"Ah, my soldier!" he said solemnly, laying his hand on Dumay's
shoulder, and thinking to himself how droll it was to make a soldier
of the empire tremble, "this young girl may be all in all to you, but
to society at large what is she? nothing. At this moment the greatest
mandarin in China may be yielding up the ghost and putting half the
universe in mourning, and what is that to you? The English are killing
thousands of people in India more worthy than we are; why, at this
very moment while I am speaking to you some ravishing woman is being
burned alive,--did that make you care less for your cup of coffee this
morning at breakfast? Not a day passes in Paris that some mother in
rags does not cast her infant on the world to be picked up by whoever
finds it; and yet see! here is this delicious tea in a cup that cost
five louis, and I write verses which Parisian women rush to buy,
exclaiming, 'Divine! delicious! charming! food for the soul!' Social
nature, like Nature herself, is a great forgetter. You will be quite
surprised ten years hence at what you have done to-day. You are here
in a city where people die, where they marry, where they adore each
other at an assignation, where young girls suffocate themselves, where
the man of genius with his cargo of thoughts teeming with humane
beneficence goes to the bottom,--all side by side, sometimes under the
same roof, and yet ignorant of each other, ignorant and indifferent.
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