"Now, did you murder them?" Emile asked him.
"Capital punishment is going to be abolished, they say, in favor of
the Revolution of July," answered Taillefer, raising his eyebrows with
drunken sagacity.
"Don't they rise up before you in dreams at times?" Raphael persisted.
"There's a statute of limitations," said the murderer-Croesus.
"And on his tombstone," Emile began, with a sardonic laugh, "the
stonemason will carve 'Passer-by, accord a tear, in memory of one
that's here!' Oh," he continued, "I would cheerfully pay a hundred
sous to any mathematician who would prove the existence of hell to me
by an algebraical equation."
He flung up a coin and cried:
"Heads for the existence of God!"
"Don't look!" Raphael cried, pouncing upon it. "Who knows? Suspense is
so pleasant."
"Unluckily," Emile said, with burlesque melancholy, "I can see no
halting-place between the unbeliever's arithmetic and the papal _Pater
noster_. Pshaw! let us drink. _Trinq_ was, I believe, the oracular answer
of the _dive bouteille_ and the final conclusion of Pantagruel."
"We owe our arts and monuments to the _Pater noster_, and our knowledge,
too, perhaps; and a still greater benefit--modern government--whereby
a vast and teeming society is wondrously represented by some five
hundred intellects.
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