“They may return. We are divided from them as yet by nothing tangible, nothing apparent or definite. They have faded away like the clouds of the error which created them, and the least breath may yet rekindle their ashes. But even if everything were to conspire to strengthen your cause, you are none the less irretrievably lost. You are conquered from within, and that is the irretrievable defeat. When you are conquered from without, you can continue to resist and hope for revenge. Your ruin is within you. The necessary consequences of your crimes and your errors are at hand in spite of your efforts to prevent them, and with amazement you see the beginning of your downfall. Unjust and violent, you will be destroyed by your own injustice and violence. And the monstrous party of unrighteousness, hitherto inviolable, respected and feared, is falling, breaking asunder of its own weight.
“What does it matter then if legal sanctions are dilatory or lacking? The only true and natural justice is contained in the very consequences of the act, not in external formulæ, which are often narrow and sometimes arbitrary. Why complain that the greatest culprits evade the law and retain their despicable honours? That doesn’t matter either, under the present social system, any more than it mattered, in the days of the earth’s infancy, when the great saurians of the primeval oceans were disappearing to make way for creatures more beautiful and of happier instincts, that there still remained stranded, on the slime of the beaches, a few monstrous survivors of a doomed race.”
As Jumage reached the gate of the Luxembourg after his visit to his friend, he met young Goubin.
“I’ve just been to see Bergeret,” he said. “I’m sorry for him; he seems very cast-down and dejected. The Affair has crushed him.”
CHAPTER XV
At the offices of the Executive Committee in the Rue de Berri, Henri de Brécé, Joseph Lacrisse and Henri Léon were dealing with the business of the day.
“My dear President,” said Joseph Lacrisse to Henri de Brécé. “I want you to find a prefecture for a good Royalist. I am sure you will not refuse when I have told you of my candidate’s qualification. His father, Ferdinand Dellion, an iron-master at Valcombe, is in every way deserving of the King’s favour. He is most careful of the moral and physical well-being of his workmen. He has a dispensary for them, and he sees that they go to Mass on Sundays and send their children to the church schools, and that they vote properly and abstain from trade unions. He is opposed, unfortunately, by the deputy Cothard and ill-supported by the sub-prefect of Valcombe. His son Gustave is one of the most active and energetic members of my Departmental Committee. He was most vigorous in the campaign against the Jews in our city, and was arrested at Auteuil for taking part in the demonstration against Loubet. You simply cannot refuse a prefecture to Gustave Dellion, my dear President!”