"You may say troubled joy, and to-day, after that fatal return of the past, which is called 1814, joy which has disappeared! Alas!
The work was incomplete, I admit:
we demolished the ancient regime in deeds; we were not able to suppress it entirely in ideas. To destroy abuses is not sufficient; customs must be modified. The mill is there no longer; the wind is still there."
"You have demolished.
It may be of use to demolish, but I distrust a demolition complicated with wrath."
"Right has its wrath, Bishop; and the wrath of right is an element of progress.
In any case, and in spite of whatever may be said, the French Revolution is the most important step of the human race since the advent of Christ.
Incomplete, it may be, but sublime. It set free all the unknown social quantities; it softened spirits, it calmed, appeased, enlightened; it caused the waves of civilization to flow over the earth.
It was a good thing.
The French Revolution is the consecration of humanity."
The Bishop could not refrain from murmuring:--
"Yes? '93!"
The member of the Convention straightened himself up in his chair with an almost lugubrious solemnity, and exclaimed, so far as a dying man is capable of exclamation:--
"Ah, there you go; '93!
I was expecting that word.
A cloud had been forming for the space of fifteen hundred years; at the end of fifteen hundred years it burst.
You are putting the thunderbolt on its trial."
The Bishop felt, without, perhaps, confessing it, that something within him had suffered extinction.
Nevertheless, he put a good face on the matter.
He replied:--