“My child, the harshness of the rich justifies the knavery of the poor. Let their purse come open to our needs, let humanity reign in their hearts, and then perhaps virtue will reside in ours. But so long as our misfortune, our patience under it, our trust and our bondage serve merely to augment our irons, then our crimes become their doing, and we should be foolish indeed to spurn such crimes in order to lessen a little the yoke they place on us. Nature, Sophie, made us all equal at birth; if Fate is pleased to upset the first project of the general laws of Nature, it is up to us to correct her caprices, and to use our cunning to set right the encroachment of the strongest. How I love to hear them, these rich people, these judges, these magistrates—how I love to hear them preaching virtue at us; indeed, it is very difficult to keep from stealing when one has three times more than enough to live by, very difficult not to conceive murder when surrounded only by sycophants or obedient slaves. Enormously difficult, in truth, to be temperate and sober when pleasure intoxicates and the most succulent dishes are all around. How hard for them to be frank, when no occasion ever arises in which it is to their interest to lie! But we, Sophie, we whom this barbarous providence you have been so foolish as to make your idol has condemned to crawl upon the earth like the serpent in the grass, we who are eyed only with disdain, because we are poor, we, in short, who find only gall and thorns on the whole surface of the world, you would have us deny ourselves crime, when crime alone can open the door of life to us, maintain us, keep us alive, or prevent us from losing our lives; you, while the class that is our master keeps all fortune's favors to itself, you would have us, perpetually submissive and humble as we are, own nothing but suffering, dejection, and pain, nothing but want and tears, mutilation and the scaffold. No, no, Sophie, no, either the providence you worship is made only for us to scorn, or those are not its intentions.... Know it better, Sophie, know it better, and realize that the moment it [Nature] places us in a situation where evil is our necessity, and at the same time allows us the opportunity of doing evil, it is because this evil obeys her laws even as good does, and because one is as rewarding to her as the other. The state in which we are created is one of equality, and whoever upsets it is no more to blame than he who tries to re-establish it, for both act according to the impulses they receive, both follow them, averting their eyes and enjoying their acts.”