As free from prejudices as one may be, one always retains a few
     As ignorant as a schoolmaster
     Confidence in one’s self is strength, but it is also weakness
     Conscience is a bad weighing-machine
     Conscience is only an affair of environment and of education
     Find it more easy to make myself feared than loved
     Force, which is the last word of the philosophy of life
     I believed in the virtue of work, and look at me! 
     Intelligent persons have no remorse
     It is only those who own something who worry about the price
     Leant—­and when I did not lose my friends I lost my money
     Leisure must be had for light reading, and even more for love
     People whose principle was never to pay a doctor
     Power to work, that was never disturbed or weakened by anything
     Reason before the deed, and not after
     Will not admit that conscience is the proper guide of our action

CONSCIENCE

By Hector Malot

BOOK 2.

CHAPTER XI

THE INSTRUMENT OF DEATH

When, after two hours’ sleep, Saniel woke, he did not at first think of this knife; he was tired and dull.  Mechanically he walked about his room without paying attention to what he was doing, as if he were in a state of somnambulism, and it astonished him, because he never felt weariness of mind any more than of body, no matter how little he had slept, nor how hard he had worked.

But suddenly, catching a glimpse of the knife that he had placed on the mantel, he received a shock that annihilated his torpor and his fatigue.  It dazzled him like a flash of lightning.

He took it, and, going to the window, he examined it by the pale light of early morning.  It was a strong instrument that, in a firm hand, would be a terrible arm; newly sharpened, it had the edge of a razor.

Then the idea, the vision that had come to him two hours before, came back to him, clear and complete at nightfall, that is, at the moment when the concierge was in the second wing of the building, he mounted to Caffie’s apartment without being seen, and with this knife he cut his throat.  It was as simple as it was easy, and this knife left beside the corpse, and the nature of the wound, would lead the police to look for a butcher, or at least a man who was in thehabit of using a knife of this kind.

The evening before, when he had discussed Caffie’s death, the how and the when still remained vague and uncertain.  But now the day and the means were definitely settled:  it should be with this knife, and this evening.

This shook him out of his torpor and made him shudder.

He was angry with himself for this weakness.  Did he know or did he not know what he wished?  Was he irresolute or cowardly?