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It is not upon the paltry level of negations or of decent philosophies, it is in the action and hot mood of creative certitudes that the French battle is engaged.  The little sophists are dumb and terrified, their books are quite forgotten.  I myself forgot (in those few days by that water and in that city) the thin and ineffectual bodies of ignorant men who live quite beyond any knowledge of such fires.  The printed things which tired and poor writers put down for pay no longer even disturbed me; the reflections, the mere phantasms of reality, with which in a secluded measure we please our intellect, faded.  I was like a man who was in the centre of two lines that meet in war; to such a man this fellow’s prose on fighting and that one’s verse, this theory of strategy, or that essay upon arms, are not for one moment remembered.  Here (in the narrow street which I knew and was now following) St. Bernard had upheld the sacrament in the shock of the first awakening—­in that twelfth century, when Julian stirred in his sleep.  Beyond the bridge, in Roman walls that still stand carefully preserved, the Church of Gaul had sustained Athanasius, and determined the course of the Christian centuries.  I had passed upon my way the vast and empty room where had been established the Terror; where had been forced by an angry and compelling force the full return of equal laws upon Europe.  Who could remember in such an air the follies and the pottering of men who analyse and put in categories and explain the follies of wealth and of old age?

Good Lord, how little the academies became!  I remembered the phrases upon one side and upon the other which still live in the stones of the city, carved and deep, but more lasting than are even the letters of their inscription.  I remembered the defiant sentence of Mad Dolet on his statue there in the Quarter, the deliberate perversion of Plato, “And when you are dead you shall no more be anything at all.”  I remembered the “Ave Crux spes Unica”; and St. Just’s “The words that we have spoken will never be lost on earth”; and Danton’s “Continual Daring,” and the scribbled Greek on the walls of the cathedral towers.  For not only are the air and the voice, but the very material of this town is filled with words that remain.  Certainly the philosophies and the negations dwindled to be so small as at last to disappear, and to leave only the two antagonists.  Passion brooded over the silence of the morning; there was great energy in the cool of the spring air, and up above, the forms the clouds were taking were forms of gigantic powers.