leeting opportunity, to get a man hanged or set him free. They infect
their horses, they overdrive and age and break them, like their own
legs, before their time. Time is their tyrant: it fails them, it escapes
them; they can neither expand it nor cut it short. What soul can remain
great, pure, moral, and generous, and, consequently, what face retain
its beauty in this depraving practice of a calling which compels one to
bear the weight of the public sorrows, to analyze them, to weigh them,
estimate them, and mark them out by rule? Where do these folk put aside
their hearts?... I do not know; but they leave them somewhere or other,
when they have any, before they descend each morning into the abyss of
the misery which puts families on the rack. For them there is no such
thing as mystery; they see the reverse side of society, whose confessors
they are, and despise it. Then, whatever they do, owing to their contact
with corruption, they either are horrified at it and grow gloomy, or
else, out of lassitude, or some secret compromise, espouse it. In fine,
they necessarily become callous to every sentiment, since man, his laws
and his institutions, make them steal, like jackals, from corpses that
are still warm. At all hours the financier is trampling on the living,
the attorney on the dead, the pleader on the conscience. Forced to be
speaking without a rest, they all substitute words for ideas, phrases
for feelings, and their soul becomes a larynx. Neither the great
merchant, nor the judge, nor the pleader preserves his sense of right;
they feel no more, they apply set rules that leave cases out of count.
Borne along by their headlong course, they are neither husbands nor
fathers nor lovers; they glide on sledges over the facts of life, and
live at all times at the high pressure conduced by business and the vast
city. When they return to their homes they are required to go to a ball,
to the opera, into society, where they can make clients, acquaintances,
protectors. They all eat to excess, play and keep vigil, and their faces
become bloated, flushed, and emaciated.

To this terrific expenditure of intellectual strength, to such multifold
moral contradictions, they oppose--not, indeed pleasure, it would be too
pale a contrast--but debauchery, a debauchery both secret and alarming,
for they have all means at their disposal, and fix the morality of
society. Their genuine stupidity lies hid beneath their specialism. They
know th