VII

Summary

“I am suffering extremely, but we must all suffer, so long as the social question is so abominably, so iniquitously neglected,” Poupin remarked, speaking French and rolling toward Hyacinth his salient, excited-looking eyes, which always had the same proclaiming, challenging expression, whatever his occupation or his topic. Hyacinth had seated himself near his friend's pillow, opposite the strange young man, who had been accommodated with a chair at the foot of the bed.

“Ah, yes; with their filthy politics the situation of the pauvre monde is the last thing they ever think of!” his wife exclaimed, from the fire. “There are times when I ask myself how long it will go on.”

“It will go on till the measure of their imbecility, their infamy, is full. It will go on till the day of justice, till the reintegration of the despoiled and disinherited, is ushered in with an irresistible force.”

“Oh, we always see things go on; we never see them change,” said Madame Poupin, making a very cheerful clatter with a big spoon in a saucepan.

“We may not see it, but they’ll see it,” her husband rejoined. “But what do I say, my children? I do see it,” he pursued. “It's before my eyes, in its luminous reality, especially as I lie here — the revendication, the rehabilitation, the rectification.”

Hyacinth ceased to pay attention, not because he had a differing opinion about what M. Poupin called the avènement of the disinherited, but, on the contrary, precisely on account of his familiarity with that prospect. It was the constant theme of his French friends, whom he had long since perceived to be in a state of chronic spiritual inflammation. For them the social question was always in order, the political question always abhorrent, the disinherited always present. He wondered at their zeal, their continuity, their vivacity, their incorruptibility; at the abundant supply of conviction and prophecy which they always had on hand. He believed that at bottom he was sorer than they, yet he had deviations and lapses, moments when the social question bored him and he forgot not only his own wrongs, which would have been pardonable, but those of the people at large, of his brothers and sisters in misery.