericourt
And you have never written two lines in your life!

De la Brive
There are journalists who write and journalists who do not write. The
former are editors--and horses that drag the car; the latter, the
proprietors, who furnish the funds; these give oats to their horses
and keep the capital for themselves. I shall be a proprietor. You
merely have to put on a lofty air and exclaim: "The Eastern question
is a question of great importance and of wide influence, one about
which there cannot be two opinions!" You sum up a discussion by
declaiming: "England, sir, will always get the better of us!" or you
make an answer to some one whom you have heard speak for a long time
without paying attention to him: "We are advancing towards an abyss,
we have not yet passed through all the evolutions of the evolutionary
phase!" You say to a representative of labor: "Sir, I think there is
something to be done in this matter." A proprietor of a journal speaks
very little, rushes about and makes himself useful by doing for a man
in power what the latter cannot do himself. He is supposed to inspire
the articles, those I mean, which attract any notice! And then, if it
is absolutely necessary he undertakes to publish a yellow-backed
volume on some Utopian topic, so well written, so strong, that no one
opens it, although every one declares that he has read it! Then he is
looked upon as an earnest man, and ends by finding himself
acknowledged as somebody, instead of something.

Mericourt
Alas! What you say is too true, in these times!

De la Brive
And we ourselves are a startling proof of this! In order to claim a
part in political power you must not show what good but what harm you
can do. You must not alone possess talents, you must be able also to
inspire fear. Accordingly, the very day after my marriage, I shall
assume an air of seriousness, of profundity, of high principles! I can
take my choice, for we have in France a list of principles which is as
varied as a bill of fare. I elect to be a socialist! The word pleases
me! At every epoch, my dear friend, there are adjectives which form
the pass-