Page 177 - nostromo-a-tale-of-the-seaboard

Ribierists, of whom we hear so much just now, are really
trying in their own comical way to make the country hab-
itable, and even to pay some of its debts. My friends, you
had better write up Senor Ribiera all you can in kindness to
your own bondholders. Really, if what I am told in my let-
ters is true, there is some chance for them at last.’
And he would explain with railing verve what Don Vin-
cente Ribiera stood for—a mournful little man oppressed
by his own good intentions, the significance of battles won,
who Montero was (un grotesque vaniteux et feroce), and the
manner of the new loan connected with railway develop-
ment, and the colonization of vast tracts of land in one great
financial scheme.
And his French friends would remark that evidently
this little fellow Decoud connaissait la question a fond. An
important Parisian review asked him for an article on the
situation. It was composed in a serious tone and in a spirit
of levity. Afterwards he asked one of his intimates—
‘Have you read my thing about the regeneration of Costa-
guana—une bonne blague, hein?’
He imagined himself Parisian to the tips of his fingers.
But far from being that he was in danger of remaining a
sort of nondescript dilettante all his life. He had pushed the
habit of universal raillery to a point where it blinded him to
the genuine impulses of his own nature. To be suddenly se-
lected for the executive member of the patriotic small-arms
committee of Sulaco seemed to him the height of the unex-
pected, one of those fantastic moves of which only his ‘dear
countrymen’ were capable.

1 Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard