tell you that by an almost
miraculous chance the most poetic memorials of the material world had
but just then been summed up for me as a symbolical interpretation of
human wisdom; whilst at this minute the remains of all the intellectual
treasures ravaged by us at table are comprised in these two women, the
living and authentic types of folly, would you be any the wiser? Our
profound apathy towards men and things supplied the half-tones in a
crudely contrasted picture of two theories of life so diametrically
opposed. If you were not drunk, you might perhaps catch a gleam of
philosophy in this."

"And if you had not both feet on that fascinating Aquilina, whose
heavy breathing suggests an analogy with the sounds of a storm about
to burst," replied Emile, absently engaged in the harmless amusement of
winding and unwinding Euphrasia's hair, "you would be ashamed of your
inebriated garrulity. Both your systems can be packed in a phrase, and
reduced to a single idea. The mere routine of living brings a stupid
kind of wisdom with it, by blunting our intelligence with work; and on
the other hand, a life passed in the limbo of the abstract or in the
abysses of the moral world, produces a sort of wisdom run mad. The
conditions may be summed up in brief; we may extinguish emotion, and so
live to old age, or we may choose to die young as martyrs to contending
passions. And yet this decree is at variance with the temperaments with
which we were endowed by the bitter jester who modeled all creatures."

"Idiot!" Raphael burst in. "Go on epitomizing yourself after that
fashion, and you will fill volumes. If I attempted to formulate those
two ideas clearly, I might as well say that man is corrupted by the
exercise of his wits, and purified by ignorance. You are calling the
whole fabric of society to account. But whether we live with the wise
or perish with the fool, isn't the result the same sooner or later? And
have not the prime constituents of the quintessence of both systems been
before expressed in a couple of words--_Carymary_, _Carymara_."

"You make me doubt the existence of a God, for your stupidity is greater
than His power," said Emile. "Our beloved Rabelais summed it all up in
a shorter word than your '_Carymary_, _Carymara_'; from his _Peut-etre_
Montaigne derived his own _Que sais-je_? After all, this last word of
moral science is scarcely more than the cry of Pyrrhus set betwixt good
and evil, or Buridan's ass betwee