“Who bore them.”

“Certainly!  But superior men would weary them more.  They would have more resources to employ in boring them.  But tell me the subject of your novel.”

“Do you insist?”

“Oh, I insist upon nothing.”

“Well, I will tell you.  It is a study of popular manners; the history of a young workman, sober and chaste, as handsome as a girl, with the mind of a virgin, a sensitive soul.  He is a carver, and works well.  At night, near his mother, whom he loves, he studies, he reads books.  In his mind, simple and receptive, ideas lodge themselves like bullets in a wall.  He has no desires.  He has neither the passions nor the vices that attach us to life.  He is solitary and pure.  Endowed with strong virtues, he becomes conceited.  He lives among miserable people.  He sees suffering.  He has devotion without humanity.  He has that sort of cold charity which is called altruism.  He is not human because he is not sensual.”

“Oh!  One must be sensual to be human?”

“Certainly, Madame.  True pity, like tenderness, comes from the heart.  He is not intelligent enough to doubt.  He believes what he has read.  And he has read that to establish universal happiness society must be destroyed.  Thirst for martyrdom devours him.  One morning, having kissed his mother, he goes out; he watches for the socialist deputy of his district, sees him, throws himself on him, and buries a poniard in his breast.  Long live anarchy!  He is arrested, measured, photographed, questioned, judged, condemned to death, and guillotined.  That is my novel.”

“It is not very amusing,” said the Princess; “but that is not your fault.  Your anarchists are as timid and moderate as other Frenchmen.  The Russians have more audacity and more imagination.”

Countess Martin asked Paul Vence whether he knew a silent, timid-looking man among the guests.  Her husband had invited him.  She knew nothing of him, not even his name.  Paul Vence could only say that he was a senator.  He had seen him one day by chance in the Luxembourg, in the gallery that served as a library.

“I went there to look at the cupola, where Delacroix has painted, in a wood of bluish myrtles, heroes and sages of antiquity.  That gentleman was there, with the same wretched and pitiful air.  His coat was damp and he was warming himself.  He was talking with old colleagues and saying, while rubbing his hands:  ’The proof that the Republic is the best of governments is that in 1871 it could kill in a week sixty thousand insurgents without becoming unpopular.  After such a repression any other regime would have been impossible.’”

“He is a very wicked man,” said Madame Martin.  “And to think that I was pitying him!”

Madame Garain, her chin softly dropped on her chest, slept in the peace of her housewifely mind, and dreamed of her vegetable garden on the banks of the Loire, where singing-societies came to serenade her.