Never let any one do you a service.  They will abuse the advantage it gives them.  Never allow yourself to be taken in the act of inanition.  They would relieve you.  Because he was starving, this woman had found it a sufficient pretext to give him bread.  From that moment he was her servant; a craving of the stomach, and there is a chain for life!  To be obliged is to be sold.  The happy, the powerful, make use of the moment you stretch out your hand to place a penny in it, and at the crisis of your weakness make you a slave, and a slave of the worst kind, the slave of an act of charity—­a slave forced to love the enslaver.  What infamy! what want of delicacy! what an assault on your self-respect!  Then all is over.  You are sentenced for life to consider this man good, that woman beautiful; to remain in the back rows; to approve, to applaud, to admire, to worship, to prostrate yourself, to blister your knees by long genuflections, to sugar your words when you are gnawing your lips with anger, when you are biting down your cries of fury, and when you have within you more savage turbulence and more bitter foam than the ocean!

It is thus that the rich make prisoners of the poor.

This slime of a good action performed towards you bedaubs and bespatters you with mud for ever.

An alms is irremediable.  Gratitude is paralysis.  A benefit is a sticky and repugnant adherence which deprives you of free movement.  Those odious, opulent, and spoiled creatures whose pity has thus injured you are well aware of this.  It is done—­you are their creature.  They have bought you—­and how?  By a bone taken from their dog and cast to you.  They have flung that bone at your head.  You have been stoned as much as benefited.  It is all one.  Have you gnawed the bone—­yes or no?  You have had your place in the dog-kennel as well.  Then be thankful—­be ever thankful.  Adore your masters.  Kneel on indefinitely.  A benefit implies an understood inferiority accepted by you.  It means that you feel them to be gods and yourself a poor devil.  Your diminution augments them.  Your bent form makes theirs more upright.  In the tones of their voices there is an impertinent inflexion.  Their family matters—­their marriages, their baptisms, their child-bearings, their progeny—­all concern you.  A wolf cub is born to them.  Well, you have to compose a sonnet.  You are a poet because you are low.  Isn’t it enough to make the stars fall!  A little more, and they would make you wear their old shoes.

“Who have you got there, my dear?  How ugly he is!  Who is that man?”

“I do not know.  A sort of scholar, whom I feed.”