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The Illustrious Gaudissart by Honoré de Balzac
page 19 of 58 (32%)

"As to the article journal--the devil! that's a horse of another
color. Holy saints! how one has to warble before you can teach
these bumpkins a new tune. I have only made sixty-two 'Movements':
exactly a hundred less for the whole trip than the shawls in one
town. Those republican rogues! they won't subscribe. They talk,
they talk; they share your opinions, and presently you are all
agreed that every existing thing must be overturned. You feel sure
your man is going to subscribe. Not a bit of it! If he owns three
feet of ground, enough to grow ten cabbages, or a few trees to
slice into toothpicks, the fellow begins to talk of consolidated
property, taxes, revenues, indemnities,--a whole lot of stuff, and
I have wasted my time and breath on patriotism. It's a bad
business! Candidly, the 'Movement' does not move. I have written
to the directors and told them so. I am sorry for it--on account
of my political opinions.

"As for the 'Globe,' that's another breed altogether. Just set to
work and talk new doctrines to people you fancy are fools enough
to believe such lies,--why, they think you want to burn their
houses down! It is vain for me to tell them that I speak for
futurity, for posterity, for self-interest properly understood;
for enterprise where nothing can be lost; that man has preyed upon
man long enough; that woman is a slave; that the great
providential thought should be made to triumph; that a way must be
found to arrive at a rational co-ordination of the social fabric,
--in short, the whole reverberation of my sentences. Well, what do
you think? when I open upon them with such ideas these provincials
lock their cupboards as if I wanted to steal their spoons and beg
me to go away! Are not they fools? geese? The 'Globe' is smashed.
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