"
I could write at length upon this man. He was not a Sceptic as you may
imagine, nor had he adopted the Lucretian form of Epicureanism. Not a
bit of it. He was a hearty Atheist, with Positivist leanings. I further
found that he had married a woman older, wealthier, and if possible
uglier than himself. She kept the inn, and was very kind to him. His
life would have been quite happy had he not been tortured by the
monstrous superstitions of others.
Then, again, in the town of Marseilles, only two years ago, I met a man
who looked well fed, and had a stalwart, square French face, and whose
politico-economic ideal, though it was not mine, greatly moved me. It
was just past midnight, and I was throwing little stones into the old
Greek harbour, the stench and the glory of which are nearly three
thousand years old; I was to be off at dawn upon a tramp steamer, and I
had so determined to pass the few hours of darkness.
I was throwing pebbles into the water, I say, and thinking about
Ulysses, when this man came slouching up, with his hands in the pockets
of his enormous corduroy trousers, and, looking at me with some contempt
from above (for he was standing, I was sitting), he began to converse
with me. We talked first of ships, then of heat and cold, and so on to
wealth and poverty; and thus it was I came upon his views, which were
that there should be a sort of break up, and houses ought to be burned,
and things smashed, and people killed; and over and above this, it
should be made plain that no one had a right to govern: not the people,
because they were always being bamboozled; obviously not the rich; least
of all, the politicians, to whom he justly applied the most derogatory
epithets.
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