Valmy, intended to betray her; whether
in Prairial it was the Mountain or the Girondist party that began, and
in Thermidor the Jacobins or the Plain; what matters it to the
development of the Revolution, of which the causes were far to seek and
the results incalculable?

Therefore it was bound to accomplish itself, to be what it was; but,
suppose the flight of the King without impediment, Robespierre escaping
or Bonaparte assassinated--chances which depended upon an innkeeper
proving less scrupulous, a door being left open, or a sentinel falling
asleep--and the progress of the world would have taken a different
direction.

They had no longer on the men and the events of that period a single
well-balanced idea. In order to form an impartial judgment upon it, it
would have been necessary to have read all the histories, all the
memoirs, all the newspapers, and all the manuscript productions, for
through the least omission might arise an error, which might lead to
others without limit.

They abandoned the subject. But the taste for history had come to them,
the need of truth for its own sake.

Perhaps it is easier to find it in more ancient epochs? The authors,
being far removed from the events, ought to speak of them without
passion. And they began the good Rollin.

"What a heap of rubbish!" exclaimed Bouvard, after the first chapter.

"Wait a bit," said Pecuchet, rummaging at the end of their library,
where lay heaped up the books of the last proprietor, an old lawyer, an
accomplished man with a mania for literature; and, having put out of
their places a number of novels and plays, together with an edition of
Montesquieu and translations of Horace, he obtained what he was looking
for--Beaufort's work on Roman History.

Titus Livius attributes the foundation of Rome to Romulus; Sallust gives
the credit of it to the Trojans under AEneas. Coriolanus died in exile,
according to Fabius Pictor; through the stratagems of Attius Tullius, if
we may believe Dionysius. Seneca states that Horatius Cocles came back
victorious; and Dionysius that he was wounded in the leg. And La Mothe
le Vayer gives expression to similar doubts with reference to other
nations.

There is no agreement as to the antiquity of the Chaldeans, the age of
Homer, the existence of Zoroaster, the two empires of Assyria. Quintus
Curtius has manufactured fables. Plutarch gives the lie to Herodotus. We
should have a different idea of Caesar if Vercingeto