There was, moreover, more sorrow than anger in Poupin’s face when he learned that his young friend and pupil had failed to cultivate in Paris the rich opportunities he had offered him. “You’re cooling off, my child; there’s something about you! Have you the weakness to flatter yourself that anything has been done or that humanity suffers a particle less? _Enfin_ it’s between you and your conscience.” “Do you think I want to get out of it?” Hyacinth grimaced; this expositor’s phrases about humanity, which used to thrill him so, having grown of late strangely hollow and rococo. “You owe me no explanations; the conscience of the individual is absolute, except of course in those classes in which, from the very nature of the infamies on which they’re founded, no conscience can exist. Speak to me, however, of my City; _she_ is always divine,” Poupin went on, though showing signs of irritation when Hyacinth began to praise to him the magnificent creations of the arch-fiend of December. In the presence of this picture he was in a terrible dilemma—gratified as a Parisian and a patriot but all disconcerted as a lover of liberty: it cost him a pang to admit that anything amid the _seuils sacrés_ was defective, yet he saw still less his way to concede that it could owe any charm to the perjured monster of the Second Empire or even to the hypocritical, mendacious republicanism of the régime before which the inspired Commune had gone down in blood and fire. “Ah yes, it’s very fine, no doubt,” he remarked at last, “but it will be finer still when it’s ours!”—a speech which caused Hyacinth to turn back to his work with a feeling of sickness. Everywhere, everywhere he saw the ulcer of envy—the greed of a party hanging together only that it might despoil another to its advantage. In old Eustache, one of the “pure,” this was especially disenchanting. XXXII