still more
beautiful, and it was called liberty.

The children raised their heads and remembered that thus their
grandfathers had spoken. They remembered having seen in certain obscure
corners of the paternal home mysterious busts with long marble hair and a
Latin inscription; they remembered how their grandsires shook their heads
and spoke of streams of blood more terrible than those of the Empire.
Something in that word liberty made their hearts beat with the memory of
a terrible past and the hope of a glorious future.

They trembled at the word; but returning to their homes they encountered
in the street three coffins which were being borne to Clamart; within
were three young men who had pronounced that word liberty too distinctly.

A strange smile hovered on their lips at that sad sight; but other
speakers, mounted on the rostrum, began publicly to estimate what
ambition had cost and how very dear was glory; they pointed out the
horror of war and called the battle-losses butcheries. They spoke so
often and so long that all human illusions, like the trees in autumn,
fell leaf by leaf about them, and those who listened passed their hands
over their foreheads as if awakening from a feverish dream.

Some said: "The Emperor has fallen because the people wished no more of
him;" others added: "The people wished the king; no, liberty; no, reason;
no, religion; no, the English constitution; no, absolutism;" and the last
one said: "No, none of these things, but simply peace."

Three elements entered into the life which offered itself to these
children: behind them a past forever destroyed, still quivering on its
ruins with all the fossils of centuries of absolutism; before them the
aurora of an immense horizon, the first gleams of the future; and between
these two worlds--like the ocean which separates the Old World from the
New--something vague and floating, a troubled sea filled with wreckage,
traversed from time to time by some distant sail or some ship trailing
thick clouds of smoke; the present, in a word, which separates the past
from the future, which is neither the one nor the other, which resembles
both, and where one can not know whether, at each step, one treads on
living matter or on dead refuse.

It was in such chaos that choice had to be made; this was the aspect
presented to children full of spirit and of audacity, sons of the Empire
and grandsons of the Revolution.

As for the past, they would none of