Chapter 3 - Page 2

"fine
apartments" or "handsome rooms" were to be let; announcements without an
adjective he turned from with scorn. Then he inspected them with a
lofty air, measuring the height of the rooms, sketching the plan in his
note-book, with the passages, the arrangement of the exits, explaining
that he was a medical man and had many visitors. He must have a broad
and well-kept stair-case; nor could he be any higher up than the first
floor.

After having written down seven or eight addresses and scribbled two
hundred notes, he got home to breakfast a quarter of an hour too late.

In the hall he heard the clatter of plates. Then they had begun without
him! Why? They were never wont to be so punctual. He was nettled and put
out, for he was somewhat thin-skinned. As he went in Roland said to him:

"Come, Pierre, make haste, devil take you! You know we have to be at the
lawyer's at two o'clock. This is not the day to be dawdling."

Pierre sat down without replying, after kissing his mother and shaking
hands with his father and brother; and he helped himself from the deep
dish in the middle of the table to the cutlet which had been kept for
him. It was cold and dry, probably the least tempting of them all. He
thought that they might have left it on the hot plate till he came in,
and not lose their heads so completely as to have forgotten their other
son, their eldest.

The conversation, which his entrance had interrupted, was taken up again
at the point where it had ceased.

"In your place," Mme. Roland was saying to Jean, "I will tell you what
I should do at once. I should settle in handsome rooms so as to attract
attention; I should ride on horseback and select one or two interesting
cases to defend and make a mark in court. I would be a sort of amateur
lawyer, and very select. Thank God you are out of all danger of want,
and if you pursue a profession, it is, after all, only that you may not
lose the benefit of your studies, and because a man ought never to sit
idle."

Old Roland, who was peeling a pear, exclaimed:

"Christi! In your place I should buy a nice yacht, a cutter on the build
of our pilot-boats. I would sail as far as Senegal in such a boat as
that."

Pierre, in his turn, spoke his views. After all, said he, it was not his
wealth which made the moral worth, the intellectual worth of a man. To
a man of inferior mind it was only a means of degradation, while in the
hands of a strong man it was a powerful lever. They, to be sure, were
rare. If Jean were a really superior man, now that he could never want
he might prove it. But then he must work a hundred times harder than he
would have done in other