“But you know it is not for myself I make it,” said la Peyrade; “it is a necessity for the future of all of us. Come, come, there are tears in your eyes! I shall leave you; you are not reasonable. The devil! as that Prudhomme of a Phellion says, ‘Whoso wants the end wants the means.’” And he went toward the group composed of Celeste, Madame Thuillier, Madame de Godollo, Colleville, and Phellion. Madame Colleville followed him; and, under the influence of the feeling of jealousy she had just shown, she became a savage mother. “Celeste,” she said, “why don’t you sing? These gentlemen wish to hear you.” “Oh, mamma!” cried the girl, “how can I sing after Madame de Godollo, with my poor thread of a voice? Besides, you know I have a cold.” “That is to say that, as usual, you make yourself pretentious and disagreeable; people sing as they can sing; all voices have their own merits.” “My dear,” said Colleville, who, having just lost twenty francs at the card-tables, found courage in his ill-humor to oppose his wife, “that saying, ‘People sing as they can sing’ is a bourgeois maxim. People sing with a voice, if they have one; but they don’t sing after hearing such a magnificent opera voice as that of Madame la comtesse. For my part, I readily excuse Celeste for not warbling to us one of her sentimental little ditties.” “Then it is well worth while,” said Flavie, leaving the group, “to spend so much money on expensive masters who are good for nothing.” “So,” said Colleville, resuming the conversation which the invasion of Flavie had interrupted, “Felix no longer inhabits this earth; he lives among the stars?” “My dear and former colleague,” said Phellion, “I am, as you are, annoyed with my son for neglecting, as he does, the oldest friends of his family; and though the contemplation of those great luminous bodies suspended in space by the hand of the Creator presents, in my opinion, higher interest than it appears to have to your more eager brain, I think that Felix, by not coming here to-night, as he promised me he would, shows a want of propriety, about which, I can assure you I shall speak my mind.” “Science,” said la Peyrade, “is a fine thing, but it has, unfortunately, the attribute of making bears and monomaniacs.” “Not to mention,” said Celeste, “that it destroys all religious sentiments.” “You are mistaken there, my dear child,” said Madame de Godollo. “Pascal, who was himself a great example of the falseness of your point of view, says, if I am not mistaken, that a little science draws us from religion, but a great deal draws us back to it.” “And yet, madame,” said Celeste, “every one admits that Monsieur Felix is really very learned; when he helped my brother with his studies nothing could be, so Francois told me, clearer or more comprehensible than his explanations; and you see, yourself, he is not the more religious for that.”