‘I’m sorry. But I think, since you bring it up, that a lot of your life is despicable’.

‘I could say the same about yours’, said Jacques. ‘There are so many ways of being despicable it quite makes one’s head spin. But the way to be really despicable it to be contemptuous of other people’s pain. You ought to have some apprehension that the man you see before you was once even younger than you are now and arrived at this present wretchedness by imperceptible degrees.’