Benevolence is out of date,
quite vulgar. Providing for old offenders, and making them more
comfortable than the poor devils who are honest, is played out. What I
should like to see is some invention of your own with an endowment of
two hundred thousand francs--something difficult and really useful.
Then you would be talked about as a man of mark, a Montyon, and I
should be very proud of you!
"But as to throwing two hundred thousand francs into a holy-water
shell, or lending them to a bigot--cast off by her husband, and who
knows why? there is always some reason: does any one cast me off, I
ask you?--is a piece of idiocy which in our days could only come into
the head of a retired perfumer. It reeks of the counter. You would not
dare look at yourself in the glass two days after.
"Go and pay the money in where it will be safe--run, fly; I will not
admit you again without the receipt in your hand. Go, as fast and soon
as you can!"
She pushed Crevel out of the room by the shoulders, seeing avarice
blossoming in his face once more. When she heard the outer door shut,
she exclaimed:
"Then Lisbeth is revenged over and over again! What a pity that she is
at her old Marshal's now! We would have had a good laugh! So that old
woman wants to take the bread out of my mouth.
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