To-day, the champions of the past, since they cannot deny these things, have adopted the course of making light of them. They have made it the fashion, this convenient and strange way of suppressing the revelations of history, of weakening the commentaries of philosophy, and of getting rid of all troublesome facts and all grave questions. "Matter for declamations," say the able ones. "Declamations" repeat the fools. Jean-Jacques, a declaimer; Diderot, a declaimer; Voltaire on Calas, Labarre and Sirven, a declaimer. They have made it out now that Tacitus was a declaimer, that Nero was a victim, and that we really ought to feel very sorry for "poor Holofernes."
Facts are obstinate, however, and hard to disconcert. The writer of this book has seen with his own eyes, within eight leagues of Brussels, and that is a part of the Middle Ages which every one has at hand, at the Abbey of Villers, the dungeon-hole in the middle of the meadow which used to be the court-yard of the cloister; and on the banks of the Thil, four stone cells, half under ground, half under water. These were the _in pace._ Each of these cells has the remains of an iron door, a latrine, and a barred window, which from the outside is two feet above the water, and from the inside is six feet above the floor. Four feet of river wash the outside of the wall. The floor is always wet. The tenant of the _in pace_ had for a bed this wet earth. In one of these cells there is a broken piece of a collar fastened to the wall; in another may be seen a kind of square box made of four slabs of granite, too short to lie down in, too low to sit up in. They put into that a human being with a stone lid over her. This exists. You can see it. You can touch it. These _in pace_, these cells, these iron hinges, these collars, this high window, close to which flows the river, this stone box closed with a granite lid like a tomb, with this difference, that here the corpse was a living being, this floor of mud, this sewer, these oozing walls,--what declaimers these are!
The monastic system, as it existed in Spain, and as it exists now at Thibet, is to civilization a sort of consumption. It stops life short. It depopulates, nothing more nor less,--claustration, castration. It has been the scourge of Europe. Add to this the violence so often done to conscience, the forced vocations, the feudal system resting upon the cloister, primogeniture pouring into the monastic system the overflow of the family, these cruelties of which we have just spoken, the _in pace_, the mouths sealed, the brains walled up, so many unhappy intellects thrown into the dungeon of eternal vows, the taking of the veil, the burying alive of souls. Add the individual sufferings to the national degradation, and whoever you may be, you feel yourself shudder before the frock and the veil, these two shrouds of human invention.