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luminated as by the radiance of dawn and entirely covered,
at the same time, with the shadows of the great catastro-
phes which still filled the horizon and were slowly sinking
into the past. There existed in that light and that shadow, a
complete little new and old world, comic and sad, juvenile
and senile, which was rubbing its eyes; nothing resembles
an awakening like a return; a group which regarded France
with ill-temper, and which France regarded with irony; good
old owls of marquises by the streetful, who had returned,
and of ghosts, the ‘former’ subjects of amazement at every-
thing, brave and noble gentlemen who smiled at being in
France but wept also, delighted to behold their country once
more, in despair at not finding their monarchy; the nobility
of the Crusades treating the nobility of the Empire, that is to
say, the nobility of the sword, with scorn; historic races who
had lost the sense of history; the sons of the companions of
Charlemagne disdaining the companions of Napoleon. The
swords, as we have just remarked, returned the insult; the
sword of Fontenoy was laughable and nothing but a scrap of
rusty iron; the sword of Marengo was odious and was only
a sabre. Former days did not recognize Yesterday. People no
longer had the feeling for what was grand. There was some
one who called Bonaparte Scapin. This Society no longer
exists. Nothing of it, we repeat, exists to-day. When we se-
lect from it some one figure at random, and attempt to make
it live again in thought, it seems as strange to us as the world
before the Deluge. It is because it, too, as a matter of fact,
has been engulfed in a deluge. It has disappeared beneath
two Revolutions. What billows are ideas! How quickly they