“You're the only one I know!” I interrupted violently, upsetting piles of papers which lay near me on his desk. “The others don't concern me. The others are none of my business. You're the only one. You've betrayed me—it's vile!”
“But damn it, listen a minute, will you!” begged the Minister, “and don't get angry like that before you know—”
“I only know one thing, and that's enough for me. You've made a fool of me. Well then—no, no, it won't pass off as easily as you think. It's my turn now.” I walked up and down the office, uttering threats and kicking the chairs.
“So! so! you've made a fool of me! Now we're going to have some fun! Then the country will know at last what a Minister is. At the risk of poisoning it, I'll show it—I'll expose the soul of a Minister to it. Idiot! So you didn't realize that you, your career, your secrets, and your portfolio, are at my mercy! So my past troubles you? It shocks your modesty, and Marianne's? Just wait! Tomorrow—yes, tomorrow, everything will be known—”
I was choking with rage. The Minister tried to calm me, grasped me by the arm and drew me gently, into the armchair I had just bounded out of in fury.
“Calm down!” he said to me, and his voice too on a pleading tone. “Listen to me, please! Come, sit down! Stubborn ass! You won't listen to anything! Here, this is what happened...”
He uttered swift, short sentences, choppy and trembling:
We reckoned without your opponent. In the campaign he revealed himself a powerful man—a real statesman! You know how restricted the eligible ministerial personnel is. Although the same candidates are always coming up, from time to time we have to show a new face to the Chamber and the country. Well, there is none. Do you know any? Well, we thought your opponent might be one of those faces. He has all the qualities suitable to a provisory Minister—an emergency Minister. Finally, since he was for sale and deliverable right then and there—you understand? It's hard on you, I admit... But the country's welfare, first of all—”
“Don't talk nonsense. We're not in the Chamber now, It's not a question of the country's interests, which You don't give a damn about, and neither do I. It's a question of me. Well, thanks to you, I'm on the street. Yesterday the cashier of my gambling−joint insolently refused me a hundred sous. My creditors, banking on my success and furious at my defeat, are hounding me like a hare. I'll be sold out! Today, I haven't even the price of a dinner. And you simply imagine that things can go on like this? Well, have you become senseless—as senseless as a member of the majority?”
The Minister smiled. He tapped me familiarly on the knee and said:
“I'm entirely willing—but you won't let me speak—I'm entirely willing to grant you a compensation—”
“A reparation!”
“A reparation, agreed!”
“Complete?”
“Complete! Come back in a few days... Doubtless I'll be in a position to offer it to you then. In the meantime here's a hundred louis. It's all I have left of the confidential funds.”
Sweetly, with merry cordiality, he added:
“A half−a−dozen more guys like you, and there'll be no budget!”
This generosity, which had exceeded my expectations, possessed the power instantly to calm my nerves. Still grumbling incessantly, for I did not wish to appear disarmed or satisfied, I pocketed the two bills my friend smilingly held out to me, and I retired with dignity.
I spent the following three days in the basest debauchery.
PART 2
Permit me to go back once more into the past. Perhaps it is not immaterial that I tell you who I am and where I come from. It will explain the irony of my fate so much better.
I was born in the country, of a lower middle−class family—that honest, thrifty and virtuous middle−class which, they inform us in official bulletins, is the real France. Oh well, I am none the prouder for that.
My father was a grain merchant. He was a very crude, uncultured man, and a very astute business man. He had the reputation of being very clever, and this great cleverness consisted of 'roping people in' as he used to say. To cheat about the quality and weight of merchandise; to charge two francs for what cost him two sous and whenever possible, without raising too much of a scandal, to get those two francs twice—such were his principles. For instance, he never delivered oats that he had not first soaked with water. In that way, the swollen grains yielded double measure to the liter or kilogram, especially when a little gravel had been added—a practice which my father always indulged in conscientiously. He also knew how discreetly to distribute in the bags blighted and other noxious seeds thrown off in threshing—and no one could adulterate fresh flour with fermented better than he. For in business, nothing must be wasted, and everything makes weight. My mother, who was even more greedy for dishonest profits, assisted him by her predatory ingenuity and sat stiff and distrustful, watching over the till as one mounts guard before an enemy.
A strict Republican and a fiery patriot—he furnished supplies to the army—an intolerant moralist and a good man after all, in the popular sense of the word, my father had no pity and accepted no excuse for the dishonesty of others; especially when it was to his disadvantage. In such cases he could never cease talking about the necessity for honor and virtue. One of his great ideas was that in a well−organized democracy they should be made compulsory—like education, taxes and voting. One day he discovered that a teamster who had been in his service for fifteen years, was robbing him. He immediately had him arrested. At the trial the teamster defended himself as best he could:
“But the boss never hesitated to 'rope people in'. Whenever he had played a good trick on a customer, he boasted about it as though he had done a good deed. 'The only thing is to take in the cash,' he used to say, 'no matter where or how you get it. To sell a dead cat for a live horse—that's the secret of business.' Well, I've done just what the boss does with his customers. I've roped him in.”
These cynical remarks made a bad impression on the judges. They sentenced the teamster to two years in prison, not only for having pilfered a few kilograms of grain, but chiefly because he had slandered one of the oldest business houses in district... a house founded in 1794, whose long−standing, steadfast, and legendary respectability had been the ornament of the town from generation to generation.
I remember that on the evening of this celebrated decision my father had gathered some friends at table: merchants like himself and, like him, rooted in this inaugural principle that to 'rope people in' was the very soul of trade. You can imagine how indignant they were about the defiant attitude of the teamster. They talked of nothing else until midnight; and out of the confusion, epigrams, discussions and little glasses of brandy, I distilled this precept: which was, so to speak, the moral of the episode and at the same time the synthesis of my education:
To take something from a person and keep it for one self: that is robbery. To take something from one person and then turn it over to another in exchange for as much money as you can get: that is business. Robbery is so much more stupid, since it is satisfied with a single, frequently dangerous profit; whereas in business it Can be doubled without danger.
It was in this moral atmosphere that in some way or other I grew up and developed entirely alone, with no other text than the daily example of my parents. Among the shop keeping classes children are generally left to their own devices, for no one has time to bother with their education. They educate themselves as best they can, at the mercy of their own dispositions and the pernicious influences of that environment, which is generally degrading and confined. Spontaneously, and without the need of any outward pressure, I contributed my own portion of emulation or invention to the family swindles. From the age