my head. But there, that day is a good way off, and meantime many
of my business acquaintances have been ruined for the sake of keeping
me from ruin. The last word, too, the greatest praise that I could
give to wealth, certainly is, that such a circle as I find myself in
at present has had the patience to listen so long to the son of a
gardener, who has no other right to their attention than the poor
little millions that he has made.

_Durieu_ [_aside_]--It is all absolutely true, every word that he has
been saying--gardener's son that he is! He sees our epoch just as it
really is.

_Madame Durieu_--Come now, my dear M. De Cayolle, what do you think of
what M. Giraud has been telling us?

_Cayolle_--I think, madam, that the theories of M. Giraud are sound,
but sound only as to that society in which M. Giraud has lived until
now: a world of speculation, whose one object naturally ought to be to
make money. As to wealth itself, it brings about infamous things, but
it also brings about great and noble things. In that respect it is
like human speech: a bad thing for some people, a good thing for
others, according to the use they make of it. This obligation of our
state of society that makes a man wake up each morning with taking
thought of the necessary sum for his personal wants, lest he take what
does not belong to him, has created the finest intelligence of all the
ages! It is simply to this need of money every day that we owe
Franklin, who began the world by being a printer's apprentice;
Shakespeare, who used to hold horses at the door of the theatre which
later he was going to immortalize; Machiavelli, who was secretary to
the Florentine republic at fifteen crowns a month; Raphael, the son of
a mere dauber; Jean Jacques Rousseau, a notary's clerk and an
engraver,--one who did not have a dinner every day; Fulton, once upon
a time a mechanic, who gave us steam: and so many others. Had these
same people been born with an income of half a million livres apiece,
there would have been a good many chances that not one of them would
ever have become what he did become. [_To M. Giraud._] This race after
wealth, of which you speak, M. Giraud, has good in it: even if it
enriches some silly people or some rascals, if it procures for them
the consideration of those in a humble station of life,--of the lower
classes, of those who have cash relations with society, on the other
hand there is a great deal of good in the spur given