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She sprang to the attack. "Diable! am I linked to a skinflint?" "A skinflint, forsooth, at a thousand livres!" "Yes," she cried in a fresh flood of tears. "A wretch, a miser. You are unworthy, sir, to be linked to a family from whom Germain takes his gentlemanly qualities. Had he nothing but you in him, he would be a grovelling clod-hopper to-day instead of a favourite of kings."

"My son," replied the hermit, "this mighty lord, who only welcomes travellers through vanity, and to display his riches, will henceforth grow wiser, while the miser will be taught to practise hospitality. Be amazed at nothing, and follow me." Zadig knew not whether he was dealing with the most foolish or the wisest of all men.

The movement of material progress is in some sense a downhill movement. No doubt it evokes much seeming virtue, such as is necessary to secure the end; but the motive force is one with regard to which man is passive rather than active, a slave rather than a master, as a miser is in respect to that passion which stimulates him to struggle for gain.

The exclamation was always followed by an undefinable look cast upon him in return by the old servant. The words, uttered from time to time, formed a chain of friendship that nothing ever parted, and to which each exclamation added a link. Such compassion arising in the heart of the miser, and accepted gratefully by the old spinster, had something inconceivably horrible about it.

With a dark frown he said to himself: "It is unjust and mean to require of me to buy provender for my horse, and to have my carriage repaired; if the king furnishes me with an equipage, he should not allow it to be any expense to me. The major-domo is an old miser, who cheats me every month out of some pounds of sugar and coffee, and the wax-lights are becoming thinner and poorer.

I was in the position of a greedy, passionate miser who should suddenly discover that all his gold coins were false. The pure, gracious images which my imagination, warmed by love, had cherished for so long, my plans, my hopes, my memories, my ideas of love and of woman all now were jeering and putting out their tongues at me.

Another miser has got his chest, And his painfully hoarded store; Like ferrets his hands go in and out, Burrowing, tossing the gold about; And his heart too is out of his breast, Hid in the yellow ore. Which is the better the ghost that sits Counting shadowy coin all day, Or the man that puts his hope and trust In a thing whose value is only his lust?

By thus trying to get a direct and immediate result out of what has no really direct or immediate existence, they fall into the kind of folly which is called vanity the appropriate term for that which has no solid or instrinsic value. Like a miser, such people forget the end in their eagerness to obtain the means.

The total wreck of his fortune, which seemed now to be rendered unavoidable by the loss of the royal warrant, that had afforded him the means of redeeming his paternal estate, was an unexpected and additional blow. When he had seen the warrant he could not precisely remember; but was inclined to think, it was in the casket when he took out money to pay the miser for his lodgings at Whitefriars.

Love brings suffering, yes; but that was no reason for shrinking from Love. The greater the value of anything, the greater the price which must be paid. This was not cynicism, but common sense; and it was only a coward who did not welcome the suffering as an intrinsic part of the wonderful whole, only a miser who would not pay the price.