y task you have
undertaken, for Pyrot his become the symbol of the oppressed and of all
the social iniquities that now exist; by destroying one you make all the
others tremble."

When Phoenix ended, comrade Sapor spoke in these terms:

"You are advised to abandon your task in order to do something with
which you have no concern. Why throw yourselves into a conflict
where, on whatever side you turn, you will find none but your natural,
uncompromising, even necessary opponents? Are the financiers to be less
hated by us than the army? What inept and criminal generosity is it that
hurries you to save those seven hundred Pyrotists whom you will always
find confronting you in the social war?

"It is proposed that you act the part of the police for your enemies,
and that you are to re-establish for them the order which their own
crimes have disturbed. Magnanimity pushed to this degree changes its
name.

"Comrades, there is a point at which infamy becomes fatal to a society.
Penguin society is being strangled by its infamy, and you are requested
to save it, to give it air that it can breathe. This is simply turning
you into ridicule.

"Leave is to smother itself and let us gaze at its last convulsions with
joyful contempt, only regretting that it has so entirely corrupted the
soil on which it has been built that we shall find nothing but poisoned
mud on which to lay the foundations of a new society."

When Sapor had ended his speech comrade Lapersonne pronounced these few
words:

"Phoenix calls us to Pyrot's help for the reason that Pyrot is innocent.
It seems to me that that is a very bad reason. If Pyrot is innocent he
has behaved like a good soldier and has always conscientiously worked
at his trade, which principally consists in shooting the people. That is
not a motive to make the people brave all dangers in his defence. When
it is demonstrated to me that Pyrot is guilty and that he stole the army
hay, I shall be on his side."

Comrade Larrivee afterwards spoke.

"I am not of my friend, Phoenix's opinion but I am not with my friend
Sapor either. I do not believe that the party is bound to embrace a
cause as soon as we are told that that cause is just. That, I am afraid,
is a grievous abuse of words and a dangerous equivocation. For social
justice is not revolutionary justice. They are both in perpetual
antagonism: to serve the one is to oppose the other. As for me, my
choice is made. I am for revolutionary just