Of course exactitude was impossible.  Why should he dream of getting at the whole truth about the Middle Ages when nobody had been able to give a full account of the Revolution, of the Commune for that matter?  The best he could do was to imagine himself in the midst of creatures of that other epoch, wearing their antique garb, thinking their thoughts, and then, having saturated himself with their spirit, to convey his illusion by means of adroitly selected details.

That is practically what Michelet did, and though the garrulous old gossip drivelled endlessly about matters of supreme unimportance and ecstasized in his mild way over trivial anecdotes which he expanded beyond all proportion, and though his sentimentality and chauvinism sometimes discredited his quite plausible conjectures, he was nevertheless the only French historian who had overcome the limitation of time and made another age live anew before our eyes.

Hysterical, garrulous, manneristic as he was, there was yet a truly epic sweep in certain passages of his History of France.  The personages were raised from the oblivion into which the dry-as-dust professors had sunk them, and became live human beings.  What matter, then, if Michelet was the least trustworthy of historians since he was the most personal and the most evocative?

As for the others, they simply ferreted around among the old state papers, clipped them, and, following M. Taine’s example, arranged, ticketed, and mounted their sensational gleanings in logical sequence, rejecting, of course, everything that did not advance the case they were trying to make.  They denied themselves imagination and enthusiasm and claimed that they did not invent.  True enough, but they did none the less distort history by the selection they employed.  And how simply and summarily they disposed of things!  It was discovered that such and such an event occurred in France in several communities, and straightway it was decided that the whole country lived, acted, and thought in a certain manner at a certain hour, on a certain day, in a certain year.

No less than Michelet they were doughty falsifiers, but they lacked his vision.  They dealt in knickknacks, and their trivialities were as far from creating a unified impression as were the pointillistic puzzles of modern painters and the word hashes cooked up by the decadent poets.

And worst of all, thought Durtal, the biographers.  The depilators! taking all the hair off a real man’s chest.  They wrote ponderous tomes to prove that Jan Steen was a teetotaler.  Somebody had deloused Villon and shown that the Grosse Margot of the ballade was not a woman but an inn sign.  Pretty soon they would be representing the poet as a priggishly honest and judicious man.  One would say that in writing their monographs these historians feared to dishonour themselves by treating of artists who had tasted somewhat fully and passionately of life.  Hence the expurgation of masterpieces that an artist might appear as commonplace a bourgeois as his commentator.