In the time of the Restoration party hatred was far more bitter than in our day.  Intensity of feeling is diminished in our high-pressure age.  The critic cuts a book to pieces and shakes hands with the author afterwards, and the victim must keep on good terms with his slaughterer, or run the gantlet of innumerable jokes at his expense.  If he refuses, he is unsociable, eaten up with self-love, he is sulky and rancorous, he bears malice, he is a bad bed-fellow.  To-day let an author receive a treacherous stab in the back, let him avoid the snares set for him with base hypocrisy, and endure the most unhandsome treatment, he must still exchange greetings with his assassin, who, for that matter, claims the esteem and friendship of his victim.  Everything can be excused and justified in an age which has transformed vice into virtue and virtue into vice.  Good-fellowship has come to be the most sacred of our liberties; the representatives of the most opposite opinions courteously blunt the edge of their words, and fence with buttoned foils.  But in those almost forgotten days the same theatre could scarcely hold certain Royalist and Liberal journalists; the most malignant provocation was offered, glances were like pistol-shots, the least spark produced an explosion of quarrel.  Who has not heard his neighbor’s half-smothered oath on the entrance of some man in the forefront of the battle on the opposing side?  There were but two parties—­Royalists and Liberals, Classics and Romantics.  You found the same hatred masquerading in either form, and no longer wondered at the scaffolds of the Convention.

Lucien had been a Liberal and a hot Voltairean; now he was a rabid Royalist and a Romantic.  Martainville, the only one among his colleagues who really liked him and stood by him loyally, was more hated by the Liberals than any man on the Royalist side, and this fact drew down all the hate of the Liberals on Lucien’s head.  Martainville’s staunch friendship injured Lucien.  Political parties show scanty gratitude to outpost sentinels, and leave leaders of forlorn hopes to their fate; ’tis a rule of warfare which holds equally good in matters political, to keep with the main body of the army if you mean to succeed.  The spite of the small Liberal papers fastened at once on the opportunity of coupling the two names, and flung them into each other’s arms.  Their friendship, real or imaginary, brought down upon them both a series of articles written by pens dipped in gall.  Felicien Vernou was furious with jealousy of Lucien’s social success; and believed, like all his old associates, in the poet’s approaching elevation.

The fiction of Lucien’s treason was embellished with every kind of aggravating circumstance; he was called Judas the Less, Martainville being Judas the Great, for Martainville was supposed (rightly or wrongly) to have given up the Bridge of Pecq to the foreign invaders.  Lucien said jestingly to des Lupeaulx that he himself, surely, had given up the Asses’ Bridge.