to lead the people by his powers of oratory, as he leads them now.  I heard him speak in French as fluently as in English; and I resolved on my part to speak likewise in English as easily as he did in French.  And when we parted it was with a mutual resolve to lead!—­to lead—­and ever still to lead!—­we would starve on our theories, we said, but we would speak out if it cost us our very lives.  To earn daily bread I managed to obtain steady employment as a labourer in the fields,—­and I soon gained sufficient to keep my mother and myself.  My friend Aubrey had imbued me thoroughly with the love of incessant hard work; there was no disgrace, he said, in digging the soil, if the brain were kept working as well as the hands.  And I did keep my brain working; I allowed it also to lie fallow, and to absorb everything of nature that was complex, grand and beautiful,—­and from such studies I learnt the goodness and the majesty of the Creator as they are never found in human expositions of Him made by the preachers of creeds.  At eighteen I made my first public address,—­and the next year published my first book in Tours.  But though I won an instant success my soul was hampered and heavy with the burning thought of vengeance; and this thought greatly hindered the true conceptions of life that I desired to entertain.  When my mother died, and her failing voice crooned for the last time, ’Ah, la tristesse d’avoir aime!’ the spark of hatred I had cherished all the years of my life for my father burst into a flame, and leapt up to its final height this morning as you saw.  Now it has gone out into dust and ashes—­ the way of all such flames!  I have been spared for better things I hope.  What I have written and done, France knows,—­but my thoughts are not limited to France, they seek a wider horizon.  France is a decaying nation—­her doom is sealed.  I work and write for the To-Be, not the Has-Been.  Such as my life is, it has never been darkened or brightened by love of any sort, save that which my mother gave me.  Your Eminence,” and he turned towards the Cardinal, “asks me why I inculcate theories which suggest change, terror and confusion;—­ Monseigneur, terror and confusion can never be caused save among the ranks of those who have secret reason to be terrorised!  There is nothing terrifying in Truth to those who are true!  If I distract and alarm unworthy societies, revolting hypocrism, established shams and miserable conventions, I am only the wielder of the broom that sweeps out the cobwebs and the dust from a dirty house.  My one desire is to make the habitation of Christian souls clean!  Terror and confusion there will be,—­there must be;—­the time is ripe for it—­none of us can escape it—­it is the prophesied period of ’men’s hearts failing them for fear, and looking after those things which are coming on the earth.’  I have not made the time.  I am born of it--one with it;—­God arranges these things.  I am not working for self or for money,—­I