and cupid Press
which lived upon scandal, the everlasting flood of denunciation and filth
which poured from Sagnier, and the gay impudence shown by the
unscrupulous and conscienceless Massot, who attacked all and defended
all, by profession and to order! And in the same way as insects, on
discovering one of their own kind dying, will often finish it off and
fatten upon it, so the whole swarm of appetites, interests and passions
had fallen upon a wretched madman, that unhappy Salvat, whose idiotic
crime had brought them all scrambling together, gluttonously eager to
derive some benefit from that starveling's emaciated carcass. And all
boiled in the huge vat of Paris; the desires, the deeds of violence, the
strivings of one and another man's will, the whole nameless medley of the
bitterest ferments, whence, in all purity, the wine of the future would
at last flow.

Then Pierre became conscious of the prodigious work which went on in the
depths of the vat, beneath all the impurity and waste. As his brother had
just said, what mattered the stains, the egotism and greed of
politicians, if humanity were still on the march, ever slowly and
stubbornly stepping forward! What mattered, too, that corrupt and
emasculate _bourgeoisie_, nowadays as moribund as the aristocracy, whose
place it took, if behind it there ever came the inexhaustible reserve of
men who surged up from the masses of the country-sides and the towns!
What mattered the debauchery, the perversion arising from excess of
wealth and power, the luxuriousness and dissoluteness of life, since it
seemed a proven fact that the capitals that had been queens of the world
had never reigned without extreme civilisation, a cult of beauty and of
pleasure! And what mattered even the venality, the transgressions and the
folly of the press, if at the same time it remained an admirable
instrument for the diffusion of knowledge, the open conscience, so to
say, of the nation, a river which, though there might be horrors on its
surface, none the less flowed on, carrying all nations to the brotherly
ocean of the future centuries! The human lees ended by sinking to the
bottom of the vat, and it was not possible to expect that what was right
would triumph visibly every day; for it was often necessary that years
should elapse before the realisation of some hope could emerge from the
fermentation. Eternal matter is ever being cast afresh into the crucible
and ever coming from it improved