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insurance! If I were from Dreyfus's rock-pile,° I'd be respected . . . but Gaston's rock-pile,° they'd only laugh! . . . I've only got one privilege . . . because I crusaded for the Vrench, I'm entitled to posters all over the walls, calling me the king of traitors, accusing me of cutting Jews in little pieces, of selling the Maginot Line, Indochina, and Sicily . . . Oh, I have no illusions . . . they don't believe a word of their horror stories, but one thing is sure . . . they'll hound me to my dying day . . . I'll always be the whipping-boy of the left-wing racists! the raw material of propaganda . . .
    But let's get back to serious things . . . I was talking about the winter in Bellevue . . . the cold . . . . don't make me laugh . . . I hear people griping . . . I'd like to see them for two minutes under Scandinavian conditions . . . in the Baltic winds, with holes in the roof and the thatch blowing away . . . and twenty below . . . not for a weekend, for five years, Madame! partly in a cell . . . I'd like to see Loukoum cracking the Baltic pack ice . . . Or Achille, for instance, and his gang . . . oh, oh! . . . But first of all, give those birds two years of stir at the Venstre, and Article 75 on their ass . . . I can see the look on their faces . . . it would do them a world of good . . . you could stand to look at them and shake their hands . . . they'd finally get to know something else beside words . . .
    I was talking about the island down below . . . there are certain things that need saying . . . things that interest old men . . . they haven't very many seventy-five percent disability cases down there, or men who enlisted in 1912 . . . I'm not finding fault, only saying what's what . . . If I'd been a bit of a drunk from the start, beginning in public school for instance, I'd never have had any trouble, I'd be a sweeper at Dreyfus's now . . . with fringe benefits, security, status . . .
    Let's talk about medicine . . . a few patients still come around . . . I won't deny it . . . I can never boast of having no patients at all . . . no! they come around from time to time . . . fine . . . I examine them . . . no worse than other doctors . . . no better . . . I'm friendly, oh, very friendly! and extremely conscientious! . . . never a phony diagnosis . . . never a capricious treatment, in thirty-five years never a risky prescription . . . thirty-five years is a long time when you come to think of it . . . it's not that I don't keep abreast of developments . . . I do, I do . . . I read all the prospectuses from start to finish . . . five, six pounds a week . . . I throw them all in the fire . . . Nobody's going to accuse me of "irre sponsible medication" . . . once you stray from the old Pharmacopia . . . suffering catfish! . . . where do you think you'll end up? . . . In the criminal courts . . . the Tenth Chamber? . . . Buchenwald? Siberia? . . . No, thank you . . . nobody's going to put me on trial as a cabalist, as a dangerous alchemist. I've got nothing on my conscience. Except one little thing . . . that I never ask for money! I simply can't hold out my hand . . . not even for the Social Security . . . not even for my war pension . . . and I'll never change . . . idiotic pride! And what about the grocer? . . . for noodles? for a package of zwieback? . . . and the coal? . . . or even tap water? . . . I've hurt my reputation more by never taking a cent from my patients than Pétiot° did by cooking them in the oven! . . . I'm an aristocrat, that's all . . . an aristocrat from la Rampe du Pont . . . Mr. Schweitzer, Abbé Pierre, ° Juanovici,° Latzareff° can afford grand gestures . . . mine just look batty and shady . . . especially in a character that's just out of stir, nobody knows exactly how.
    These patients I've been telling you about, the ones that still come around, they tell me all about the state of their health, the ailments that beset them . . . I listen . . . it never stops!
    . . . the details, the