He was interested and allured
by the hope of curing this nervous complaint. On seeing the great
physician sitting with them and sparing them a few minutes, the
Baroness and her family conversed with him on general subjects.
"You life is a very full and a very sad one," said Madame Hulot. "I
know what it is to spend one's days in seeing poverty and physical
suffering."
"I know, madame," replied the doctor, "all the scenes of which charity
compels you to be a spectator; but you will get used to it in time, as
we all do. It is the law of existence. The confessor, the magistrate,
the lawyer would find life unendurable if the spirit of the State did
not assert itself above the feelings of the individual. Could we live
at all but for that? Is not the soldier in time of war brought face to
face with spectacles even more dreadful than those we see? And every
soldier that has been under fire is kind-hearted. We medical men have
the pleasure now and again of a successful cure, as you have that of
saving a family from the horrors of hunger, depravity, or misery, and
of restoring it to social respectability. But what comfort can the
magistrate find, the police agent, or the attorney, who spend their
lives in investigating the basest schemes of self-interest, the social
monster whose only regret is when it fails, but on whom repentance
never dawns?
"One-half of society spends its life in watching the other half. A
very old friend of mine is an attorney, now retired, who told me that
for fifteen years past notaries and lawyers have distrusted their
clients quite as much as their adversaries.
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