No, despite the irony of the handler of money, there are some consciences that refuse to yield:  and then, what then?—­Vaudrey had desired virtue of a different kind and other morals!  Ah! how he had suffered the poison to penetrate him; even to his bones!  How Marianne had deformed and moulded him at her fancy, and he still thought of her only with unsatisfied longings for her kisses and ardor!  Ah! women!  Woman!  Yes, indeed, yes, woman was the great source of moral weakness and inactivity.  She used politics in her own way, in destroying politicians.  If he had only left office with head erect and not dragging the chain-shot of debt!  But that bill of exchange!  Who would pay that?

“Eh!  Molina, parbleu! Molina!  Molina!”

He was right, too, that triumphant Jew with his insolent good humor.  It is an absurd thing, after all, to be prudish and to thrust away the dish that is offered you.  To be rich is, in fact, quite as good as to be powerful!  Money remains!  That is the only real thing in the world!  It would be a fine sight to see a man refuse the opportunity to make a fortune, and to refuse it—­why?  For a silly, conscientious scruple.  And after all, business was the very life of modern society.  This Molina, circulating his money, was as useful as many others who circulate ideas.

“His Algerian gas is a work of civilization just like any other!”

Urged by the necessity of escaping from that debt that strangled him like a running noose, Sulpice gradually arrived at argumentative sophistries, which were but capitulations to his own probity, cowardly arrangements with his own conscience.  His name?  Well, he would turn it into money since it was worth a gold ingot!  The journalist who sells his thought, the artist who sells his marble, the writer who sells his experiences and his recollections, equally sell their names and for money, the flesh of their flesh.  Like a living answer and a remorse, he saw the lean face and white moustache of Ramel, who was seated at the window, breathing the warm rays of the sun, in the little room on Rue Boursault, but he answered, speaking aloud: 

“Well, what?—­Ramel is a saint, a hero!—­But I am no saint.  I am a man and I will live!”

Somewhat angered, he took the prospectus that Molina had left him and rereading it again and again, he relapsed into a sitting posture and with haggard eyes scanned the loud-swelling lines of that commercial announcement, seeking therein some pretext for accepting.  For he would accept, that was done.  Nothing more was to be said, his conscience yielded.  He was inclined to laugh.

“Still another victim caught and floored by Molina the Tumbler!”

He remained there, terrified at the prospect of the quasi-association he had determined on and by his complicity with a jobber of questionable business.