Haw, haw,
haw!"
"Is it possible? reduced to this?" said Edouard gravely.
"Don't you be so weak as to pity them," cried the remorseless plebeian.
"Why don't they melt their silver into soup, and cut down their plate
into rashers of bacon? why not sell the superfluous, and buy the
needful, which it is grub? And, above all, why don't they let their old
tumble-down palace to some rich grocer, and that accursed garden along
with it, where I sweat gratis, and live small and comfortable, and pay
honest men for their little odd jobs, and"--
Here Riviere interrupted him, and asked if it was really true about the
beans.
"True?" said Dard, "why, I have seen Rose doing it for the old woman's
breakfast: it was Rose invented the move. A girl of nineteen beginning
already to deceive the world! But they are all tarred with the same
stick. Down with the aristocrats!"
"Dard," said Riviere, "you are a brute."
"Me, citizen?" inquired Dard with every appearance of genuine surprise.
Edouard Riviere rose from his seat in great excitement. Dard's abuse of
the family he was lately so bitter against had turned him right round.
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