gative of saying, 'M. de Valentin owes me something, and does
not pay. I have a hold on him. He had better not show me any offensive
airs!' You must bow to your creditors, and moreover bow politely. 'When
are you going to pay me?' say they. And you must lie, and beg money of
another man, and cringe to a fool seated on his strong-box, and receive
sour looks in return from these horse-leeches; a blow would be less
hateful; you must put up with their crass ignorance and calculating
morality. A debt is a feat of the imaginative that they cannot
appreciate. A borrower is often carried away and over-mastered by
generous impulses; nothing great, nothing magnanimous can move or
dominate those who live for money, and recognize nothing but money. I
myself held money in abhorrence.

"Or a bill may undergo a final transformation into some meritorious
old man with a family dependent upon him. My creditor might be a living
picture for Greuze, a paralytic with his children round him, a soldier's
widow, holding out beseeching hands to me. Terrible creditors are
these with whom we are forced to sympathize, and when their claims are
satisfied we owe them a further debt of assistance.

"The night before the bills fell due, I lay down with the false calm of
those who sleep before their approaching execution, or with a duel in
prospect, rocked as they are by delusive hopes. But when I woke, when
I was cool and collected, when I found myself imprisoned in a banker's
portfolio, and floundering in statements covered with red ink--then my
debts sprang up everywhere, like grasshoppers, before my eyes. There
were my debts, my clock, my armchairs; my debts were inlaid in the very
furniture which I liked best to use. These gentle inanimate slaves were
to fall prey to the harpies of the Chatelet, were to be carried off by
the broker's men, and brutally thrown on the market. Ah, my property was
a part of myself!

"The sound of the door-bell rang through my heart; while it seemed to
strike at me, where kings should be struck at--in the head. Mine was a
martyrdom, without heaven for its reward. For a magnanimous nature, debt
is a hell, and a hell, moreover, with sheriff's officers and brokers in
it. An undischarged debt is something mean and sordid; it is a beginning
of knavery; it is something worse, it is a lie; it prepares the way for
crime, and brings together the planks for the scaffold. My bills
were protested. Three days afterwards I met them,