utors.

It is those people whose interests are common and are contrary to those
of mankind; and their interests are--above all and imperiously--let
nothing change! It is those people who keep their eternal subjects in
eternal order, who deceive and dazzle them, who take their brains away
as they take their bodies, who flatter their servile instincts, who
make shallow, resplendent creeds for them, and explain huge happenings
away with all the pretexts they like. It is because of them that the
law of things does not rest on justice and the moral law.

If some of them are unconscious of it, no matter. Neither does it
matter that all of them do not always profit by the public's servitude,
nor that some of them, sometimes, even happen to suffer from it. They
are none the less, all of them, by their solid coalition, material and
moral, the defenders of lies above and delusion below. These are the
people who reign in the place of kings, or at the same time, here as
everywhere.

Formerly I used to see a harmony of interests and ideals on all that
festive, sunlit hill. Now I see reality broken in two, as I did on my
bed of pain. I see the two enemy races face to face--the victors and
the vanquished.

Monsieur Gozlan looks like a master of masters--an aged collector of
fortune, whose speculations are famous, whose wealth increases unaided,
who makes as much profit as he likes and holds the district in the
hollow of his hand. His vulgar movements flash with diamonds, and a
bulky golden trinket hangs on his belly like a phallus. The generals
beside him--those glorious potentates whose smiles are made of so many
souls--and the administrators and the honorables only look like
secondary actors.

Fontan occupies considerable space on the rostrum. He drowses there,
with his two spherical hands planted in front of him. The voluminous
trencherman digests and blows forth with his buttered mouth; and what
he has eaten purrs within him. As for Rampaille, the butcher, _he_ has
mingled with the public. He is rich but dressed with bad taste. It is
his habit to say, "I am a poor man of the people, I am; look at my
dirty clothes." A moment ago, when the lady who was collecting for the
Lest-we-Forget League suddenly confronted him and trapped him amid
general attention, he fumbled desperately in his fob and dragged three
sous out of his body. There are several like him on this side of the
barrier, looking as though they were