tate these facts calmly. Death on the barricade or the tomb in
exile, is an acceptable occasion for devotion. The real name of
devotion is disinterestedness. Let the abandoned allow themselves to
be abandoned, let the exiled allow themselves to be exiled, and let us
confine ourselves to entreating great nations not to retreat too far,
when they do retreat. One must not push too far in descent under pretext
of a return to reason.

Matter exists, the minute exists, interest exists, the stomach exists;
but the stomach must not be the sole wisdom. The life of the moment has
its rights, we admit, but permanent life has its rights also. Alas! the
fact that one is mounted does not preclude a fall. This can be seen in
history more frequently than is desirable: A nation is great, it tastes
the ideal, then it bites the mire, and finds it good; and if it be asked
how it happens that it has abandoned Socrates for Falstaff, it replies:
"Because I love statesmen."

One word more before returning to our subject, the conflict.

A battle like the one which we are engaged in describing is nothing else
than a convulsion towards the ideal. Progress trammelled is sickly, and
is subject to these tragic epilepsies. With that malady of progress,
civil war, we have been obliged to come in contact in our passage. This
is one of the fatal phases, at once act and entr'acte of that drama
whose pivot is a social condemnation, and whose veritable title is
Progress.

Progress!

The cry to which we frequently give utterance is our whole thought; and,
at the point of this drama which we have now reached, the idea which it
contains having still more than one trial to undergo, it is, perhaps,
permitted to us, if not to lift the veil from it, to at least allow its
light to shine through.

The book which the reader has under his eye at this moment is, from
one end to the other, as a whole and in detail, whatever may be its
intermittences, exceptions and faults, the march from evil to good, from
the unjust to the just, from night to day, from appetite to conscience,
from rottenness to life, from hell to heaven, from nothingness to God.
Point of departure: matter; point of arrival: the soul. The hydra at the
beginning, the angel at the end.

CHAPTER XXI--THE HEROES

All at once, the drum beat the charge.

The attack was a hurricane. On the evening before, in the darkness,
the barricade had been approached silently, as by a boa. Now, in broad