Page:Braddon--Wyllard's weird.djvu/156

148 "I should rather ask what you, chosen chronicler of fashionable society, can find to record in the dead season?"

"My dear friend, the most stupendous scandals are those that happen in the dead season, when Paris is a desert, and a man thinks he can murder his neighbour or run away with his neighbour's wife with equal impunity. Ah, my friend, for the development of intrigue, for the ripening of social mysteries, the working out of domestic tragedies, there can be no better time than this dull blank interval of the year, when there is no one in Paris. What stolen meetings, what little suppers in closely-sealed cabinets, when Madame is at the seaside and Monsieur is shooting wild boar in Auvergne! Heaven only forbid that Monsieur and Madame should happen to take their supper in adjacent cabinets, and that Monsieur should recognise the voice of Madame on the other side of the lath and plaster! Yes, there is no richer harvest-time for the chronicler than the season when there is not a mortal in Paris."

"Cynic!" exclaimed Heathcote. "And so you still live by exposing the faults and follies of your fellow-creatures."

"I try to reform them by proving to them that sooner or later all social secrets are known. I am about the only preacher whose sermons scare them nowadays."

"Then you consider your trade a strictly honourable one, no doubt."

"In French no doubt means perhaps," replied Trottier, "vide Michelet. No, I will say nothing for my calling, except that a man must live. You may not see the necessity of my living, but the existence of the lowest of us has its value to the man himself. The world might get on very well without me, but I can't get on without the world."

"A man of your talent might have done well in any other line—"

"Pardon; mine is not a talent. It is a specialty. I should have succeeded in no other line. If I had been rich and high-placed, like Saint-Simon, I should have kept my impressions to myself while I lived, and should have left a big book behind me when I died. But I am poor and a nobody, so I have had to live upon my impressions."

"You put the case neatly," said Heathcote, "and you are right. We are most of us the thing which circumstances make us. The man who will not allow himself to be moulded by circumstance, who will strike out into the empyrean of ideal good, is one man in a thousand."

"And the odds are that your one in a thousand, your honest man, is an eminently disagreeable personage—like Diogenes or Thomas Carlyle," said Trottier.

"You have not finished your evening's work, I suppose?"

"No; I am in for another hour."