s, to transport ten thousand persons, and to proscribe
forty thousand. I continue your initiation into this singular mystery.
Certes, it is agreeable to give one's lackeys white silk stockings;
but, to arrive at this grand result, it is not permitted to suppress
the glory and the thought of a people, to overthrow the central tribune
of the civilized world, to shackle the progress of mankind, and to shed
torrents of blood. That is forbidden. "By whom?" you repeat, who see
before you no one who forbids you anything. Patience: you shall know
presently.

What!--here you begin to be disgusted, and I can understand it--when
one has, on the one hand, one's interest, one's ambition, one's
fortune, one's pleasures, a fine palace to maintain in Faubourg
Saint-Honore; and, on the other side, the jeremiads and whining of
women from whom one takes their sons, of families from whom one tears
their fathers, of children from whom one takes their bread, of the
people whose liberty one confiscates, of society from whom one takes
its support, the laws; what! when these clamours are on one side and
one's own interest on the other, is it not permitted to contemn the
uproar, to let all these people "vociferate" unheeded, to trample on
all obstacles, and to go naturally where one sees one's fortune, one's
pleasures, and the fine palace in Faubourg Saint-Honore? A pretty idea,
truly! What! one is to trouble one's self to remember that, some three
or four years ago, one cannot now say when or where, one day in
December, when it was very cold, and rained, and one felt it desirable
to leave a chamber in an inn for a better lodging, one pronounced, one
no longer knows in relation to what, in an indifferently lighted room,
before eight or nine hundred imbeciles who chose to believe what one
said, these eight letters, "I swear it!" What! when one is meditating
"a great act," one must needs waste one's time asking one's self what
will be the result of the course that he is taking! must worry because
one man may be eaten up by vermin in the casemates, or another rot in
the hulks, or another die at Cayenne; or because another was killed
with bayonets, or another crushed by paving-stones, or another idiot
enough to get himself shot; because these are ruined, and those exiled;
and because all these men whom one ruins, or shoots, or exiles, or
massacres, who rot in the hulks, or die in the hold, or in Africa, are,
forsooth, honest men who have done their