us shelter, you give us
clothes, you give us employment, and you push audacity, folly, cruelty,
stupidity, and absurdity to the pitch of believing that we are grateful!
The bread is the bread of servitude, the shelter is a footman's bedroom,
the clothes are a livery, the employment is ridiculous, paid for, it is
true, but brutalizing.

Oh, you believe in the right to humiliate us with lodging and
nourishment, and you imagine that we are your debtors, and you count on
our gratitude! Very well; we will eat up your substance, we will devour
you alive and gnaw your heart-strings with our teeth.

This Josiana! Was it not absurd? What merit had she? She had
accomplished the wonderful work of coming into the world as a testimony
of the folly of her father and the shame of her mother. She had done us
the favour to exist, and for her kindness in becoming a public scandal
they paid her millions; she had estates and castles, warrens, parks,
lakes, forests, and I know not what besides, and with all that she was
making a fool of herself, and verses were addressed to her! And
Barkilphedro, who had studied and laboured and taken pains, and stuffed
his eyes and his brain with great books, who had grown mouldy in old
works and in science, who was full of wit, who could command armies, who
could, if he would, write tragedies like Otway and Dryden, who was made
to be an emperor--Barkilphedro had been reduced to permit this nobody to
prevent him from dying of hunger. Could the usurpation of the rich, the
hateful elect of chance, go further? They put on the semblance of being
generous to us, of protecting us, and of smiling on us, and we would
drink their blood and lick our lips after it! That this low woman of the
court should have the odious power of being a benefactress, and that a
man so superior should be condemned to pick up such bribes falling from
such a hand, what a frightful iniquity! And what social system is this
which has for its base disproportion and injustice? Would it not be best
to take it by the four corners, and to throw pell-mell to the ceiling
the damask tablecloth, and the festival, and the orgies, and the
tippling and drunkenness, and the guests, and those with their elbows on
the table, and those with their paws under it, and the insolent who give
and the idiots who accept, and to spit it all back again in the face of
Providence, and fling all the earth to the heavens? In the meantime let
us stick our claws into Jo