get rich and give Reine a
suitable dowry."

Morange, quite moved by this little speech, caught hold of his wife's
hand and kissed it. Weak and good-natured as he was, Valerie was really
the one with will. It was she who had instilled some ambition into him,
and he esteemed her the more for it.

"My wife is a thoroughly good woman, you know, my dear Froment," said
he. "She has a good head as well as a good heart."

Then, while Valerie recapitulated her dream of wealth, the splendid flat
she would have, the receptions she would hold, and the two months
which, like the Beauchenes, she would spend at the seaside every summer,
Mathieu looked at her and her husband and pondered their position. Their
case was very different from that of old Moineaud, who knew that he
would never be a cabinet minister. Morange possibly dreamt that his wife
would indeed make him a minister some day. Every petty bourgeois in a
democratic community has a chance of rising and wishes to do so. Indeed,
there is a universal, ferocious rush, each seeking to push the others
aside so that he may the more speedily climb a rung of the social
ladder. This general ascent, this phenomenon akin to capillarity,
is possible only in a country where political equality and economic
inequality prevail; for each has the same right to fortune and has but
to conquer it. There is, however, a struggle of the vilest egotism, if
one wishes to taste the pleasures of the highly placed, pleasures which
are displayed to the gaze of all and are eagerly coveted by nearly
everybody in the lower spheres. Under a democratic constitution a nation
cannot live happily if its manners and customs are not simple, and if
the conditions of life are not virtually equal for one and all.
Under other circumstances than these the liberal professions prove
all-devouring: there is a rush for public functions; manual toil is
regarded with contempt; luxury increases and becomes necessary; and
wealth and power are furiously appropriated by assault in order that one
may greedily taste the voluptuousness of enjoyment. And in such a state
of affairs, children, as Valerie put it, were incumbrances, whereas one
needed to be free, absolutely unburdened, if one wished to climb over
all one's competitors.

Mathieu also thought of that law of imitation which impels even the
least fortunate to impoverish themselves by striving to copy the happy
ones of the world. How great the distress which really lurks