“Beware, there are terrible duties in life.  Do not accuse what is not responsible.  Since when has the disorder been the fault of the physician?  Yes, what marks this tremendous year is being without pity.  Why?  Because it is the great revolutionary year.  This year incarnates the revolution.  The revolution has an enemy, the old world, and to that it is pitiless, just as the surgeon has an enemy, gangrene, and is pitiless to that.  The revolution extirpates kingship in the king, aristocracy in the noble, despotism in the soldier, superstition in the priest, barbarity in the judge, in a word whatever is tyranny in whatever is tyrant.  The operation is frightful, the revolution performs it with a sure hand.  As to the quantity of sound flesh that it requires, ask Boerhave what he thinks of it.  What tumour that has to be cut out does not involve loss of blood?...  The revolution devotes itself to its fated task.  It mutilates but it saves....  It has the past in its grasp, it will not spare.  It makes in civilisation a deep incision whence shall come the safety of the human race.  You suffer?  No doubt.  How long will it last?  The time needed for the operation.  Then you will live,” etc. (ii. 65-66).

“One day,” he adds, “the Revolution will justify the Terror.”  To which Gauvain retorts thus:—­

“Fear lest the Terror be the calumny of the Revolution.  Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, are dogmas of peace and harmony.  Why give them an aspect of alarm?  What do we seek?  To win nations to the universal public.  Then why inspire fright?  Of what avail is intimidation?  It is wrong to do ill in order to do good.  You do not pull down the throne to leave the scaffold standing.  Let us hurl away crowns, let us spare heads.  The revolution is concord, not affright.  Mild ideas are ill-served by men who do not know pity.  Amnesty is for me the noblest word in human speech.  I will shed no blood save at hazard of my own....  In the fight let us be the enemies of our foes, and after the victory their brothers” (ii. 67).

These two together, Cimourdain and Gauvain, make an ideal pair of the revolutionists of ’93.  Strip each of them of the beauty of character with which the poet’s imagination has endowed them, add instead passion, violence, envy, egoism, malice; then you understand how in the very face of the foreign enemy Girondins sharpened the knife for the men of the Mountain, Hebertists screamed for the lives of Robespierrists, Robespierre struck off the head of Danton, Thermidorians crushed Robespierre.

Victor Hugo has given to this typic historical struggle of ’93 the qualities of nobleness and beauty which art requires in dealing with real themes.  Lantenac falls into the hands of the Blues, headed by Cimourdain and Gauvain, but he does so in consequence of yielding to a heroic and self-devoting impulse of humanity.  Cimourdain, true to his temperament, insists on his instant execution.  Gauvain, true