Suddenly these ladies turned their heads and saw me close to them.  My daughter screamed.  “Oh, go away,” cried my wife, throwing her arms round my neck, “you are lost if you remain here a moment.  You will be arrested here!” Madame Paul Meurice added, “They are looking for you.  The police were here a quarter of an hour ago.”  I could not succeed in reassuring them.  They gave me a packet of letters offering me places of refuge for the night, some of them signed with names unknown to me.  After some moments, seeing them more and more frightened, I went away.  My wife said to me, “What you are doing, you are doing for justice.  Go, continue!” I embraced my wife and my daughter; five months have elapsed at the time when I am writing these lines.  When I went into exile they remained near my son Victor in prison; I have not seen them since that day.

I left as I had entered.  In the porter’s lodge there were only two or three little children seated round a lamp, laughing and looking at pictures in a book.

[11] This list, which belongs to History, having served as the base of the proscription list, will be found complete in the sequel to this book to be published hereafter.

CHAPTER VII.

THE ARCHBISHOP

On this gloomy and tragical day an idea struck one of the people.

He was a workman belonging to the honest but almost imperceptible minority of Catholic Democrats.  The double exaltation of his mind, revolutionary on one side, mystical on the other, caused him to be somewhat distrusted by the people, even by his comrades and his friends.  Sufficiently devout to be called a Jesuit by the Socialists, sufficiently Republican to be called a Red by the Reactionists, he formed an exception in the workshops of the Faubourg.  Now, what is needed in these supreme crises to seize and govern the masses are men of exceptional genius, not men of exceptional opinion.  There is no revolutionary originality.  In order to be something, in the time of regeneration and in the days of social combat, one must bathe fully in those powerful homogeneous mediums which are called parties.  Great currents of men follow great currents of ideas, and the true revolutionary leader is he who knows how best to drive the former in accordance with the latter.

Now the Gospel is in accordance with the Revolution, but Catholicism is not.  This is due to the fact that in the main the Papacy is not in accordance with the Gospel.  One can easily understand a Christian Republican, one cannot understand a Catholic Democrat.  It is a combination of two opposites.  It is a mind in which the negative bars the way to the affirmative.  It is a neuter.