"Consequently,çoisRené those hideous times are times of great acts of self-devotion. Then women went heroically to the scaffold; fathers gave themselves up for their sons, sons for their fathers; unexpected assistance was introduced into the prisons, and the priest who was being hunted consoled the victim by the side of the executioner who failed to recognise him.
"Morality, under the Directory, had to combat the corruption of morals rather than of doctrines; license prevailed. Men were hurled into pleasures as they had been heaped up in the prisons; they forced the present to advance joys on the future, in the fear of seeing a revival of the past. Every man, not having yet had time to create himself a home, lived in the street, on the public walks, in the public rooms. Familiarized with the scaffolds, and already half cut off from the world, they did not think it worth the trouble to go indoors. There was question only of arts, balls, fashions; people changed their ornaments and clothes as readily as they would have stripped themselves of their lives.
"Under Bonaparte the seduction commenced again, but it was a seduction that carried its own remedy: Bonaparte seduced by means of the spell of glory, and all that is great carries a principle of legislation within itself. He conceived that it was useful to allow the doctrine of all peoples to be taught, the morality of all times, the religion of eternity.
"I should not be surprised to hear some one reply:
"'To base society upon a _duty_, is to build it on a fiction; to place it in an _interest_, is to establish it in a reality.'
"Now it is precisely _duty_ which is a fact and _interest_ a fiction. _Duty_, which takes its source in the Godhead, descends first into the family, where it establishes a real affinity between the father and the children; from there, passing into society and dividing into two branches, in the political order it rules the relations of the king and the subject; in the moral order it establishes the tie of service and protection, of benefits and gratitude.
"Duty is therefore a most positive fact, since it gives to human society the only lasting existence that the latter can have.
"Interest, on the contrary, is a fiction when it is taken as people take it to-day, in its physical and rigorous sense, since it is no longer in the evening what it was in the morning; since it changes its nature at each moment; since, founded on fortune, it has fortune's fickleness.