Then it was that old Judge Carcasson laid a hand on his knee.
"Come, come," he said to the dejected and broken little man, "where is your philosophy ?" Jean Jacques looked at the Judge, as though with a new-born suspicion that henceforth the world would laugh at him, and that Judge Carcasson was setting the fashion; but seeing a pitying moisture in the other's eyes, he drew himself up, set his jaw, and calling on all the forces at his command, he said: "Moi je suis philosophe!" His voice frayed a little on the last word, but his head was up now.
The Clerk of the Court would have asked to accompany him to the Manor Cartier, but he was not sure that Jean Jacques would like it.

He had a feeling that Jean Jacques would wish to have his dark hour alone.

So he remained silent, and Jean Jacques touched his horses with the whip.
After starting, however, and having been followed for a hundred yards or so by the pitying murmurs and a few I-told-you-so's and revilings for having married as he did, Jean Jacques stopped the ponies.

Standing up in the red wagon he looked round for someone whom, for a moment, he did not see in the slowly shifting crowd.
Philosophy was all very well, and he had courageously given his allegiance to it, or a formula of it, a moment before; but there was something deeper and rarer still in the little man's soul.

His heart hungered for the two women who had been the joy and pride of his life, even when he had been lost in the business of the material world.