“True enough,” mused the younger man.
“Twenty-six years ago, Voltaire wrote to Chauvelin: ‘All that I see is sowing Revolution round us, and it will inevitably come though I shall not have the bliss to see the harvest. The French are sometimes slow to come into the battle but they get there before the fight is over. Light is so spread from one to another, that it will burst forth in a mass soon, and then there will be a fine explosion. The young men are happy for they will behold splendors. What do you say about the flare-ups of yesterday and what is going on to-day?'”
“Terrible!”
“And what you have beheld in the way of events?”
“Dreadful!”
“We are only at the beginning.”
“Prophet of evil!”
“For instance, I was at the house of a man of merit, a doctor of medicine and a philanthropist: what do you think he was busy over?”
“Seeking the remedy for some great disease.”
“You have it. He is trying to cure, not death, but life.”