I will say what there is to say:  I place the Republic before France.  France is ourselves.  The Republic is ourselves and the others.  The general welfare must be put much higher than national welfare, because it is much higher.  But if it is venturesome to assert, as they have so much and so indiscriminately done, that such national interest is in accord with the general interest, then the converse is obvious; and that is illuminating, momentous and decisive—­the good of all includes the good of each; France can be prosperous even if the world is not, but the world cannot be prosperous and France not.  The moving argument reestablishes, with positive and crowding certainties which touch us softly on all sides, that distracting stake which Pascal tried to place, like a lever in the void—­“On one side I lose; on the other I have all to gain.”

* * * * * *

Amid the beauty of these dear spots on Chestnut Hill, in the heart of these four crossing ways, I have seen new things; not that any new things have happened, but because I have opened my eyes.

I am rewarded, I the lowest, for being the only one of all to follow up error to the end, right into its holy places; for I am at last disentangling all the simplicity and truth of the great horizons.  The revelation still seems to me so terrible that the silence of men, heaped under the roofs down there at my feet, seizes and threatens me.  And if I am but timidly formulating it within myself, that is because each of us has lived in reality more than his life, and because my training has filled me, like the rest, with centuries of shadow, of humiliation and captivity.

It is establishing itself cautiously; but it is the truth, and there are moments when logic seizes you in its godlike whirlwind.  In this disordered world where the weakness of a few oppresses the strength of all; since ever the religion of the God of Battles and of Resignation has not sufficed by itself to consecrate inequality.  Tradition reigns, the gospel of the blind adoration of what was and what is—­God without a head.  Man’s destiny is eternally blockaded by two forms of tradition; in time, by hereditary succession; in space, by frontiers, and thus it is crushed and annihilated in detail.  It is the truth.  I am certain of it, for I am touching it.

But I do not know what will become of us.  All the blood poured out, all the words poured out, to impose a sham ideal on our bodies and souls, will they suffice for a long time yet to separate and isolate humanity in absurdity made real?  History is a Bible of errors.  I have not only seen blessings falling from on high on all which supported evil, and curses on all which could heal it; I have seen, here below, the keepers of the moral law hunted and derided, from little Termite, lost like a rat in unfolding battle, back to Jesus Christ.

We go away.  For the first time since I came back I no longer lean on Marie.  It is she who leans on me.