nations pass their
time in producing webs of Penelope, whose bloody threads they weave and
unweave again with tears? All governments, royalties, empires,
republics, ought to be more modest. But all, profoundly forgetful of
the lessons of the past, believe themselves immortal. All declare
haughtily that they have closed forever the era of revolutions.

With the advent of the Republic a new calendar had been put in force.
The equality of days and nights at the autumnal equinox opened the era
of civil equality on September 22. "Who would have believed that this
human geometry, so profoundly calculated, was written in the sand, and
that in a few years no traces of it would remain? ... The heavens have
continued to gravitate, and have brought back the equality of days and
nights; but they have allowed the promised liberty and equality to
perish, like meteors that vanish in empty space.... The
_sans-culottes_ have not been able to make themselves popular among the
starry peoples.... An ancient belief which the men of the Revolution
had neglected through fear or through contempt was again met with; a
spectre had appeared; a chilly breath, like that of Samuel, had made
itself felt; and lo, the edifice so sagely constructed, and leaning on
the worlds, has vanished away."[4]

{394}

There lies at the foundation of history a supreme sadness and
melancholy. This never-ending series of illusions and deceptions,
errors and afflictions, faults and crimes; this rage, and passion, and
folly; so many efforts and fatigues, so many dangers, tortures, and
tears, so much blood, such revolutions, catastrophies, cataclysms of
every sort,--and all for what? Wretched humanity, rolling its stone of
Sisyphus from age to age, inspires far more compassion than contempt.
The painful reflections caused by the annals of all peoples are perhaps
more sombre for the French Revolution than for any other period. Edgar
Quinet justly laments over the inequality between the sacrifices of the
victims and the results obtained by posterity. He affirms that in
other histories one thing reconciles us to the fury of men, and that is
the speedy fecundity of the blood they shed; for example, when one sees
that of the martyrs flow, one also sees Christianity spread over the
earth from the depth of the catacombs; while amongst us, the blood
which streamed most abundantly and from such lofty sources, did not
find soil equally well prepared. And the illustr