ought he read the fate of his son in
the face of every acquaintance he met. And so it was in later campaigns,
as De Maistre records in correspondence that glows with tender and
healthy solicitude. All this is worth dwelling upon, for two reasons.
First, because De Maistre has been too much regarded and spoken of as a
man of cold sensibility, and little moved by the hardships which fill
the destiny of our unfortunate race. And, secondly, because his own keen
acquaintance with mental anguish helps us to understand the zeal with
which he attempts to reconcile the blind cruelty and pain and torture
endured by mortals with the benignity and wisdom of the immortal. 'After
all,' he used to say, 'there are only two real evils--remorse and
disease.' This is true enough for an apophthegm, but as a matter of fact
it never for an instant dulled his sensibility to far less supreme forms
of agony than the recollection of irreparable pain struck into the lives
of others. It is interesting and suggestive to recall how a later
publicist viewed the ills that dwarf our little lives. 'If I were asked
to class human miseries,' said Tocqueville, 'I would do so in this
order: first, Disease; second, Death; third, Doubt.' At a later date, he
altered the order, and deliberately declared doubt to be the most
insupportable of all evils, worse than death itself. But Tocqueville was
an aristocrat, as Guizot once told him, who accepted his defeat. He
stood on the brink of the great torrent of democracy, and shivered. De
Maistre was an aristocrat too, but he was incapable of knowing what
doubt or hesitation meant. He never dreamt that his cause was lost, and
he mocked and defied the Revolution to the end. We easily see how
natures of this sort, ardent, impetuous, unflinching, find themselves in
the triumphant paths that lead to remorse at their close, and how they
thus come to feel remorse rather than doubt as the consummate agony of
the human mind.

Having had this glimpse of De Maistre's character away from his books,
we need not linger long over the remaining events of his life. In 1814
his wife and two daughters joined him in the Russian capital. Two years
later an outburst of religious fanaticism caused the sudden expulsion of
the Jesuits from Russia, to De Maistre's deep mortification. Several
conversions had taken place from the Orthodox to the Western faith, and
these inflamed the Orthodox party, headed by the Prince de Galitzin, the
minister