He had for his specialty Greece, Poland, Hungary, Roumania, Italy.
He uttered these names incessantly, appropriately and inappropriately, with the tenacity of right. The violations of Turkey on Greece and Thessaly, of Russia on Warsaw, of Austria on Venice, enraged him.
Above all things, the great violence of 1772 aroused him.
There is no more sovereign eloquence than the true in indignation; he was eloquent with that eloquence.
He was inexhaustible on that infamous date of 1772, on the subject of that noble and valiant race suppressed by treason, and that three-sided crime, on that monstrous ambush, the prototype and pattern of all those horrible suppressions of states, which, since that time, have struck many a noble nation, and have annulled their certificate of birth, so to speak. All contemporary social crimes have their origin in the partition of Poland.
The partition of Poland is a theorem of which all present political outrages are the corollaries.
There has not been a despot, nor a traitor for nearly a century back, who has not signed, approved, counter-signed, and copied, ne variatur, the partition of Poland. When the record of modern treasons was examined, that was the first thing which made its appearance.
The congress of Vienna consulted that crime before consummating its own.
1772 sounded the onset; 1815 was the death of the game.
Such was Feuilly's habitual text. This poor workingman had constituted himself the tutor of Justice, and she recompensed him by rendering him great.
The fact is, that there is eternity in right.
Warsaw can no more be Tartar than Venice can be Teuton.
Kings lose their pains and their honor in the attempt to make them so.
Sooner or later, the submerged part floats to the surface and reappears.
Greece becomes Greece again, Italy is once more Italy.
The protest of right against the deed persists forever.
The theft of a nation cannot be allowed by prescription.
These lofty deeds of rascality have no future. A nation cannot have its mark extracted like a pocket handkerchief.
Courfeyrac had a father who was called M. de Courfeyrac.
One of the false ideas of the bourgeoisie under the Restoration as regards aristocracy and the nobility was to believe in the particle. The particle, as every one knows, possesses no significance. But the bourgeois of the epoch of la Minerve estimated so highly that poor de, that they thought themselves bound to abdicate it. M. de Chauvelin had himself called M. Chauvelin; M. de Caumartin, M. Caumartin; M. de Constant de Robecque, Benjamin Constant; M. de Lafayette, M. Lafayette.