Don't you see (but you never did understand anything of politics!) that government puts such heavy taxes on wine only to hinder our profits and keep us poor?
The middle classes and the government, they are all one.

What would become of them if everybody was rich?
Could they till their fields?
Would they gather the harvest?
No, they _want_ the poor! I was rich for ten years and I know what I thought of paupers." "Must hunt with them, though," replied Tonsard, "because they mean to cut up the great estates; after that's done, we can turn against them.
If I'd been Courtecuisse, whom that scoundrel Rigou is ruining, I'd have long ago paid his bill with other balls than the poor fellow gives him." "Right enough, too," replied Fourchon.

"As Pere Niseron says (and he stayed republican long after everybody else), 'The people are tough; they don't die; they have time before them.'" Fourchon fell into a sort of reverie; Tonsard profited by his inattention to take back the trap, and as he took it up he cut a slip below the coin in his father-in-law's pocket at the moment when the old man raised his glass to his lips; then he set his foot on the five-franc piece as it dropped on the earthen floor just where it was always kept damp by the heel-taps which the customers flung from their glasses.
Though quickly and lightly done, the old man might, perhaps, have felt the theft, if Vermichel had not happened to appear at that moment.
"Tonsard, do you know where you father is ?" called that functionary from the foot of the steps.
Vermichel's shout, the theft of the money, and the emptying of old Fourchon's glass, were simultaneous.
"Present, captain!" cried Fourchon, holding out a hand to Vermichel to help him up the steps.
Of all Burgundian figures, Vermichel would have seemed to you the most Burgundian.

The practitioner was not red, he was scarlet.

His face, like certain tropical portions of the globe, was fissured, here and there, with small extinct volcanoes, defined by flat and greenish patches which Fourchon called, not unpoetically, the "flowers of wine." This fiery face, the features of which were swelled out of shape by continual drunkenness, looked cyclopic; for it was lighted on the right side by a gleaming eye, and darkened on the other by a yellow patch over the left orb.