y of self-defense becomes so much
more certainly a prey according as its brilliancy, imprudence and even
gentleness deliver it over in advance to the gross appetites roaming
around it. Where find resistance in characters formed by the habits we
have just described? To defend ourselves we must, first of all, look
carefully around us, see and foresee, and provide for danger. How could
they do this living as they did? Their circle is too narrow and too
carefully enclosed. Confined to their castles and mansions they see only
those of their own sphere, they hear only the echo of their own ideas,
they imagine that there is nothing beyond the public seems to consist of
two hundred persons. Moreover, disagreeable truths are not admitted into
a drawing-room, especially when of personal import, an idle fancy there
becoming a dogma because it becomes conventional. Here, accordingly, we
find those who, already deceived by the limitations of their accustomed
horizon, fortify their delusion still more by delusions about their
fellow men. They comprehend nothing of the vast world, which envelops
their little world; they are incapable of entering into the sentiments
of a bourgeois, of a villager; they have no conception of the peasant as
he is but as they would like him to be. The idyll is in fashion, and no
one dares dispute it; any other supposition would be false because it
would be disagreeable, and as the drawing rooms have decided that all
will go well, all must go well. Never was a delusion more complete and
more voluntary. The Duc d'Orleans offers to wager a hundred louis that
the States-General will dissolve without accomplishing anything, not
even abolishing the lettre-de-cachet.. After the demolition has begun,
and yet again after it is finished, they will form opinions no more
accurate. They have no idea of social architecture; they know nothing
about its materials, its proportions, or its harmonious balance; they
have had no hand in it, they have never worked at it. They are entirely
ignorant of the old building[2321] in which they occupy the first
story. They are not qualified to calculate either its pressure or its
resistance.[2322] They conclude, finally, that it is better to let
the thing tumble in, and that the restoration of the edifice in their
behalf will follow its own course, and that they will return to their
drawing-room, expressly rebuilt for them, and freshly gilded, to begin
over again the pleasant conversatio