From Gilles & Jeanne - Michel Tournier (Methuen: London, 1987, p. 56)

... 'Have gold, more gold and yet more gold and the rest will be given unto you, genius and talent, beauty and nobility, glory and pleasure, and even, by some incredible paradox, disinterest, generosity, charity!'
'Hold on, hold on!' Blanchet spluttered.
'and science, too, my good father, science, which opens all doors, all coffers, all safes...'
'I am dazzled by everything I see, but why, on top of everything, do you insist on deafening my ears with your extravagant words? Poverty is not a vice, for heaven's sake!'

'Poverty is the mother of all vices.'

'Prelat, my friend, now you are blaspheming!'
'If I locked you up in a cage with a lion, would you prefer the animal to be well fed or hungry?'[...]
'[...] Take a thousand good, well-fed burghers, all inclined to benevolence to their fellow men. Shut them up in a cave without food and drink. Make them hungry! They will be transformed soon enough. If you are very fortunate, you may get one saint whose spirit will rise above the horrible condition of his body and who will sacrifice himself [...]'
'In time of war, famine, and epidemics, do you imagine that such things are hard to find?'
'And, above all, one would think that you took pleasure in such a frightful truth.'
'No, father, I do not take pleasure in it. But, you see, we Florentines have discovered a remedy for that purulent canker - gold. Against mankind's moral wounds, the panacea is wealth. If good angel appeared on earth to cure all wounds of body and soul, do you know what he would do? He would be an alchemical angel and manufacture gold!'

From 'The Midnight Love Feast' - Michel Tournier (Collins: London, 1991, p. 129)

'Begging. I'm tryinging to understand the relationship it established between two human beings,' I said. 'The other day I was pestered by a young boy who was as handsome as god. He didn't look at all wretched. Laughing, I refused to give him anything. In the end he laughed too, and his demand became more and more familiar until they seemed to be a kind of game. I went on walking, and then we got lost in the Botanical Gardens in the middle of the forest of the famous 200-year old banyan tree's self-propagating roots. Emboldened by my obvious goodwill, he was just about to search my pockets. I stopped and looked at him. I said to myself: 'A yong Arab would have already had his pants down ten times! But everything about his behaviour discouraged the slightest sexual advance. Yes, the young poor of India are cloaked in a mantle of innocence. You can't touch the Untouchables, not because of their purity. There is an absolute incompatibility between begging an prostitution. The prostitutes in the red-light distiricts of Bombay are superbly dressed, their hair is impeccable, and they move around in what look like theatre sets.'

'Of course, ' said Karl. 'Prostitution presupposes that the prostitute is desired by the client. It is her professional duty to be beautiful, seductive, provocative. This relationship also exists in a certain sense in begging. But in that case it is you who without realising it are handsome, seductive and provocative in the eyes of the beggar. The money or the shirt you give to the beggar is a piece of yourself or of your universe that you are delivering up to his concupiscence. The rich man is the poor man's whore.'