times
assailed, as well as the hopes, consolations, joys in which in general
his soul was bathed. Wherever we follow his steps local tradition has
preserved the memory of rude assaults of the tempter which he had to
undergo.

It is no doubt useless to recall here the elementary fact that if
manners change with the times, man himself is quite as strangely
modified. If, according to education, and the manner of life, such or
such a sense may develop an acuteness which confounds common
experience--hearing in the musician, touch with the blind, etc.--we may
estimate by this how much sharper certain senses may have been then than
now. Several centuries ago visual delusion was with adults what it is
now with children in remotest country parts. A quivering leaf, a
nothing, a breath, an unexplained sound creates an image which they see
and in the reality of which they believe absolutely. Man is all of a
piece; the hyperaesthesia of the will presupposes that of the
sensibility, one is conditioned on the other, and it is this which makes
men of revolutionary epochs so much greater than nature. It would be
absurd under pretext of truth to try to bring them back to the common
measures of our contemporary society, for they were veritably demigods
for good as for evil.

Legends are not always absurd. The men of '93 are still near to us, but
it is nevertheless with good right that legend has taken possession of
them, and it is pitiable to see these men who, ten times a day, had to
take resolutions where everything was at stake--their destiny, that of
their ideas, and sometimes that of their country--judged as if they had
been mere worthy citizens, with leisure to discuss at length every
morning the garments they were to wear or the _menu_ of a dinner. Most
of the time historians have perceived only a part of the truth about
them; for not only were there two men in them, almost all of them are at
the same time poets, demagogues, prophets, heroes, martyrs. To write
history, then, is to translate and transpose almost continually. The men
of the thirteenth century could not bring themselves to not refer to an
exterior cause the inner motions of their souls. In what appears to us
as the result of our own reflections they saw inspiration; where we say
desires, instincts, passions, they said temptation, but we must not
permit these differences of language to make us overlook or tax with
trickery a part of their spiritual life, bringing us