“And afterwards, in the evening, when Paris turned out in the streets and market-places. Families ate their mid-day meal on the pavement; the old and sick were carried into the open air; food and wine were distributed at the public expense. That was the Feast of Tabernacles, the recollection of the Exodus from Egyptian bondage; it was the Saturnalia, the return of the Golden Age! And then....”
“Then came Marat, Danton, and Robespierre.”
“Yes! Robespierre, the most hated of all, was not worse than Louis XI and Henry VIII.”
“The judge is not a murderer, nor is the executioner.”
“A Corsican, born in the same year in which France annexed his country. He will avenge it, and, since he can never feel himself a Frenchman, he will exploit our country only for his own purposes. But nevertheless, in spite of his unparalleled selfishness, his wickedness and crimes, he will serve humanity--for everything serves.”
“Who can say? Probably things will go on as they have done hitherto; sometimes advancing, then a halt; then again advance.”
“Yes, like a drowning man. Three times he comes to the surface to breathe, but the fourth time he remains below. Or, like an animal chewing the cud; for some time there are small eructations, re-mastications, and then everything is ejected through the gullet, after going through the circle.”
“Do you believe in the return of the Golden Age?”
“Yes I believe like Thomas, when I have seen. And I have seen. At the moment, which I now recall, on the Champs du Mars,--then I saw! We had a forefeeling of the future, we were sure that we had had a vision of some new order of things, but were uncertain when it would be established.”
“We should not sit still and wait, but work! That makes the time pass. The learned say that it took a million years for the Hill of Montmartre to be deposited from the water. Now history is only three thousand years old; for three thousand years more, men can reflect over their past, and perhaps in six thousand an improvement may be noticeable! We are too proud and impatient, sire. And yet things move quickly. America was discovered only three hundred years ago, and now it is an European republic. Africa, India, China, Japan are opened, and soon the whole world will belong to Europe. Do you see the promise to Abraham, ‘In thy seed shall all the nations of the earth be blessed,’ is on the way to fulfilment--on the way, I say.”