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c h a p t e r o n e The Legislator Bissot Renounces Chicanery in Favor of Philosophy The sun was about to rise from Amphitrite’s bed, dawn was fleeting apace; prostitutes were just closing their eyes, and the bourgeois housewives of Reims squawking to rouse their servant-girls, since in Champagne nobody rings for them; ladies of quality or any claim to nobility had six hours’ sleep left to go; female devotees roused by mournful church bells hurried to early mass: when fear of the bailiffs and the first ray of the morning star startled awake the lawyer Bissot1 as he lay sleeping in a garret beside his brother Tifarès,2 faithful companion of his lot and emulator of his philosophical works. After various futile attempts to drag the fortunate Tifarès from the arms of Morpheus, the lawyer pulled off his covers, sat his brother upright on his pallet, and exposed the miserable creature’s emaciated body to the gaze of the sun. At this hideous sight, blond Apollo thought he must be off track, and that his horses, instead of following the summer tropic, had carried him off to one of those caves used by ancient Egyptians to store ancestors’ mummies. Himself annoyed at being awake so early in the morning, Apollo took a mischievous pleasure in sending rays to pierce the translucent fists that Tifarès, crouched on his backside as once in his mother’s belly, was now cramming into the vacant orbits around his little eyes. So pure and ardent was Tifarès’s love of sleep that it required this combination of divine and mortal efforts to awaken him; indeed only after one last embrace did Tifarès drag his black, withered leg from under a torn and dirty sheet; present that leg to the mouth 6 chapter one of an oversized stocking; lend an ear; and listen at last—perhaps with some measure of enjoyment—to his illustrious brother’s philosophical discourse, which you are about to read: “O how wise are the natives of the Ganges, whose children are forced to follow their fathers’ professions!” began Bissot.3 “Would to God the companions of Clovis had adopted similar institutions: we would not have so many useless parasitical classes among us today!4 We would not see the hardworking laborer tanning rough leather in the noonday heat to protect the sweet, fresh skin of some voluptuous do-nothing prelate; no sailor would roam the seas so that an idle lubricious courtesan could wear India muslins; no hollow-cheeked soldier dying of hunger, barely clothed, his comrade-in-arms his only company and bedmate, while in a damask-curtained bed, a bored and fraudulent financier dozes on the breast of some young girl he has no idea what to do with. As for myself, instead of spending one hundred écus—the best money I ever saw in my life—on a squealing lawyer’s silly hood,5 I’d have been buying red-leg partridges to lard, bard, and bake in pie-crust, while you stoked the oven and carried the flour for your next batch of pastry. Soon we’d have expanded our business around the city of Chartres ten leagues and more; we’d be considered wholesale merchants; we could have taken our place among the Third Estate’s most memorable aristocrats; and I wouldn’t be awakened at the crack of dawn by the unwelcome fear of creditors descending on our wasted cadavers, after grabbing whatever écus we have left. “O incompetent legislators—why don’t you study my colleague Lungiet’s Theory of Civil Law, or my own Theory of Criminal Law?6 You would not allow creditors such limitless power over debtors if you had read these books; you would make decisions according to the principles of natural law and lex talionis, and show much better judgment. But you are at once feather-brained and iron-hearted. “All the same, Tifarès, if we do not make an instant retreat to safeguard the life of the mind and philosophy, the only retreat we’ll be making is to a dark and dismal prison. O Apollo, will that be the museum office you once promised me? . . . Instead, Tifarès, let us escape to the heart of the forest, where we can survive by eating acorns, roots, and wild fruits. May we forget societies established by the rich to injure the poor—may we spend our remaining...

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