"
"Then you have four hundred thousand francs?" said she thoughtfully.
"No."
"Then, sir, you meant to lend that old horror the two hundred thousand
francs due for my hotel? What a crime, what high treason!"
"Only listen to me."
"If you were giving the money to some idiotic philanthropic scheme,
you would be regarded as a coming man," she went on, with increasing
eagerness, "and I should be the first to advise it; for you are too
simple to write a big political book that might make you famous; as
for style, you have not enough to butter a pamphlet; but you might do
as other men do who are in your predicament, and who get a halo of
glory about their name by putting it at the top of some social, or
moral, or general, or national enterprise. Benevolence is out of date,
quite vulgar. Providing for old offenders, and making them more
comfortable than the poor devils who are honest, is played out. What I
should like to see is some invention of your own with an endowment of
two hundred thousand francs--something difficult and really useful.
Then you would be talked about as a man of mark, a Montyon, and I
should be very proud of you!
"But as to throwing two hundred thousand francs into a holy-water
shell, or lending them to a bigot--cast off by her husband, and who
knows why? there is always some reason: does any one cast me off, I
ask you?--is a piece of idiocy which in our days could only come into
the head of a retired perfumer.
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