Mege and the intelligent ambition
of Vignon as his weapons. Next came money the poisoner, with that affair
of the African Railways, which had rotted the Parliament and turned
Duvillard, the triumphant _bourgeois_, into a public perverter, the very
cancer as it were of the financial world. Then as a just consequence of
all this there was Duvillard's own home infected by himself, that
frightful drama of Eve contending with her daughter Camille for the
possession of Gerard, then Camille stealing him from her mother, and
Hyacinthe, the son, passing his crazy mistress Rosemonde on to that
notorious harlot Silviane, with whom his father publicly exhibited
himself. Then there was the old expiring aristocracy, with the pale, sad
faces of Madame de Quinsac and the Marquis de Morigny; the old military
spirit whose funeral was conducted by General de Bozonnet; the magistracy
which slavishly served the powers of the day, Amadieu thrusting himself
into notoriety by means of sensational cases, Lehmann, the public
prosecutor, preparing his speeches in the private room of the Minister
whose policy he defended; and, finally, the mendacious and cupid Press
which lived upon scandal, the everlasting flood of denunciation and filth
which poured from Sagnier, and the gay impudence shown by the
unscrupulous and conscienceless Massot, who attacked all and defended
all, by profession and to order! And in the same way as insects, on
discovering one of their own kind dying, will often finish it off and
fatten upon it, so the whole swarm of appetites, interests and passions
had fallen upon a wretched madman, that unhappy Salvat, whose idiotic
crime had brought them all scrambling together, gluttonously eager to
derive some benefit from that starveling's emaciated carcass. And all
boiled in the huge vat of Paris; the desires, the deeds of violence, the
strivings of one and another man's will, the whole nameless medley of the
bitterest ferments, whence, in all purity, the wine of the future would
at last flow.

Then Pierre became conscious of the prodigious work which went on in the
depths of the vat, beneath all the impurity and waste. As his brother had
just said, what mattered the stains, the egotism and greed of
politicians, if humanity were still on the march, ever slowly and
stubbornly stepping forward! What mattered, too, that corrupt and
emasculate _bourgeoisie_, nowadays as moribund as the aristocracy, whose
place it took, if behind it the