feel queasy. We sha'n't be able
to carve a capon in peace, because we shall find the agrarian law inside
it."

"Ah, my little Brutus, stuffed with truffles, your principles are all
right enough. But you are like my valet, the rogue is so frightfully
possessed with a mania for property that if I left him to clean my
clothes after his fashion, he would soon clean me out."

"Crass idiots!" replied the Republican, "you are for setting a nation
straight with toothpicks. To your way of thinking, justice is more
dangerous than thieves."

"Oh, dear!" cried the attorney Deroches.

"Aren't they a bore with their politics!" said the notary Cardot. "Shut
up. That's enough of it. There is no knowledge nor virtue worth shedding
a drop of blood for. If Truth were brought into liquidation, we might
find her insolvent."

"It would be much less trouble, no doubt, to amuse ourselves with evil,
rather than dispute about good. Moreover, I would give all the speeches
made for forty years past at the Tribune for a trout, for one of
Perrault's tales or Charlet's sketches."

"Quite right!... Hand me the asparagus. Because, after all, liberty
begets anarchy, anarchy leads to despotism, and despotism back again
to liberty. Millions have died without securing a triumph for any one
system. Is not that the vicious circle in which the whole moral world
revolves? Man believes that he has reached perfection, when in fact he
has but rearranged matters."

"Oh! oh!" cried Cursy, the _vaudevilliste_; "in that case, gentlemen,
here's to Charles X., the father of liberty."

"Why not?" asked Emile. "When law becomes despotic, morals are relaxed,
and vice versa.

"Let us drink to the imbecility of authority, which gives us such an
authority over imbeciles!" said the good banker.

"Napoleon left us glory, at any rate, my good friend!" exclaimed a naval
officer who had never left Brest.

"Glory is a poor bargain; you buy it dear, and it will not keep.
Does not the egotism of the great take the form of glory, just as for
nobodies it is their own well-being?"

"You are very fortunate, sir----"

"The first inventor of ditches must have been a weakling, for society
is only useful to the puny. The savage and the philosopher, at either
extreme of the moral scale, hold property in equal horror."

"All very fine!" said Cardot; "but if there were no property, there
would be no documents to draw up."

"These green peas are excessively delicious!"

"A