messages of compliment are passed from one throne to the other. But that
gift did not take place. The English royalist Press applauded, but the
people of London would have none of it. The great city muttered thunder.
Majesty clothed in probity--that is the character of the English nation.
That good and proud people showed their indignation, and Palmerston and
Bonaparte had to be content with the expulsion of the exiles.

During the whole long night of my exile I never lost Paris from my view.
When Europe and even France were in darkness, Paris was never hidden.
That is because Paris is the frontier of the future, the visible
frontier of the unknown. All of to-morrow that can be seen to-day is in
Paris. The eyes that are searching for progress come to rest on Paris,
for Paris is the city of light.

_VI.--After the Exile_

This triology, "Before, During, and After the Exile," is no work of
mine, it is the doing of Napoleon III. He it is who has divided my life
in this way, observing, as one might say, the rules of art. Returning to
my country on September 5, 1870, I found the sky more gloomy and my duty
more clamant than ever.

Though it is sad to leave the fatherland, to return to it is sometimes
sadder still; and there is no Frenchman who would not have preferred a
life-long banishment, to seeing France ground beneath the Prussian heel,
and the loss of Metz and Strasburg. This was an invasion of barbarians;
but there is another menace that is not less formidable. I mean the
invasion of our land by darkness, an invasion of the nineteenth century
by the middle ages. After the emperor, the pope; after Berlin, Rome;
after the triumph of the sword, the triumph of night. For the light of
civilisation may be extinguished in either of two ways, by a military or
by a clerical invasion. The former threatens our mother, France; the
latter our child, the future.

A double inviolability is the most precious possession of a civilised
people--the inviolability of territory and the inviolability of
conscience; and as the soldier violates the first, so does the priest
violate the other. Yet the soldier does but obey his orders and the
priest his dogmas, so that there are only two who are ultimately
culpable--Caesar, who slays, and Peter, who lies. There is no religion
which has not as its aim to seize forcibly the human soul, and it is to
attempts of this kind that France is given up to-day.

One may say, indeed, that in our