Mauprat
thought of the morrow; they will agree to as high a rate of interest as may be asked, and with your money they will buy a hemp-field or a set of furniture so as to astonish their neighbours and make them jealous. Meanwhile their debts go on increasing year by year, and in the end they have to sell their hemp-field and their furniture, because the creditor, who is always one of themselves, calls for repayment or for more interest than they can furnish. Everything goes; the principal takes all their capital, just as the interest had taken all their income. Then you grow old and can work no longer; your children abandon you, because you have brought them up badly, and because they have the same passions and the same vanities as yourself. All you can do is to take a wallet and go from door to door to beg your bread, because you are used to bread and would die if you had to live on roots like the sorcerer Patience, that outcast of Nature, whom everybody hates and despises because he has not become a beggar.
"The beggar, moreover, is hardly worse off than the day-labourer; probably he is better off. He is no longer troubled with pride, whether estimable or foolish; he has no longer to suffer. The folks in his part of the country are good to him; there is not a beggar that wants for a bed or supper as he goes his round. The peasants load him with bits of bread, to such an extent that he has enough to feed both poultry and pigs in the little hovel where he has left a child and an old mother to look after his animals. Every week he returns there and spends two or three days, doing nothing except counting the pennies that have been given him. These poor coins often serve to satisfy the superfluous wants which idleness breeds. A peasant rarely takes snuff; many beggars cannot do
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