The Republic of ’48 soon died:  his uncle was among the vanquished; and this, to the young man, had but an additional attraction.  Without his father’s knowledge, he went to see him, as if on a pilgrimage to a holy shrine; and he was well received.

He found his uncle exasperated—­not so much against his enemies as against his own party, to which he attributed all the disasters of the cause.

“They never can make revolutions with gloves on,” he said in a solemn, dogmatic tone.  “The men of ’ninety-three did not wear them.  You can not make an omelette without first breaking the eggs.

“The pioneers of the future should march on, axe in hand!

“The chrysalis of the people is not hatched upon roses!

“Liberty is a goddess who demands great holocausts.  Had they made a Reign of Terror in ’forty-eight, they would now be masters!”

These high-flown maxims astonished Louis de Camors.  In his youthful simplicity he had an infinite respect for the men who had governed his country in her darkest hour; not more that they had given up power as poor as when they assumed it, than that they left it with their hands unstained with blood:  To this praise—­which will be accorded them in history, which redresses many contemporary injustices—­he added a reproach which he could not reconcile with the strange regrets of his uncle.  He reproached them with not having more boldly separated the New Republic, in its management and minor details, from the memories of the old one.  Far from agreeing with his uncle that a revival of the horrors of ’ninety-three would have assured the triumph of the New Republic, he believed it had sunk under the bloody shadow of its predecessor.  He believed that, owing to this boasted Terror, France had been for centuries the only country in which the dangers of liberty outweighed its benefits.

It is useless to dwell longer on the relations of Louis de Camors with his uncle Dardennes.  It is enough that he was doubtful and discouraged, and made the error of holding the cause responsible for the violence of its lesser apostles, and that he adopted the fatal error, too common in France at that period, of confounding progress with discord, liberty with license, and revolution with terrorism!

The natural result of irritation and disenchantment on this ardent spirit was to swing it rapidly around to the opposite pole of opinion.  After all, Camors argued, his birth, his name, his family ties all pointed out his true course, which was to combat the cruel and despotic doctrines which he believed he detected under these democratic theories.  Another thing in the habitual language of his uncle also shocked and repelled him—­the profession of an absolute atheism.  He had within him, in default of a formal creed, a fund of general belief and respect for holy things—­that kind of religious sensibility which was shocked by impious cynicism.  Further he could not comprehend then, or ever afterward, how principles alone, without faith in some higher sanction, could sustain themselves by their own strength in the human conscience.