rbles with mutilated inscriptions, on the sense of which
learned men were unable to agree. And, as formerly, on the Capitol, among
the buried remnants of Jupiter's temple, goats strayed and climbed
through the solitude, browsing upon the bushes, amidst the deep silence
of the oppressive summer sunlight, which only the buzzing flies
disturbed.

Then, only then, did Pierre feel the supreme collapse within him. It was
really all over, Science was victorious, nothing of the old world
remained. What use would it be then to become the great schismatic, the
reformer who was awaited? Would it not simply mean the building up of a
new dream? Only the eternal struggle of Science against the Unknown, the
searching, pursuing inquiry which incessantly moderated man's thirst for
the divine, now seemed to him of import, leaving him waiting to know if
she would ever triumph so completely as to suffice mankind, by satisfying
all its wants. And in the disaster which had overcome his apostolic
enthusiasm, in presence of all those ruins, having lost his faith, and
even his hope of utilising old Catholicism for social and moral
salvation, there only remained reason that held him up. She had at one
moment given way. If he had dreamt that book, and had just passed through
that terrible crisis, it was because sentiment had once again overcome
reason within him. It was his mother, so to say, who had wept in his
heart, who had filled him with an irresistible desire to relieve the
wretched and prevent the massacres which seemed near at hand; and his
passion for charity had thus swept aside the scruples of his
intelligence. But it was his father's voice that he now heard, lofty and
bitter reason which, though it had fled, at present came back in all
sovereignty. As he had done already after Lourdes, he protested against
the glorification of the absurd and the downfall of common sense. Reason
alone enabled him to walk erect and firm among the remnants of the old
beliefs, even amidst the obscurities and failures of Science. Ah! Reason,
it was through her alone that he suffered, through her alone that he
could content himself, and he swore that he would now always seek to
satisfy her, even if in doing so he should lose his happiness.

At that moment it would have been vain for him to ask what he ought to
do. Everything remained in suspense, the world stretched before him still
littered with the ruins of the past, of which, to-morrow, it would
perhaps