It is those people whose interests are common and are contrary to those of mankind; and their interests are—­above all and imperiously—­let nothing change!  It is those people who keep their eternal subjects in eternal order, who deceive and dazzle them, who take their brains away as they take their bodies, who flatter their servile instincts, who make shallow, resplendent creeds for them, and explain huge happenings away with all the pretexts they like.  It is because of them that the law of things does not rest on justice and the moral law.

If some of them are unconscious of it, no matter.  Neither does it matter that all of them do not always profit by the public’s servitude, nor that some of them, sometimes, even happen to suffer from it.  They are none the less, all of them, by their solid coalition, material and moral, the defenders of lies above and delusion below.  These are the people who reign in the place of kings, or at the same time, here as everywhere.

Formerly I used to see a harmony of interests and ideals on all that festive, sunlit hill.  Now I see reality broken in two, as I did on my bed of pain.  I see the two enemy races face to face—­the victors and the vanquished.

Monsieur Gozlan looks like a master of masters—­an aged collector of fortune, whose speculations are famous, whose wealth increases unaided, who makes as much profit as he likes and holds the district in the hollow of his hand.  His vulgar movements flash with diamonds, and a bulky golden trinket hangs on his belly like a phallus.  The generals beside him—­those glorious potentates whose smiles are made of so many souls—­and the administrators and the honorables only look like secondary actors.

Fontan occupies considerable space on the rostrum.  He drowses there, with his two spherical hands planted in front of him.  The voluminous trencherman digests and blows forth with his buttered mouth; and what he has eaten purrs within him.  As for Rampaille, the butcher, he has mingled with the public.  He is rich but dressed with bad taste.  It is his habit to say, “I am a poor man of the people, I am; look at my dirty clothes.”  A moment ago, when the lady who was collecting for the Lest-we-Forget League suddenly confronted him and trapped him amid general attention, he fumbled desperately in his fob and dragged three sous out of his body.  There are several like him on this side of the barrier, looking as though they were part of the crowd, but only attached to it by their trade.  Kings do not now carry royalty everywhere on their sleeves; they obliterate themselves in the clothes of everybody.  But all the hundred faces of royalty have the same signs, all of them, and are distinctly repeated through their smiles of cupidity, rapacity, ferocity.