days;--about the time of the 16th of May, or a
little later. Like quinquagenarians grown stolid and settled, they
looked back with pride to their wild conduct, and lived on the memory
of the emotions of by-gone days. If their mirror showed them no
change, the world had altered around them without their suspecting it,
while they continued to copy their antiquated models. It is a curious
imitative instinct, a slavery of the brain, to remain hypnotised by
some point in the past, instead of trying to follow Proteus in his
course--the life of change. One picks up the old skin which the young
snake has thrown off long ago, and tries to sew it together again.
These pedantic admirers of old revolutions believe that those of the
future will be made on the same lines. They will not see that the new
liberty must have a gait of its own, and will overleap barriers before
which its grandmother of ninety-three stopped, out of breath. They are
also much more vexed by the disrespect of the young people who have
gone by them, than they are by the spiteful yelping of the old whom
they have left behind; this is only natural, for these young folks
make them feel their age, and then it is their turn to yelp.

So it ever shall be; as they grow older there are very few men willing
to let life take its own course, and who are generous enough to look
at the future through the eyes of their juniors, as their own sight
grows dim. The greater number of those who loved liberty in their
youth, want to make a case of it now for the new broods, because they
can no longer fly themselves.

The followers of the national revolutionary cult--in the style of
Danton, or of Robespierre--were the bitterest adversaries of the
internationalism of today; though they did not always agree perfectly
amongst themselves, and the friends of Danton and Robespierre, with
the shadow of the guillotine between them, hurled the epithet of
heretic at each other with the deadliest threats. They did, however,
all agree on one point, and devoted to destruction those who did not
believe that Liberty is shot out of the mouth of cannon, those who
dared to feel the same aversion towards violence, whether it was
exerted by Caesar, Demos, or his satellites, or even if it was in the
name of right and liberty itself. The face underneath is the same, no
matter what mask may be worn.

Clerambault knew several of these fanatics, but there was no point in
discussing with them whether the