sation. And Armand Monnier lived in that period and
was one of that class. The little knowledge that his mind, impulsive
and ardent, had picked up out of books that warred with the great
foundations of existing society, had originated in ill advices. A man
stored with much knowledge would never have let Madame de Grantmesnil's
denunciations of marriage rites, or Louis Blane's vindication of
Robespierre as the representative of the working against the middle
class, influence his practical life. He would have assessed such
opinions at their real worth; and whatever that worth might seem to
him, would not to such opinions have committed the conduct of his
life. Opinion is not fateful: conduct is. A little knowledge crazes
an earnest, warm-blooded, powerful creature like Armand Monnier into a
fanatic. He takes an opinion which pleases him as a revelation from the
gods; that opinion shapes his conduct; that conduct is his fate. Woe to
the philosopher who serenely flings before the little knowledge of
the artisan dogmas as harmless as the Atlantis of Plato if only to be
discussed by philosophers, and deadly as the torches of Ate if seized as
articles of a creed by fanatics! But thrice woe to the artisan who makes
himself the zealot of the Dogma!

Poor Armand acts on the opinions he adopts; proves his contempt for the
marriage state by living with the wife of another; resents, as natures
so inherently manly must do, the Society that visits on her his defiance
of its laws; throws himself, head foremost, against that society
altogether; necessarily joins all who have other reasons for
hostility to Society; he himself having every inducement not to join
indiscriminate strikes--high wages, a liberal employer, ample savings,
the certainty of soon becoming employer himself. No; that is not enough
to the fanatic: he persists on being dupe and victim. He, this great
king of labour, crowned by Nature, and cursed with that degree of little
knowledge which does not comprehend how much more is required before
a schoolboy would admit it to be knowledge at all,--he rushes into the
maddest of all speculations--that of the artisan with little knowledge
and enormous faith--that which intrusts the safety and repose and
dignity of life to some ambitious adventurer, who uses his warm heart
for the adventurer's frigid purpose, much as the lawyer-government of
September used the Communists,--much as, in every revolution of France,
a Bertrand has us