B: You think then that by outraging and robbing the good man who has
surrounded his garden and chicken-run with a live hedge, he has been
wanting in respect towards the duties of natural law?
A: Yes, yes, once again, there is a natural law, and it does not consist
either in doing harm to others, or in rejoicing thereat.
B: I imagine that man likes and does harm only for his own advantage.
But so many people are led to look for their own interest in the
misfortune of others, vengeance is so violent a passion, there are such
disastrous examples of it; ambition, still more fatal, has inundated the
world with so much blood, that when I retrace for myself the horrible
picture, I am tempted to avow that man is a very devil. In vain have I
in my heart the notion of justice and injustice; an Attila courted by
St. Leo, a Phocas flattered by St. Gregory with the most cowardly
baseness, an Alexander VI. sullied with so many incests, so many
murders, so many poisonings, with whom the weak Louis XII., who is
called "the good," makes the most infamous and intimate alliance; a
Cromwell whose protection Cardinal Mazarin seeks, and for whom he drives
out of France the heirs of Charles I., Louis XIV.'s first cousins, etc.,
etc.; a hundred like examples set my ideas in disorder, and I know no
longer where I am.
A: Well, do storms stop our enjoyment of to-day's beautiful sun? Did the
earthquake which destroyed half the city of Lisbon stop your making the
voyage to Madrid very comfortably? If Attila was a brigand and Cardinal
Mazarin a rogue, are there not princes and ministers who are honest
people? Has it not been remarked that in the war of 1701, Louis XIV.
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