king him for it knew not what,--and then the radiant images
of the future died in his soul; a groan out of the powerlessness of the
man mingled in the discordant chorus of lamentations and tears from poor
human creatures tormented by life.

Tedium and inquietude reigned everywhere, and sometimes terror. And the
dull and somber city, the stone buildings atrociously lined one against
the other, shutting in the temples, were for men a prison, rebuffing the
rays of the sun. And the music of life was smothered by the cry of
suffering and rage, by the whisper of dissimulated hate, by the
threatening bark of cruelty, by the voluptuous cry of violence.

In the sullen agitation caused by trial and suffering, in the feverish
struggle of misery, in the vile slime of egoism, in the subsoils of the
houses wherein vegetated Poverty, the creator of Riches, solitary
dreamers full of faith in Man, strangers to all, prophets of seditions,
moved about like sparks issued from some far-off hearthstone of justice.
Secretly they brought into these wretched holes tiny fertile seeds of a
doctrine simple and grand;--and sometimes rudely, with lightnings in
their eyes, and sometimes mild and tender, they sowed this clear and
burning truth in the sombre hearts of these slaves, transformed into
mute, blind instruments by the strength of the rapacious, by the will of
the cruel. And these sullen beings, these oppressed ones, listened
without much belief to the music of the new words,--the music for which
their hearts had long been waiting. Little by little they lifted up
their heads, and tore the meshes of the web of lies wherewith their
oppressors had enwound them. In their existence, made up of silent and
contained rage, in their hearts envenomed by numberless wrongs, in their
consciences encumbered by the dupings of the wisdom of the strong, in
this dark and laborious life, all penetrated with the bitterness of
humiliation, had resounded a simple word:

Comrade.

It was not a new word; they had heard it and pronounced it themselves;
but until then it had seemed to them void of sense, like all other words
dulled by usage, and which one may forget without losing anything. But
now this word, strong and clear, had another sound; a soul was singing
in it,--the facets of it shone brilliant as a diamond. The wretched
accepted this word, and at first uttered it gently, cradling it in their
hearts like a mother rocking her new-born child and admiring it