An inexorable religion has fallen from them upon us all, upholding what exists, preserving what is.

Suddenly I hear beside me, as if I were in a file of the executed, a stammering death-agony; and I think I see him who struggled like a stricken vulture, on the earth that was bloated with dead.  And his words enter my heart more distinctly than when they were still alive; and they wound me like blows at once of darkness and of light.

“Men must not open their eyes!”

“Faith comes at will, like the rest!” said Adjutant Marcassin, as he fluttered in his red trousers about the ranks, like a blood-stained priest of the God of War.

He was right!  He had grasped the chains of bondage when he hurled that true cry against the truth.  Every man is something of account, but ignorance isolates and resignation scatters.  Every poor man carries within him centuries of indifference and servility.  He is a defenseless prey for hatred and dazzlement.

The man of the people whom I am looking for, while I writhe through confusion as through mud, the worker who measures his strength against toil which is greater than he, and who never escapes from hardships, the serf of these days—­I see him as if he were here.  He is coming out of his shop at the bottom of the court.  He wears a square cap.  One makes out the shining dust of old age strewn in his stubbly beard.  He chews and smokes his foul and noisy pipe.  He nods his head; with a fine and sterling smile he says, “There’s always been war, so there’ll always be.”

And all around him people nod their heads and think the same, in the poor lonely well of their heart.  They hold the conviction anchored to the bottom of their brains that things can never change any more.  They are like posts and paving stones, distinct but cemented together; they believe that the life of the world is a sort of great stone monument, and they obey, obscurely and indistinctly, everything which commands; and they do not look afar, in spite of the little children.  And I remember the readiness there was to yield themselves, body and soul, to serried resignation.  Then, too, there is alcohol which murders; wine, which drowns.

One does not see the kings; one only sees the reflection of them on the multitude.

There are bemusings and spells of fascination, of which we are the object.  I think, fascinated.

My lips religiously recite a passage in a book which a young man has just read to me, while I, quite a child, lean drowsily on the kitchen table—­“Roland is not dead.  Through long centuries our splendid ancestor, the warrior of warriors, has been seen riding over the mountains and hills across the France of Charlemagne and Hugh the Great.  At all times of great national disaster he has risen before the people’s eyes, like an omen of victory and glory, with his lustrous helmet and his sword.  He has appeared and has halted like a soldier-archangel over