The passages here reprinted are from some odd leaves of a Cheap Red Bottom Shoes first draft. The play is, of course, not unlike Salome, though it was written in English. It expanded Wilde’s favourite theory that when you convert some one to an idea, you lose your faith in it; the same motive runs through Mr.
“You have three years in which to pay off the whole sum,” said Gigonnet. “But,” said des Lupeaulx, frightened at such kindness, and also by so apparently fantastic an arrangement. “What do you want of me?” “La Billardiere’s place for Baudoyer,” said Gigonnet, quickly.
An ambitious public man should produce some bold scheme,–he should make himself another Law, without Law’s fatal ill-luck; he ought to exhibit the power of credit, and show that we should reduce, not principal, but interest, as they do in England.” “Come, come, Celestine,” said Rabourdin; “mix up ideas as much as you please, and make fun of them,–I’m accustomed to that; but don’t criticise a work of which you know nothing as yet.” “Do I need,” she asked, “to know a scheme the essence of which is to govern France with a civil service of six thousand men instead of twenty thousand? My dear friend, even allowing it were the plan of a man of genius, a king of France who attempted to carry it out would get himself dethroned. You can keep down a feudal aristocracy by levelling a few heads, but you can’t subdue a hydra with thousands. And is it with the present ministers–between ourselves, a wretched crew–that you expect to carry out your reform? No, no; change the monetary system if you will, but do not meddle with men, with little men; they cry out too much, whereas gold is dumb.” “But, Celestine, if you will talk, and put wit before argument, we shall never understand each other.” “Understand! I understand what that paper, in which you have analyzed the capacities of the men in office, will lead to,” she replied, paying no attention to what her husband said.
A very slight observation of him sufficed to show that, like a Norman peasant, he invariably held the upper hand in business matters. He was an authority on wine-making, the leading science of Touraine. He had managed to extend the meadow lands of his domain by taking in a part of the alluvial soil of the Loire without getting into difficulties with the State.
“Do you remember, when we went down to Tredowen just before we left for America, a little, long-legged, black-frocked child, whom we met in the gardens–the organist’s daughter, you know?” “What of her?” Wingrave asked. “It was she who was with me,” Aynesworth remarked. “It was she who saw you in the box with the Marchioness of Westchester.” Aynesworth was puzzled by the Jeremy Scott Shoes intentness with which Wingrave was regarding him.