The conversation, which his entrance had interrupted, was taken up again at the point where it had ceased.

“In your place,” Mme. Roland was saying to Jean, “I will tell you what I should do at once.  I should settle in handsome rooms so as to attract attention; I should ride on horseback and select one or two interesting cases to defend and make a mark in court.  I would be a sort of amateur lawyer, and very select.  Thank God you are out of all danger of want, and if you pursue a profession, it is, after all, only that you may not lose the benefit of your studies, and because a man ought never to sit idle.”

Old Roland, who was peeling a pear, exclaimed: 

“Christi!  In your place I should buy a nice yacht, a cutter on the build of our pilot-boats.  I would sail as far as Senegal in such a boat as that.”

Pierre, in his turn, spoke his views.  After all, said he, it was not his wealth which made the moral worth, the intellectual worth of a man.  To a man of inferior mind it was only a means of degradation, while in the hands of a strong man it was a powerful lever.  They, to be sure, were rare.  If Jean were a really superior man, now that he could never want he might prove it.  But then he must work a hundred times harder than he would have done in other circumstances.  His business now must be not to argue for or against the widow and the orphan, and pocket his fees for every case he gained, but to become a really eminent legal authority, a luminary of the law.  And he added in conclusion: 

“If I were rich wouldn’t I dissect no end of bodies!”

Father Roland shrugged his shoulders.

“That is all very fine,” he said.  “But the wisest way of life is to take it easy.  We are not beasts of burden, but men.  If you are born poor you must work; well, so much the worse; and you do work.  But where you have dividends!  You must be a flat if you grind yourself to death.”

Pierre replied haughtily: 

“Our notions differ.  For my part, I respect nothing on earth but learning and intellect; everything else is beneath contempt.”

Mme. Roland always tried to deaden the constant shocks between father and son; she turned the conversation, and began talking of a murder committed the week before at Bolbec Nointot.  Their minds were immediately full of the circumstances under which the crime had been committed, and absorbed by the interesting horror, the attractive mystery of crime, which, however commonplace, shameful, and disgusting, exercises a strange and universal fascination over the curiosity of mankind.  Now and again, however, old Roland looked at his watch.  “Come,” said he, “it is time to be going.”

Pierre sneered.

“It is not yet one o’clock,” he said.  “It really was hardly worth while to condemn me to eat a cold cutlet.”

“Are you coming to the lawyer’s?” his mother asked.

“I?  No.  What for?” he replied dryly.  “My presence is quite unnecessary.”