of necessity be composed of several strata.  You may disturb it temporarily into an amorphous whole by a revolution such as this; but only temporarily.  Soon out of the chaos which is all that you and your kind can ever produce, order must be restored or life will perish; and with the restoration of order comes the restoration of the various strata necessary to organized society.  Those that were yesterday at the top may in the new order of things find themselves dispossessed without any benefit to the whole.  That change I resisted.  The spirit of it I fought with whatever weapons were available, whenever and wherever I encountered it.  M. de Vilmorin was an incendiary of the worst type, a man of eloquence full of false ideals that misled poor ignorant men into believing that the change proposed could make the world a better place for them.  You are an intelligent man, and I defy you to answer me from your heart and conscience that such a thing was true or possible.  You know that it is untrue; you know that it is a pernicious doctrine; and what made it worse on the lips of M. de Vilmorin was that he was sincere and eloquent.  His voice was a danger that must be removed — silenced.  So much was necessary in self-defence.  In self-defence I did it.  I had no grudge against M. de Vilmorin.  He was a man of my own class; a gentleman of pleasant ways, amiable, estimable, and able.

“You conceive me slaying him for the very lust of slaying, like some beast of the jungle flinging itself upon its natural prey.  That has been your error from the first.  I did what I did with the very heaviest heart — oh, spare me your sneer! — I do not lie, I have never lied.  And I swear to you here and now, by my every hope of Heaven, that what I say is true.  I loathed the thing I did.  Yet for my own sake and the sake of my order I must do it.  Ask yourself whether M. de Vilmorin would have hesitated for a moment if by procuring my death he could have brought the Utopia of his dreams a moment nearer realization.

“After that.  You determined that the sweetest vengeance would be to frustrate my ends by reviving in yourself the voice that I had silenced, by yourself carrying forward the fantastic apostleship of equality that was M. de Vilmorin’s.  You lacked the vision that would have shown you that God did not create men equals.  Well, you are in case to-night to judge which of us was right, which wrong.  You see what is happening here in Paris.  You see the foul spectre of Anarchy stalking through a land fallen into confusion.  Probably you have enough imagination to conceive something of what must follow.  And do you deceive yourself that out of this filth and ruin there will rise up an ideal form of society?  Don’t you understand that society must re-order itself presently out of all this?

“But why say more?  I must have said enough to make you understand the only thing that really matters — that I killed M. de Vilmorin as a matter of duty to my order.  And the truth — which though it may offend you should also convince you — is that to-night I can look back on the deed with equanimity, without a single regret, apart from what lies between you and me.