untry; sooner or later his family will be, it is predicted, the
entire universe.

Will this moral cosmopolitanism, the hope of Christian Rome, prove to be
only a sublime error? It is so natural to believe in the realization of
a noble vision, in the Brotherhood of Man. But, alas! the human machine
does not have such divine proportions. Souls that are vast enough to
grasp a range of feelings bestowed on great men only will never belong
to either fathers of families or simple citizens. Some physiologists
have thought that as the brain enlarges the heart narrows; but they are
mistaken. The apparent egotism of men who bear a science, a nation, a
code of laws in their bosom is the noblest of passions; it is, as one
may say, the maternity of the masses; to give birth to new peoples, to
produce new ideas they must unite within their mighty brains the breasts
of woman and the force of God. The history of such men as Innocent the
Third and Peter the Great, and all great leaders of their age and nation
will show, if need be, in the highest spheres the same vast thought of
which Troubert was made the representative in the quiet depths of the
Cloister of Saint-Gatien.

ADDENDUM

The following personages appear in other stories of the Human Comedy.

Birotteau, Abbe Francois
The Lily of the Valley
Cesar Birotteau

Bourbonne, De
Madame Firmiani

Listomere, Baronne de
Cesar Birotteau
The Muse of the Department

Troubert, Abbe Hyacinthe
The Member for Arcis

Villenoix, Pauline Salomon de
Louis Lambert
A Seaside Tragedy

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