rrest, and its reflux,
which carries with it the ruins of the institution which it has itself
shattered. I can understand all that, but lance against lance, sword
against sword, men against men, a people against a people! I can
understand the deadly rage of the victors, the sanguinary reaction of
the vanquished, the political volcanoes which rumble in the bowels of
the globe, shake the earth, topple over thrones, upset monarchies, and
roll heads and crowns on the scaffold. But what I cannot understand is
this mutilation of the granite, this placing of monuments beyond the
pale of the law, the destruction of inanimate things, which belong
neither to those who destroy them nor to the epoch in which they are
destroyed; this pillage of the gigantic library where the antiquarian
can read the archeological history of a country. Oh! the vandals, the
barbarians! Worse than that, the idiots! who revenge the Borgia crimes
and the debauches of Louis XV. on stone. How well those Pharaohs, Menaes,
and Cheops knew man as the most perversive, destructive and evil of
animals! They who built their pyramids, not with carved traceries, nor
lacy spires, but with solid blocks of granite fifty feet square! How
they must have laughed in the depths of those sepulchres as they watched
Time dull its scythe and pashas wear out their nails in vain against
them. Let us build pyramids, my dear Sir John. They are not difficult as
architecture, nor beautiful as art, but they are solid; and that enables
a general to say four thousand years later: 'Soldiers, from the apex of
these monuments forty centuries are watching you!' On my honor, my lord,
I long to meet a windmill this moment that I might tilt against it."

And Roland, bursting into his accustomed laugh, dragged Sir John in the
direction of the chateau. But Sir John stopped him and asked: "Is there
nothing else to see in the city except the church?"

"Formerly, my lord," replied Roland, "before they made a hay-loft of
it, I should have asked you to come down with me into the vaults of
the Dukes of Savoy. We could have hunted for that subterranean passage,
nearly three miles long, which is said to exist there, and which,
according to these rumors, communicates with the grotto of Ceyzeriat.
Please observe, I should never offer such a pleasure trip except to an
Englishman; it would have been like a scene from your celebrated Anne
Radcliffe in the 'Mysteries of Udolpho.' But, as you see, that is
im