people--in a word, the whole _credo_ of the
revolution.... In order to shake that faith [in these principles]
... it was necessary that human reason, proclaimed infallible,
should turn its arms against itself. And that is what happened.
Scientific criticism, after having ruined old dogmatism, ... made
as short work of the revolutionary legend as of the monarchical
one, and showed itself as pitiless for the rights of man as it had
been for the rights of God. All these causes combined, sufficiently
explain the nihilism and pessimism which invaded the souls of the
young during the past ten years.... Clear-sighted boys analyzed
life with a vigor and a precision unknown to their predecessors;
having analyzed it, they found it bad; they turned away from life
with fear and horror. There was heard from the peaks of
intelligence a great cry of discouragement:--'Beware of deceitful
nature; fear life, emancipate yourselves from life!' This cry was
first uttered by the masters of contemporary thought,--a
Schopenhauer, a Taine, a Tolstoy; below them, thousands of humbler
voices repeat it in chorus. According to each one's turn of mind,
the new philosophy assumed shades different in appearance--Buddhist
nirvana, atheistic nihilism, mystic asceticism; but all these
theories proceeded from the same sentiment, and all these doctrines
may be reduced to the same formula:--'Let us depreciate life, let
us escape from its snares.'"

Paul Desjardins, by name and family, belongs to the old _bourgeoisie_ of
France, that reserve force of Gallic virtue to which the French people
always look for help in political and moral crises. Like most of the
young men of distinction in the French world of letters, he combines
professional and literary work; he is professor of rhetoric at the Lycee
Veuves in Paris, and a member of the brilliant editorial staff of the
Journal des Debats. Paris offered to his grasp her same old choice of
subjects, to his eye the same aspects of life, which form her one
freehold for all artists, and he had but the instrument of his
guild--his pen; the series of his collected contributions to journals
and magazines bear a no more distinctive title than the hackneyed one of
'Notes Contemporaines,' but the sub-titles betray at once the trend of
originality: 'Great Souls and Little Lives,' 'The Obscure Ones,'
'Companions of