The Girl with the Golden Eyes

8Here we are, then, brought to the third circle of this hell, which perhaps one day will have its Dante. In this third social circle, a kind of Parisian belly where the interests of the city are digested and where they condense beneath the form called business, the crowd of attorneys, doctors, notaries, advocates, business people, bankers, large merchants, speculators, magistrates moves and agitates itself with an acrid and bilious intestinal movement. There are encountered still more causes for physical and moral destruction than anywhere else. These people live, almost all, in infected Offices, in pestilential courtrooms, in small barred offices, pass the day bent beneath the weight of business, rise at dawn to be in a position to act, not to let themselves be plundered, to gain everything or to lose nothing, to seize a man or his money, to put a handle on or take a handle off an affair, to profit from a fleeting circumstance, to have a man hanged or acquitted. They react upon their horses, they founder them, overdrive them, age their legs too, before their time. Time is their tyrant, they lack it, it escapes them; they can neither extend nor contract it. What soul can remain great, pure, moral, generous, and consequently what face remains beautiful in the depraving exercise of a profession that forces one to bear the weight of public miseries, to analyze them, weigh them, value them, subject them to regulated exploitation? These people deposit their heart, where?... I do not know; but they leave it somewhere, when they have one, before descending every morning to the bottom of the sorrows that pierce families. For them, no mysteries, they see the reverse of the society whose confessors they are, and despise it. Now, whatever they do, by dint of measuring themselves against corruption, they hold it in horror and grow sad; or through weariness, through secret compromise, they marry it; finally, necessarily, they become jaded toward all feelings, they whom the laws, men, institutions make fly like jackdaws over still-warm corpses. At every hour, the man of money weighs the living, the man of contracts weighs the dead, the man of law weighs conscience. Obliged to speak incessantly, all replace the idea with speech, feeling with the phrase, and their soul becomes a larynx. They wear themselves out and demoralize themselves. Neither the great merchant, nor the judge, nor the advocate preserves his right sense: they no longer feel, they apply the rules that cases falsify. Carried away by their torrential existence, they are neither husbands, nor fathers, nor lovers; they slide on a sled over the things of life, and live at every hour, driven by the business of the great city. When they return home, they are required to go to the ball, to the Opera, to the festivities where they go to make clients, acquaintances, protectors for themselves.