him a sign to sit down, and said, "Let us converse, Monsieur."

The two women went into Madame Margaritis' bedroom, leaving the door
open so as to hear the conversation, and interpose if it became

necessary. They were hardly installed before Monsieur Vernier crept
softly up through the field and, opening a window, got into the

bedroom without noise.
"Monsieur has doubtless been in business--?" began Gaudissart.

"Public business," answered Margaritis, interrupting him. "I
pacificated Calabria under the reign of King Murat."

"Bless me! if he hasn't gone to Calabria!" whispered Monsieur Vernier.
"In that case," said Gaudissart, "we shall quickly understand each

other."
"I am listening," said Margaritis, striking the attitude taken by a

man when he poses to a portrait-painter.
"Monsieur," said Gaudissart, who chanced to be turning his watch-key

with a rotatory and periodical click which caught the attention of the
lunatic and contributed no doubt to keep him quiet. "Monsieur, if you

were not a man of superior intelligence" (the fool bowed), "I should
content myself with merely laying before you the material advantages

of this enterprise, whose psychological aspects it would be a waste of
time to explain to you. Listen! Of all kinds of social wealth, is not

time the most precious? To economize time is, consequently, to become
wealthy. Now, is there anything that consumes so much time as those

anxieties which I call 'pot-boiling'?--a vulgar expression, but it
puts the whole question in a nutshell. For instance, what can eat up

more time than the ability" target="_blank" title="n.无能，无力">inability to give proper security to persons from
whom you seek to borrow money when, poor at the moment, you are

nevertheless rich in hope?"
"Money,--yes, that's right," said Margaritis.

"Well, Monsieur, I am sent into the departments by a company of
bankers and capitalists, who have apprehended the enormous waste which

rising men of talent are thus making of time, and, consequently, of
intelligence and productiveability. We have seized the idea of

capitalizing for such men their future prospects, and cashing their
talents by discounting--what? TIME; securing the value of it to their

survivors. I may say that it is no longer a question of economizing
time, but of giving it a price, a quotation; of representing in a

pecuniary sense those products developed by time which presumably you
possess in the region of your intellect; of representing also the

moral qualities with which you are endowed, and which are, Monsieur,
living forces,--as living as a cataract, as a steam-engine of three,

ten, twenty, fifty horse-power. Ha! this is progress! the movement
onward to a better state of things; a movement born of the spirit of

our epoch; a movementessentiallyprogressive, as I shall prove to you
when we come to consider the principles involved in the logical

co-ordination of the social fabric. I will now explain my meaning by
literal examples, leaving aside all purelyabstractreasoning, which I

call the mathematics of thought. Instead of being, as you are, a
proprietor living upon your income, let us suppose that you are

painter, a musician, an artist, or a poet--"
"I am a painter," said the lunatic.

"Well, so be it. I see you take my metaphor. You are a painter; you
have a glorious future, a rich future before you. But I go still

farther--"
At these words the madman looked anxiously at Gaudissart, thinking he

meant to go away; but was reassured when he saw that he kept his seat.
"You may even be nothing at all," said Gaudissart, going on with his

phrases, "but you are conscious of yourself; you feel yourself--"
"I feel myself," said the lunatic.

"--you feel yourself a great man; you say to yourself, 'I will be a
minister of state.' Well, then, you--painter, artist, man of letters,

statesman of the future--you reckon upon your talents, you estimate
their value, you rate them, let us say, at a hundred thousand

crowns--"
"Do you give me a hundred thousand crowns?"

"Yes, Monsieur, as you will see. Either your heirs and assigns will
receive them if you die, for the company contemplates that event, or

you will receive them in the long run through your works of art, your
writings, or your fortunate speculations during your lifetime. But, as

I have already had the honor to tell you, when you have once fixed
upon the value of your intellectual capital,--for it is intellectual

capital,--seize that idea firmly,--intellectual--"
"I understand," said the fool.

"You sign a policy of insurance with a company which recognizes in you
a value of a hundred thousand crowns; in you, poet--"

"I am a painter," said the lunatic.
"Yes," resumed Gaudissart,--"painter, poet, musician, statesman--and

binds itself to pay them over to your family, your heirs, if, by
reason of your death, the hopes foundered on your intellectual capital

should be overthrown for you personally. The payment of the premium is
all that is required to protect--"

"The money-box," said the lunatic, sharply interrupting him.
"Ah! naturally; yes. I see that Monsieur understands business."

"Yes," said the madman. "I established the Territorial Bank in the Rue
des Fosses-Montmartre at Paris in 1798."

"For," resumed Gaudissart, going back to his premium, "in order to
meet the payments on the intellectual capital which each man

recognizes and esteems in himself, it is of course necessary that each
should pay a certain premium, three per cent; an annual due of three

per cent. Thus, by the payment of this trifling sum, a mere nothing,
you protect your family from disastrous results at your death--"

"But I live," said the fool.
"Ah! yes; you mean if you should live long? That is the usual

objection,--a vulgarprejudice. I fully agree that if we had not
foreseen and demolished it we might feel we were unworthy of being--

what? What are we, after all? Book-keepers in the great Bureau of
Intellect. Monsieur, I don't apply these remarks to you, but I meet on

all sides men who make it a business to teach new ideas and disclose
chains of reasoning to people who turn pale at the first word. On my

word of honor, it is pitiable! But that's the way of the world, and I
don't pretend to reform it. Your objection, Monsieur, is really sheer

nonsense."
"Why?" asked the lunatic.

"Why?--this is why: because, if you live and possess the qualities
which are estimated in your policy against the chances of death,--now,

attend to this--"
"I am attending."

"Well, then, you have succeeded in life; and you have succeeded
because of the said insurance. You doubled your chances of success by

getting rid of the anxieties you were dragging about with you in the
shape of wife and children who might otherwise be left destitute at

your death. If you attain this certainty, you have touched the value
of your intellectual capital, on which the cost of insurance is but a

trifle,--a mere trifle, a bagatelle."
"That's a fine idea!"

"Ah! is it not, Monsieur?" cried Gaudissart. "I call this enterprise
the exchequer of beneficence; a mutual insurance against poverty; or,

if you like it better, the discounting, the cashing, of talent. For
talent, Monsieur, is a bill of exchange which Nature gives to the man

of genius, and which often has a long time to run before it falls
due."

"That is usury!" cried Margaritis.
"The devil! he's keen, the old fellow! I've made a mistake," thought

Gaudissart, "I must catch him with other chaff. I'll try humbug No. 1.
Not at all," he said aloud, "for you who--"

"Will you take a glass of wine?" asked Margaritis.
"With pleasure," replied Gaudissart.

"Wife, give us a bottle of the wine that is in the puncheons. You are
here at the very head of Vouvray," he continued, with a gesture of the

hand, "the vineyard of Margaritis."
The maid-servant brought glasses and a bottle of wine of the vintage

of 1819. The good-man filled a glass with circumspection and offered
it to Gaudissart, who drank it up.