“These two men of science are not, then, of the same way of thinking as Voltaire?”
“That fellow! I make you a present of him!”
“How is that? Why, I thought——”
“Oh! no, he did not love the people!”
Then the conversation came down to contemporary events: the Spanish marriages, the dilapidations of Rochefort, the new chapter-house of Saint-Denis, which had led to the taxes being doubled. Nevertheless, according to Sénécal, they were not high enough!
“And why are they paid? My God! to erect the palace for apes at the Museum, to make showy staff-officers parade along our squares, or to maintain a Gothic etiquette amongst the flunkeys of the Château!”
“I have read in the Mode,” said Cisy, “that at the Tuileries ball on the feast of Saint-Ferdinand, everyone was disguised as a miser.”
“How
