remain what I am, but I act and I speak as becomes the character. I
am not one of those who despise moralists; there is a great deal
of profit to be got from them, especially with those who have
applied morality to action. Vice only hurts men from time to time;
the characteristics of vice hurt them from morning to night.
Perhaps it would be better to be insolent than to have an insolent
expression. One who is insolent in character only insults people
now and again; one who is insolent in expression insults them
incessantly. And do not imagine that I am the only reader of my
kind. I have no other merit in this respect than having done on
system, from a natural integrity of understanding, and with true
and reasonable vision, what most others do by instinct. And so
their readings make them no better than I am, and they remain
ridiculous in spite of themselves, while I am only so when I
choose, and always leave them a vast distance behind me; for the
same art which teaches me how to escape ridicule on certain
occasions teaches me also on certain others how to incur it
happily. Then I recall to myself all that the others said, and all
that I read, and I add all that issues from my own originality,
which is in this kind wondrous fertile.

_I._--You have done well to reveal these mysteries to me, for
otherwise I should have thought you self-contradictory.

_He._--I am not so in the least, for against a single time when one
has to avoid ridicule, happily there are a hundred when one has to
provoke it. There is no better part among the great people than
that of fool. For a long time there was the king's fool; at no time
was there ever the king's sage, officially so styled. Now I am the
fool of Bertin and many others, perhaps yours at the present
moment, or perhaps you are mine. A man who meant to be a sage would
have no fool, so he who has a fool is no sage; if he is not a sage
he is a fool, and perhaps, even were he the king himself, the fool
of his fool. For the rest, remember that in a matter so variable as
manners, there is nothing absolutely, essentially, and universally
true or false; if not that one must be what interest would have us
be, good or bad, wise or mad, decent or ridiculous, honest or
vicious. If virtue had happened to be the way to f