Let us leave this petty man to his petty fears. Why did he take a man of heart into his house, when what he wanted was the soul of a lackey? Why didn't he know how to pick his servants? The ordinary course of events in the nineteenth century is that when a powerful aristocrat finds a man of heart in his way, he kills him, exiles him, imprisons him, or so humiliates him that the latter is stupid enough to die of grief. By chance, it is not yet the man of heart who is suffering in this instance. The great misfortune of small towns in France, and of governments by election, like that of New York, is that you are never allowed to forget that fellows like M. de Renal exist in the world. In the midst of a city of twenty thousand inhabitants such individuals mold public opinion, and public opinion is a terrible thing in a country that has a constitution. A man endowed with a noble and generous mind, and who might have been your friend but lives a hundred leagues away, judges you according to public opinion in your town, which is shaped by the fools whom chance has caused to be born noble, rich, and conservative. Woe to anyone who stands out from the crowd!