Just now I am lost in the Church Fathers.  As for my novel l’Education sentimentale, I am paying no more attention to it, God be thanked!  It is recopied.  Other hands have gone over it.  So, the thing is no longer mine.  It does not exist any longer, good night.  I have taken up again my old hobby of Saint Antoine.  I have reread my notes, I am making another new plan and I am devouring the ecclesiastical memoirs of the Nain de Tillemont.  I hope to succeed in finding a logical connection (and therefore a dramatic interest) between the different hallucinations of the Saint.  This extravagant setting pleases me and I am absorbed in it, there you are!

My poor Bouilhet bothers me.  He is in such a nervous state that they have advised him to take a little trip to the south of France.  He is overwhelmed by an unconquerable melancholy.  Isn’t it queer!  He who was so gay, formerly!

My Heavens!  What a beautiful and farcical thing is the life of the desert Fathers!  But without doubt they were all Buddhists.  That is a stylish problem to work at, and its solution would be more important than the election of an academician.  Oh! ye men of little faith!  Long live Saint Polycarp!

Fangeat, who has reappeared recently, is the citizen who, on the 25th day of February, 1848, demanded the death of Louis-Philippe “without a trial.”  That is the way one serves the cause of progress.

CXXII.  TO GEORGE SAND

What a good and charming letter was yours, adored master!  There is no one but you! upon my word of honor!  I am ending by believing it.  A wind of stupidity and folly is now blowing over the world.  Those who stand up firm and straight against it are rare.

This is what I meant when I wrote that the times of politics were over.  In the 18th century the chief business was diplomacy.  “The secrecy of the cabinets” really existed.  The peoples still were sufficiently amenable to be separated and to be combined.  That order of things seems to me to have said its last word in 1815.  Since then, one has hardly done anything except dispute about the external form that it is fitting to give the fantastic and odious being called the State.

Experience proves (it seems to me) that no form contains the best in itself; orleanism, republic, empire do not mean anything anymore, since the most contradictory ideas can enter into each one of these pigeon holes.  All the flags have been so soiled with blood and with filth that it is time not to have any at all.  Down with words!  No more symbols nor fetiches!  The great moral of this reign will be to prove that universal suffrage is as senseless as the divine right although a little less odions!

The question is then out of place.  One is concerned no longer with dreaming of the best form of government, since all are equal, but with making science prevail.  That is the most important.  The rest will follow inevitably.  Purely intellectual men have rendered more service to the human race than all the Saint Vincent de Pauls in the world!  And politics will be an everlasting folly so long as it is not subordinate to science.  The government of a country ought to be a section of the Institute, and the last section of all.