"
"What?" cried Justice, "are you not always bemoaning yourselves, you
penniless men of wit and capacity, that rich girls marry beings whom
you wouldn't take as your servants? You rail against the materialism
of the century which hastens to join wealth to wealth, and never
marries some fine young man with brains and no money to a rich girl.
What an outcry you make about it; and yet here is a young woman who
revolts against that very spirit of the age, and behold! the poet
replies with a blow at her heart!"
"Rich or poor, young or old, ugly or handsome, the girl is right; she
has sense and judgment, she has tripped you over into the slough of
self-interest and lets you know it," cried Honor. "She deserves an
answer, a sincere and loyal and frank answer, and, above all, the
honest expression of your thought. Examine yourself! sound your heart
and purge it of its meannesses. What would Moliere's Alceste say?"
And La Briere, having started from the boulevard Poissoniere, walked
so slowly, absorbed in these reflections, that he was more than an
hour in reaching the boulevard des Capucines. Then he followed the
quays, which led him to the Cour des Comptes, situated in that time
close to the Saint-Chapelle.
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