s none: "These things require no proof." Why, then, miserable
reasoner, did you make so much noise about your proofs?

Well! do not prove! only love! and we will let you off everything else.
Say only one word from the heart to comfort this crowd. All that
variegated mass of living heads, that you see so closely assembled
around your pulpit are not blocks of stone, but so many living souls.
Those yonder are young men, the rising generation, our future society.
They are of happy dispositions, full of spirit, fresh and entire, such
as God made them, and untamed; they rush forward incautiously even to
the very brink of precipices. What! youth, danger, futurity, and hopes
clouded with fear--does not all this move you? Will nothing open your
fatherly heart?

Mark, too, that brilliant crowd of women and flowers: in all that
splendour so delightful to the eye there is much suffering. I pray you
to speak one word of comfort to them. You know they are your
daughters, who come every evening so forlorn to weep at your feet.
They confide in you, and tell you everything; you know their wounds.
Try to find some consoling word--surely that cannot be so difficult.
What man is there who, in seeing the heart of a woman bleeding before
him, would not feel his own heart inspired with words to heal it? A
dumb man, for want of words, would find what is worth more, a flood of
tears!

What shall we say of those who, in presence of so many desponding,
sickly, and confiding persons, give them, as their only remedy, the
spirit of an academy, glittering commonplaces, old paradoxes,
Bonaparteism, socialism, and what not? There is in all this, we must
confess, a sad dryness and a great want of feeling.

Ah! you _are_ dry and harsh! I felt this the other day (it was in
December last), when I read on the walls, as I was passing by, an order
from the archbishop. It was a case of suicide; a poor wretch had
killed himself in the church of Saint-Gervais. Was it misery, passion,
madness, spleen, or moral weakness in this melancholy season? No cause
was mentioned; the body alone was there with the blood on the marble
slabs; but no explanation. By what gradation of griefs,
disappointments, and anguish had he been induced to commit this
unnatural act? What steps of moral purgatory had he descended before
he reached the bottom of the abyss? Who could say? No one. But any
man with a gleam of imagination in his heart, sees in this solemn
mys