tumultuous friends,
captivated by the absolute, adored and invoked splendid revolutionary
adventures, Combeferre was inclined to let progress, good progress, take
its own course; he may have been cold, but he was pure; methodical, but
irreproachable; phlegmatic, but imperturbable. Combeferre would have
knelt and clasped his hands to enable the future to arrive in all
its candor, and that nothing might disturb the immense and virtuous
evolution of the races. The good must be innocent, he repeated
incessantly. And in fact, if the grandeur of the Revolution consists
in keeping the dazzling ideal fixedly in view, and of soaring thither
athwart the lightnings, with fire and blood in its talons, the beauty
of progress lies in being spotless; and there exists between Washington,
who represents the one, and Danton, who incarnates the other, that
difference which separates the swan from the angel with the wings of an
eagle.

Jean Prouvaire was a still softer shade than Combeferre. His name
was Jehan, owing to that petty momentary freak which mingled with the
powerful and profound movement whence sprang the very essential study
of the Middle Ages. Jean Prouvaire was in love; he cultivated a pot
of flowers, played on the flute, made verses, loved the people, pitied
woman, wept over the child, confounded God and the future in the same
confidence, and blamed the Revolution for having caused the fall of a
royal head, that of Andre Chenier. His voice was ordinarily delicate,
but suddenly grew manly. He was learned even to erudition, and almost an
Orientalist. Above all, he was good; and, a very simple thing to those
who know how nearly goodness borders on grandeur, in the matter of
poetry, he preferred the immense. He knew Italian, Latin, Greek, and
Hebrew; and these served him only for the perusal of four poets: Dante,
Juvenal, AEschylus, and Isaiah. In French, he preferred Corneille to
Racine, and Agrippa d'Aubigne to Corneille. He loved to saunter through
fields of wild oats and corn-flowers, and busied himself with clouds
nearly as much as with events. His mind had two attitudes, one on
the side towards man, the other on that towards God; he studied or
he contemplated. All day long, he buried himself in social questions,
salary, capital, credit, marriage, religion, liberty of thought,
education, penal servitude, poverty, association, property, production
and sharing, the enigma of this lower world which covers the human
ant-hill