So That's Our Problem

We're not poor enough:

[T]his poor young man experienced that desperate poverty which is a kind of melting-pot whence great talents emerge pure and incorruptible, just as diamonds can be subjected to any kind of shock without breaking. In the violence of their unleashed passions, they acquire the most unshakeable honesty, and by dint of the constant labour with which they have contained their balked appetites, they becomde used to the struggles which arre the lot of genius. ... He wore his poverty with that gaiety which is perhaps one of the greatest elements of courage, and like all those who have nothing, he contracted few debs. Sober as a camel, brisk as a stag, he was unwavering both in his principles and in his behaviour.

--Honoré de Balzac, "The Athiest's Mass," in
Selected Short Stories 217-234, 221 (Sylvia Raphael trans., Penguin Books 1977)

"He" is Dr. Horace Bianchon, first encountered by most readers of Balzac as one of the residents of (as B says) "a miserable boarding-housse in the Latin Quarter, known by the name of La Maison Vaquer"--i.e., center-stage for what is perhaps Balzac's best-known novel, Le Père Goriot.