Mericourt
Your name, your horse, and your lands seem to me to be on their last
legs.

De la Brive
Not so loud!

Mericourt
So you have quite made up your mind?

De la Brive
Yes, and all the more decidedly in that I am going into politics.

Mericourt
Really—­but you are too clever for that!

De la Brive
As a preparation I shall take to journalism.

Mericourt
And you have never written two lines in your life!

De la Brive There are journalists who write and journalists who do not write.  The former are editors—­and horses that drag the car; the latter, the proprietors, who furnish the funds; these give oats to their horses and keep the capital for themselves.  I shall be a proprietor.  You merely have to put on a lofty air and exclaim:  “The Eastern question is a question of great importance and of wide influence, one about which there cannot be two opinions!” You sum up a discussion by declaiming:  “England, sir, will always get the better of us!” or you make an answer to some one whom you have heard speak for a long time without paying attention to him:  “We are advancing towards an abyss, we have not yet passed through all the evolutions of the evolutionary phase!” You say to a representative of labor:  “Sir, I think there is something to be done in this matter.”  A proprietor of a journal speaks very little, rushes about and makes himself useful by doing for a man in power what the latter cannot do himself.  He is supposed to inspire the articles, those I mean, which attract any notice!  And then, if it is absolutely necessary he undertakes to publish a yellow-backed volume on some Utopian topic, so well written, so strong, that no one opens it, although every one declares that he has read it!  Then he is looked upon as an earnest man, and ends by finding himself acknowledged as somebody, instead of something.

Mericourt
Alas!  What you say is too true, in these times!

De la Brive And we ourselves are a startling proof of this!  In order to claim a part in political power you must not show what good but what harm you can do.  You must not alone possess talents, you must be able also to inspire fear.  Accordingly, the very day after my marriage, I shall assume an air of seriousness, of profundity, of high principles!  I can take my choice, for we have in France a list of principles which is as varied as a bill of fare.  I elect to be a socialist!  The word pleases me!  At every epoch, my dear friend, there are adjectives which form the pass-words of ambition!  Before 1789 a man called himself an economist; in 1815 he was a liberal; the next party will call itself the social party—­perhaps because it is so unsocial.  For in France you must always take the opposite sense of a word to understand its meaning.

Mericourt Let me tell you privately, that you are now talking nothing but the nonsense of masked ball chatter, which passes for wit among those who do not indulge in it.  What are you going to do when a certain definite knowledge becomes necessary?