The Atheists Mass | Page 6

as I what care I must have taken of my clothes and shoes. I hardly
know whether in later life we feel grief so deep when a colleague plays
us false as we have known, you and I, on detecting the mocking smile
of a gaping seam in a shoe, or hearing the armhole of a coat split, I
drank nothing but water; I regarded a cafe with distant respect. Zoppi's
seemed to me a promised land where none but the Lucullus of the pays
Latin had a right of entry. 'Shall I ever take a cup of coffee there with
milk in it?' said I to myself, 'or play a game of dominoes?'
"I threw into my work the fury I felt at my misery. I tried to master
positive knowledge so as to acquire the greatest personal value, and
merit the position I should hold as soon as I could escape from
nothingness. I consumed more oil than bread; the light I burned during
these endless nights cost me more than food. It was a long duel,
obstinate, with no sort of consolation. I found no sympathy anywhere.
To have friends, must we not form connections with young men, have a
few sous so as to be able to go tippling with them, and meet them
where students congregate? And I had nothing! And no one in Paris can
understand that nothing means nothing. When I even thought of
revealing my beggary, I had that nervous contraction of the throat
which makes a sick man believe that a ball rises up from the
oesophagus into the larynx.

"In later life I have met people born to wealth who, never having
wanted for anything, had never even heard this problem in the rule of
three: A young man is to crime as a five-franc piece is to X.--These
gilded idiots say to me, 'Why did you get into debt? Why did you
involve yourself in such onerous obligations?' They remind me of the
princess who, on hearing that the people lacked bread, said, 'Why do
not they buy cakes?' I should like to see one of these rich men, who
complain that I charge too much for an operation,--yes, I should like to
see him alone in Paris without a sou, without a friend, without credit,
and forced to work with his five fingers to live at all! What would he
do? Where would he go to satisfy his hunger?
"Bianchon, if you have sometimes seen me hard and bitter, it was
because I was adding my early sufferings on to the insensibility, the
selfishness of which I have seen thousands of instances in the highest
circles; or, perhaps, I was thinking of the obstacles which hatred, envy,
jealousy, and calumny raised up between me and success. In Paris,
when certain people see you ready to set your foot in the stirrup, some
pull your coat-tails, others loosen the buckle of the strap that you may
fall and crack your skull; one wrenches off your horse's shoes, another
steals your whip, and the least treacherous of them all is the man whom
you see coming to fire his pistol at you point blank.
"You yourself, my dear boy, are clever enough to make acquaintance
before long with the odious and incessant warfare waged by mediocrity
against the superior man. If you should drop five-and-twenty louis one
day, you will be accused of gambling on the next, and your best friends
will report that you have lost twenty-five thousand. If you have a
headache, you will be considered mad. If you are a little hasty, no one
can live with you. If, to make a stand against this armament of pigmies,
you collect your best powers, your best friends will cry out that you
want to have everything, that you aim at domineering, at tyranny. In
short, your good points will become your faults, your faults will be
vices, and your virtues crime.
"If you save a man, you will be said to have killed him; if he reappears
on the scene, it will be positive that you have secured the present at the

cost of the future. If he is not dead, he will die. Stumble, and you fall!
Invent anything of any kind and claim your rights, you will be
crotchety, cunning, ill-disposed to rising younger men.
"So, you see, my dear fellow, if I do not believe in God, I believe still
less in man. But do not you know in me another Desplein, altogether
different from the Desplein whom every one abuses?--However, we
will not stir that mud-heap.
"Well, I was living in that house, I was working hard to pass my first
examination, and I had no money at all. You know. I had come to one