Imbeciles say: "My doctor has extricated my aunt from a mortal malady;
he has made my aunt live ten years longer than she ought to have lived."
Others who affect knowledge, say: "The prudent man makes his own
destiny."

But often the prudent, far from making their destinies, succumb to them;
it is destiny which makes them prudent.

Profound students of politics affirm that, if Cromwell, Ludlow, Ireton
and a dozen other parliamentarians had been assassinated a week before
Charles I.'s head was cut off, this king might have lived longer and
died in his bed; they are right; they can add further that if the whole
of England had been swallowed up in the sea, this monarch would not
have perished on a scaffold near Whitehall; but things were arranged so
that Charles had to have his neck severed.

Cardinal d'Ossat was doubtless more prudent than a madman in Bedlam; but
is it not clear that the organs of d'Ossat the sage were made otherwise
than those of the scatter-brain? just as a fox's organs are different
from a stork's and a lark's.

Your doctor saved your aunt; but assuredly he did not in that contradict
nature's order; he followed it. It is clear that your aunt could not
stop herself being born in such and such town, that she could not stop
herself having a certain malady at a particular time, that the doctor
could not be elsewhere than in the town where he was, that your aunt had
to call him, that he had to prescribe for her the drugs which cured her,
or which one thinks cured her, when nature was the only doctor.

A peasant thinks that it has hailed on his field by chance; but the