Never had there been so many sleepless nights as in the time of that man; never had there been seen, hanging over the ramparts of the cities, such a nation of desolate mothers; never was there such a silence about those who spoke of death. And yet there was never such joy, such life, such fanfares of war, in all hearts. Never was there such pure sunlight as that which dried all this blood. God made the sun for this man, they said, and they called it the Sun of Austerlitz. But he made this sunlight himself with his ever-thundering cannons which dispelled all clouds but those which succeed the day of battle.
It was this air of the spotless sky, where shone so much glory, where glistened so many swords, that the youth of the time breathed. They well knew that they were destined to the hecatomb; but they regarded Murat as invulnerable, and the emperor had been seen to cross a bridge where so many bullets whistled that they wondered if he could die. And even if one must die, what did it matter? Death itself was so beautiful, so noble, so illustrious, in his battle-scarred purple! It borrowed the color of hope, it reaped so many ripening harvests that it became young, and there was no more old age. All the cradles of France, as all its tombs, were armed with shield and buckler; there were no more old men, there were corpses or demi-gods.
Nevertheless, the immortal emperor stood one day on a hill watching seven nations engaged in mutual slaughter; as he did not know whether he would be master of all the world or only half, Azrael passed along, touched him with the tip of his wing, and pushed him into the Ocean. At the noise of his fall, the dying powers sat up in their beds of pain; and stealthily advancing with furtive tread, all the royal spiders made the partition of Europe, and the purple of Caesar became the frock of Harlequin.
Just as the traveler, sure of his way, hastens night and day through rain and sunlight, regardless of vigils or of dangers; but when he has reached his home and seated himself before the fire, he is seized upon by a feeling of extreme lassitude and can hardly drag himself to his bed: thus France, the widow of Caesar, suddenly felt her wound. She fell through sheer exhaustion, and lapsed into a sleep so profound that her old kings, believing her dead, wrapped about her a white shroud. The old army, its hair whitened in service, returned exhausted with fatigue, and the hearths of deserted castles sadly flickered into life.
Then the men of the Empire, who had been through so much, who had lived in such carnage, kissed their emaciated wives and spoke of their first love; they looked into the fountains of their natal prairies and found themselves so old, so mutilated, that they bethought themselves of their sons, in order that they might close their eyes in peace. They asked where they were; the children came from the schools, and seeing neither sabers, nor cuirasses, neither infantry nor cavalry, they asked in turn where were their fathers. They were told that the war was ended, that Caesar was dead, and that the portraits of Wellington and of Blucher were suspended in the antechambers of the consulates and the embassies, with these two words beneath: Salvatoribus mundi.
Then there seated itself on a world in ruins an anxious youth. All the children were drops of burning blood which had inundated the earth; they were born in the bosom of war, for war. For fifteen years they had dreamed of the snows of Moscow and of the sun of the pyramids. They had not gone beyond their native towns; but they were told that through each gate of these towns lay the road to a capital of Europe. They had in their heads all the world; they beheld the earth, the sky, the streets and the highways; all these were empty, and the bells of parish churches resounded faintly in the distance.
Pale fantoms shrouded in black robes, slowly traversed the country; others knocked at the doors of houses, and when admitted, drew from their pockets large well-worn documents with which they drove out the tenants. From every direction came men still trembling with the fear which had seized them when they fled twenty years before. All began to urge their claims, disputing loudly and crying for help; it was strange that a single death should attract so many crows.
The king of France was on his throne, looking here and there to see if he could perchance find a bee in the royal tapestry. Some held out their hats, and he gave them money; others showed him a crucifix, and he kissed it; others contented themselves with pronouncing in his ear great names of powerful families, and he replied to these by inviting them into his grand' salle, where the echoes were more sonorous; still others showed him their old cloaks, when they had carefully effaced the bees, and to these he gave new apparel.
The children saw all this, thinking that the spirit of Caesar would soon land at Cannes and breathe upon this larva; but the silence was unbroken and they saw floating in the sky only the paleness of the lily. When these children spoke of glory, they were answered: "Become priests;" when they spoke of hope, of love, of power, of life: "Become priests."
And yet there mounted the rostrum a man who held in his hand a contract between the king and the people; he began by saying that glory was a beautiful thing, and ambition and war as well; but there was something still more beautiful, and it was called liberty.
The children raised their heads and remembered that their grandfathers had spoken thus. They remembered having seen in certain obscure corners of the paternal home mysterious marble busts with long hair and a Latin inscription; they remembered seeing their grandsires shake their heads and speak of a stream of blood more terrible than that of the emperor. There was something in that word liberty that made their hearts beat with the memory of a terrible past and the hope of a glorious future.
They trembled at the word; but returning to their homes they encountered on the street three panniers which were being borne to Clamart; there were, within, three young men who had pronounced that word liberty too distinctly.
A strange smile hovered on their lips at that sad sight; but other speakers, mounted on the rostrum, began to publicly estimate what ambition had cost and how very dear was glory; they pointed out the horror of war and called the hecatombs butcheries. And they spoke so often and so long that all human illusions, like the trees in autumn, fell leaf by leaf about them, and those who listened passed their hands over their foreheads as though awakened from a feverish dream.
Some said: "The emperor has fallen because the people wished no more of him;" others added: "The people wished the king; no, liberty; no, reason; no, religion; no, the English constitution; no, absolutism;" and the last one said: "No, none of these things, but repose."
Three elements entered into the life which offered itself to these children: behind them a past forever destroyed, moving uneasily on its ruins with all the fossils of centuries of absolutism; before them the aurora of an immense horizon, the first gleams of the future; and between these two worlds—something like the Ocean which separates the old world from Young America, something vague and floating, a troubled sea filled with wreckage, traversed from time to time by some distant sail or some ship breathing out a heavy vapor; the present, in a word, which separates the past from the future, which is neither the one nor the other, which resemble both, and where one can not know whether, at each step, one is treading on a seed or a piece of refuse.
It was in this chaos that choice must be made; this was the aspect presented to children full of spirit and of audacity, sons of the Empire and grandsons of the Revolution.
As for the past, they would none of it, they had no faith in it; the future, they loved it, but how? As Pygmalion loved Galatea: it was for them a lover in marble and they waited for the breath of life to animate that breast, for the blood to color those veins.
There remained then, the present, the spirit of the time, angel of the dawn who is neither night nor day; they found him seated on a lime sack filled with bones, clad in the mantle of egoism, and shivering in terrible cold. The anguish of death entered into the soul at the sight of that specter, half mummy and half fetus; they approached it as the traveler who is shown at Strasburg the daughter of an old count of Sarvenden, embalmed in her bride's dress: that childish skeleton makes one shudder, for her slender and livid hand wears the wedding-ring and her head falls into dust in the midst of orange blossoms.
As upon the approach of a tempest there passes through the forests a terrible sound which makes all the