you give them to pay what they owe. They take no
thought of the morrow; they will agree to as high a rate of interest as
may be asked, and with your money they will buy a hemp-field or a set
of furniture so as to astonish their neighbours and make them jealous.
Meanwhile their debts go on increasing year by year, and in the end they
have to sell their hemp-field and their furniture, because the creditor,
who is always one of themselves, calls for repayment or for more
interest than they can furnish. Everything goes; the principal takes all
their capital, just as the interest has taken all their income. Then you
grow old and can work no longer; your children abandon you, because you
have brought them up badly, and because they have the same passions and
the same vanities as yourself. All you can do is to take a wallet and go
from door to door to beg your bread, because you are used to bread and
would die if you had to live on roots like the sorcerer Patience, that
outcast of Nature, whom everybody hates and despises because he has not
become a beggar.

"The beggar, moreover, is hardly worse off than the day-labourer;
probably he is better off. He is no longer troubled with pride, whether
estimable or foolish; he has no longer to suffer. The folks in his part
of the country are good to him; there is not a beggar that wants for a
bed or supper as he goes his round. The peasants load him with bits of
bread, to such an extent that he has enough to feed both poultry and
pigs in the little hovel where he has left a child and an old mother to
look after his animals. Every week he returns there and spends two or
three days, doing nothing except counting the pennies that have been
given him. These poor coins often serve to satisfy the superfluous wants
which idleness breeds. A peasant rarely takes snuff; many beggars cannot
do without it; they ask for it more eagerly than for bread. So the
beggar is no more to be pitied than the labourer; but he is corrupt and
debauched, when he is not a scoundrel and a brute, which, in truth, is
seldom enough.

"'This, then, is what ought to be done,' I said to Edmee; 'and the abbe
tells me that this is also the idea of your philosophers. You who are
always ready to help the unfortunate, should give without consulting
the special fancies of the man who asks, but only after ascertaining his
real wants.'

"Edmee objected that it would be impossible for her to obtain the
necessary information; t