my already weakened faith. And how admit
that omnipotence which stops at such a trifle as a pinch of fecula or
a soupcon of alcohol?"

These reflections all the more threw a gloom over the view of his
future life and rendered his horizon more menacing and dark.

He was lost, utterly lost. What would become of him in this Paris
where he had neither family nor friends? No bond united him to the
Saint-Germain quarters now in its dotage, scaling into the dust of
desuetude, buried in a new society like an empty husk. And what
contact could exist between him and that bourgeois class which had
gradually climbed up, profiting by all the disasters to grow rich,
making use of all the catastrophes to impose respect on its crimes and
thefts.

After the aristocracy of birth had come the aristocracy of money. Now
one saw the reign of the caliphates of commerce, the despotism of the
rue du Sentier, the tyranny of trade, bringing in its train venal
narrow ideas, knavish and vain instincts.

Viler and more dishonest than the nobility despoiled and the decayed
clergy, the bourgeoisie borrowed their frivolous ostentations, their
braggadoccio, degrading these qualities by its lack of _savoir-vivre_;
the bourgeoisie stole their faults and converted them into
hypocritical vices. And, authoritative and sly, low and cowardly, it
pitilessly attacked its eternal and necessary dupe, the populace,
unmuzzled and placed in ambush so as to be in readiness to assault the
old castes.

It was now an acknowledged fact. Its task once terminated, the
proletariat had been bled, supposedly as a measure of hygiene. The
bourgeoisie, reassured, strutted about in good humor, thanks to its
wealth and the contagion of its stupidity. The result of its accession
to power had been the destruction of all intelligence, the negation of
all honesty, the death of all art, and, in fact, the debased artists
had fallen on their knees, and they eagerly kissed the dirty feet of
the eminent jobbers and low satraps whose alms permitted them to live.

In painting, one now beheld a deluge of silliness; in literature, an
intemperate mixture of dull style and cowardly ideas, for they had to
credit the business man with honesty, the buccaneer who purchased a
dot for his son and refused to pay that of his daughter, with virtue;
chaste love to the Voltairian agnostic who accused the clergy of rapes
and then went hypocritically and stupidly to sniff, in the obscene
chambers.