e
work. In spite of everything, it was a cry of health, of hope in the
future. He spoke as a benefactor who, since heredity made the world,
wished to fix its laws, in order to control it, and to make a new and
happy world. Was there then only mud in this overflowing stream, whose
sluices he had opened? How much gold had passed, mingled with the grass
and the flowers on its borders? Hundreds of beings were still flying
swiftly before her, and she was haunted by good and charming faces,
delicate girlish profiles, by the serene beauty of women. All passion
bled there, hearts swelled with every tender rapture. They were
numerous, the Jeannes, the Angeliques, the Paulines, the Marthes, the
Gervaises, the Helenes. They and others, even those who were least good,
even terrible men, the worst of the band, showed a brotherhood with
humanity.

And it was precisely this breath which she had felt pass, this broad
current of sympathy, that he had introduced naturally into his exact
scientific lesson. He did not seem to be moved; he preserved the
impersonal and correct attitude of the demonstrator, but within him
what tender suffering, what a fever of devotion, what a giving up of
his whole being to the happiness of others? His entire work, constructed
with such mathematical precision, was steeped in this fraternal
suffering, even in its most cruel ironies. Had he not just spoken of
the animals, like an elder brother of the wretched living beings that
suffer? Suffering exasperated him; his wrath was because of his
too lofty dream, and he had become harsh only in his hatred of the
factitious and the transitory; dreaming of working, not for the polite
society of a time, but for all humanity in the gravest hours of its
history. Perhaps, even, it was this revolt against the vulgarity of the
time which had made him throw himself, in bold defiance, into theories
and their application. And the work remained human, overflowing as it
was with an infinite pity for beings and things.

Besides, was it not life? There is no absolute evil. Most often a virtue
presents itself side by side with a defect. No man is bad to every one,
each man makes the happiness of some one; so that, when one does not
view things from a single standpoint only, one recognizes in the end
the utility of every human being. Those who believe in God should say
to themselves that if their God does not strike the wicked dead, it is
because he sees his work in its totality,