Go into the cities, and shout from door to door, with a sublime stupidity, “Be humble, be gentle, be poor!” Announce peace and charity to the cities, to the dens, and to the barracks.  You will be disdained; the mob will throw stones at you.  Policemen will drag you into prison.  You shall be for the humble as for the powerful, for the poor as for the rich, a subject of laughter, an object of disgust and of pity.  Your priests will dethrone you, and elevate against you an anti-pope, or will say that you are crazy.  And it is necessary that they should tell the truth; it is necessary that you should be crazy; the lunatics have saved the world.  Men will give to you the crown of thorns and the reed sceptre, and they will spit in your face, and it is by that sign that you will appear as Christ and true king; and it is by such means that you will establish Christian socialism, which is the kingdom of God on earth.’”

Having spoken in this way, Choulette lighted one of those long and tortuous Italian cigars, which are pierced with a straw.  He drew from it several puffs of infectious vapor, then he continued, tranquilly: 

“And it would be practical.  You may refuse to acknowledge any quality in me except my clear view of situations.  Ah, Madame Marmet, you will never know how true it is that the great works of this world were always achieved by madmen.  Do you think, Madame Martin, that if Saint Francis of Assisi had been reasonable, he would have poured upon the earth, for the refreshment of peoples, the living water of charity and all the perfumes of love?”

“I do not know,” replied Madame Martin; “but reasonable people have always seemed to me to be bores.  I can say this to you, Monsieur Choulette.”

They returned to Fiesole by the steam tramway which goes up the hill.  The rain fell.  Madame Marmet went to sleep and Choulette complained.  All his ills came to attack him at once:  the humidity in the air gave him a pain in the knee, and he could not bend his leg; his carpet-bag, lost the day before in the trip from the station to Fiesole, had not been found, and it was an irreparable disaster; a Paris review had just published one of his poems, with typographical errors as glaring as Aphrodite’s shell.

He accused men and things of being hostile to him.  He became puerile, absurd, odious.  Madame Martin, whom Choulette and the rain saddened, thought the trip would never end.  When she reached the house she found Miss Bell in the drawing-room, copying with gold ink on a leaf of parchment, in a handwriting formed after the Aldine italics, verses which she had composed in the night.  At her friend’s coming she raised her little face, plain but illuminated by splendid eyes.

“Darling, permit me to introduce to you the Prince Albertinelli.”

The Prince possessed a certain youthful, godlike beauty, that his black beard intensified.  He bowed.

“Madame, you would make one love France, if that sentiment were not already in our hearts.”