“This is no longer the time, gentlemen, when civil discord ensanguined our public places, when the landlord, the business-man, the working-man himself, falling asleep at night, lying down to peaceful sleep, trembled lest he should be awakened suddenly by the noise of incendiary tocsins, when the most subversive doctrines audaciously sapped foundations.”

“Well, someone down there might see me,” Rodolphe resumed, “then I should have to invent excuses for a fortnight; and with my bad reputation—­”

“Oh, you are slandering yourself,” said Emma.

“No!  It is dreadful, I assure you.”

“But, gentlemen,” continued the councillor, “if, banishing from my memory the remembrance of these sad pictures, I carry my eyes back to the actual situation of our dear country, what do I see there?  Everywhere commerce and the arts are flourishing; everywhere new means of communication, like so many new arteries in the body of the state, establish within it new relations.  Our great industrial centres have recovered all their activity; religion, more consolidated, smiles in all hearts; our ports are full, confidence is born again, and France breathes once more!”

“Besides,” added Rodolphe, “perhaps from the world’s point of view they are right.”

“How so?” she asked.

“What!” said he.  “Do you not know that there are souls constantly tormented?  They need by turns to dream and to act, the purest passions and the most turbulent joys, and thus they fling themselves into all sorts of fantasies, of follies.”

Then she looked at him as one looks at a traveller who has voyaged over strange lands, and went on—­

“We have not even this distraction, we poor women!”

“A sad distraction, for happiness isn’t found in it.”

“But is it ever found?” she asked.

“Yes; one day it comes,” he answered.

“And this is what you have understood,” said the councillor.

“You, farmers, agricultural labourers! you pacific pioneers of a work that belongs wholly to civilization! you, men of progress and morality, you have understood, I say, that political storms are even more redoubtable than atmospheric disturbances!”

“It comes one day,” repeated Rodolphe, “one day suddenly, and when one is despairing of it.  Then the horizon expands; it is as if a voice cried, ‘It is here!’ You feel the need of confiding the whole of your life, of giving everything, sacrificing everything to this being.  There is no need for explanations; they understand one another.  They have seen each other in dreams!”

(And he looked at her.) “In fine, here it is, this treasure so sought after, here before you.  It glitters, it flashes; yet one still doubts, one does not believe it; one remains dazzled, as if one went out iron darkness into light.”

And as he ended Rodolphe suited the action to the word.  He passed his hand over his face, like a man seized with giddiness.  Then he let it fall on Emma’s.  She took hers away.