But somehow this vision made me angry,
too. The sight of that man, so calm, breaking bits of white bread,
exasperated me. And I had the audacity to ask him how it was that the
starving proletariat of Europe to whom he had been preaching revolt and
violence had not been made indignant by his openly luxurious life. "At
all this," I said, pointedly, with a glance round the room and at the
bottle of champagne we generally shared between us at dinner.
He remained unmoved.
"Do I feed on their toil and their heart's blood? Am I a speculator or a
capitalist? Did I steal my fortune from a starving people? No! They
know this very well. And they envy me nothing. The miserable mass of the
people is generous to its leaders. What I have acquired has come to
me through my writings; not from the millions of pamphlets distributed
gratis to the hungry and the oppressed, but from the hundreds of
thousands of copies sold to the well-fed bourgeoisie. You know that my
writings were at one time the rage, the fashion--the thing to read with
wonder and horror, to turn your eyes up at my pathos .
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