Chapter: Oh, if I had done nothing simply from laziness!  Heavens, how I should
have respected myself, then.  I should have respected myself because I
should at least have been capable of being lazy; there would at least
have been one quality, as it were, positive in me, in which I could
have believed myself.  Question:  What is he?  Answer:  A sluggard; how
very pleasant it would have been to hear that of oneself!  It would
mean that I was positively defined, it would mean that there was
something to say about me. "Sluggard"--why, it is a calling and
vocation, it is a career.  Do not jest, it is so.  I should then be a
member of the best club by right, and should find my occupation in
continually respecting myself.  I knew a gentleman who prided himself
all his life on being a connoisseur of Lafitte.  He considered this as
his positive virtue, and never doubted himself.  He died, not simply
with a tranquil, but with a triumphant conscience, and he was quite
right, too.  Then I should have chosen a career for myself, I should
have been a sluggard and a glutton, not a simple one, but, for
instance, one with sympathies for everything sublime and beautiful.
How do you like that?  I have long had visions of it.  That "sublime
and beautiful" weighs heavily on my mind at forty But that is at forty;
then--oh, then it would have been different!  I should have found for
myself a form of activity in keeping with it, to be precise, drinking
to the health of everything "sublime and beautiful."  I should have
snatched at every opportunity to drop a tear into my glass and then to
drain it to all that is "sublime and beautiful."  I should then have
turned everything into the sublime and the beautiful; in the nastiest,
unquestionable trash, I should have sought out the sublime and the
beautiful.  I should have exuded tears like a wet sponge.  An artist,
for instance, paints a picture worthy of Gay.  At once I drink to the
health of the artist who painted the picture worthy of Gay, because I
love all that is "sublime and beautiful."  An author has written AS YOU
WILL: at once I drink to the health of "anyone you will" because I love
all that is "sublime and beautiful."

I should claim respect for doing so.  I should persecute anyone who
would not show me respect.  I should live at ease, I should die with
dignity, why, it is charming, perfectly charming!  And what a good
round belly I should have grown, what a treble chin I should have
established, what a ruby nose I should have coloured for myself, so
that everyone would have said, looking at me: "Here is an asset!  Here
is something real and solid!"  And, say what you like, it is very
agreeable to hear such remarks about oneself in this negative age.

 The narrator explains how people find pleasure in the pain they are suffering. He uses a toothache as an example. A person moans when his tooth hurts, because there is a kind of pleasure in the moaning. When the moaning is heard by another person, it is even more pleasurable, for the moaner is inflicting his suffering upon someone else.

