al protectors, encountering any
surviving authority; without, in these provinces subject to the yoke of
universal centralization, encountering a single independent group
and without the possibility of forming, in this society broken up by
despotism, any centers of enterprise and resistance; without finding,
in this upper class disarmed by its very humanity, a policy devoid of
illusion and capable of action. Without which all these good intentions
and fine intellects shall be unable to protect themselves against the
two enemies of all liberty and of all order, against the contagion of
the democratic nightmare which disturbs the ablest heads and against the
irruptions of the popular brutality which perverts the best of laws. At
the moment of opening the States-General the course of ideas and events
is not only fixed but, again, apparent. Beforehand and unconsciously,
each generation bears (Page 400/296)within itself its past and its
future; and to this one, long before the end, one might have been able
to foretell its fate, and, if both details as well as the entire action
could have been foreseen, one would readily have accepted the following
fiction made up by a converted Laharpe[5501] when, at the end of the
Directory, he arranged his souvenirs:

II.

"It seems to me," he says, "as if it were but yesterday, and yet it is
at the beginning of the year 1788. We were dining with one of our fellow
members of the Academy, a grand seignior and a man of intelligence. The
company was numerous and of every profession, courtiers, advocates, men
of letters and academicians, all had feasted luxuriously according
to custom. At the dessert the wines of Malvoisie and of Constance
contributed to the social gaiety a sort of freedom not always kept
within decorous limits. At that time society had reached the point at
which everything may be expressed that excites laughter. Champfort
had read to us his impious and libertine stories, and great ladies had
listened to these without recourse to their fans. Hence a deluge of
witticisms against religion, one quoting a tirade from 'La Pucelle,'
another bringing forward certain philosophical stanzas by Diderot. . . .
and with unbounded applause. . . . The conversation becomes more
serious; admiration is expressed at the revolution accomplished by
Voltaire, and all agree in its being the first title to his fame. 'He
gave the tone to his century, finding readers in the antechambers as
well