I have
neither the strength nor the courage to be bad, angry, nor malicious, as
others are, that always passes over with me in words more or less farcical.
My cowardice and my weakness of body have prevented me from becoming worse
than I am. It needed the chance of this lonely hut, where there was neither
cat, nor, above all, a dog, to have urged me to steal. And then, again, it
chanced to be a fine moonlight night; for alone, and in the dark, I am as
cowardly as the devil!"
"That is what I have always said, my poor Fortune, that you are better than
you think. Thus I hope the judges will have pity on you."
"Pity on me? a returned criminal? reckon on it! After that, I don't wish
it; to be here, there, or elsewhere, all the same to me; and then, you are
right, I am not wicked; and those who are, I hate them, after my fashion,
by making fun of them; you must think that, from relating stories where, to
please my audience, I make it come out that those who torment others from
pure cruelty receive, in the end, their pay, I become accustomed to feel as
I relate."
"Do these people like stories, my brother? I should not have thought it."
"A moment! If I tell them a story where a fellow who robs, or who kills to
rob, is strung up at the end, they will not let me finish; but if it is
concerning a woman or child, or, for example, a poor devil like me, who
would be thrown to the ground if he was only blown upon, and let him be
ill-treated by a Bluebeard, who persecutes him solely for the pleasure of
persecuting him, for honor, as they say; oh! then they shout with joy when,
at the end, the Bluebeard receives his pay.
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