volution comes," he cried, clasping the hand of the
master, "whatever else may perish, this must be saved at any cost!"

Tchernoff roused himself from his reveries to look around him and say
with sadness:

"THEY have passed through here!"

Every time that he walked through the Arch, the same vision would spring
up in his mind. THEY were thousands of helmets glistening in the sun,
thousands of heavy boots lifted with mechanical rigidity at the same
time; horns, fifes, drums large and small, clashing against the majestic
silence of these stones--the warlike march from Lohengrin sounding in
the deserted avenues before the closed houses.

He, who was a foreigner, always felt attracted by the spell exerted by
venerable buildings guarding the glory of a bygone day. He did not wish
to know who had erected it. As soon as its pride is flattered, mankind
tries immediately to solidify it. Then Humanity intervenes with a
broader vision that changes the original significance of the work,
enlarges it and strips it of its first egotistical import. The Greek
statues, models of the highest beauty, had been originally mere images
of the temple, donated by the piety of the devotees of those times.
Upon evoking Roman grandeur, everybody sees in imagination the enormous
Coliseum, circle of butcheries, or the arches erected to the glory
of the inept Caesars. The representative works of nations have two
significations--the interior or immediate one which their creators gave
them, and the exterior or universal interest, the symbolic value which
the centuries have given them.

"This Arch," continued Tchernoff, "is French within, with its names
of battles and generals open to criticism. On the outside, it is the
monument of the people who carried through the greatest revolution
for liberty ever known. The glorification of man is there below in
the column of the place Vendome. Here there is nothing individual. Its
builders erected it to the memory of la Grande Armee and that Grand
Army was the people in arms who spread revolution throughout Europe. The
artists, great inventors, foresaw the true significance of this work.
The warriors of Rude who are chanting the Marseillaise in the group
at the left are not professional soldiers, they are armed citizens,
marching to work out their sublime and violent mission. Their nudity
makes them appear to me like sans-culottes in Grecian helmets. . . .
Here there is more than the glory and egoism of a gr