“I shall not tell you all I have suffered since September. Why didn’t I die from it?... And I cannot get over it! I am not consoled! I have no hope!”
And in another letter:
“Ah! dear and good master, if you could only hate! That is what you lack—hate.... Come now. Cry out! Thunder! Take your lyre and touch the brazen string; the monsters will flee.”
Poor wretch, with the only remedy of the arrogant! But the fine old priestess of another heaven and earth did as he bid her; cried out, thundered, in a noble letter, which should be engraved on gold plates and hung up on the Quai d’Orsay:
“What then, you want me to stop loving? You want me to say that I have been mistaken all my life, that humanity is contemptible, hateful, that it has always been and will always be so?... You assert that the people has always been ferocious, the priest always a hypocrite, the bourgeois a coward, the soldier a brigand, the peasant a beast?... The people, you say? The people is yourself and myself.... Whoever denies the people cheapens himself, and gives the world the shameful spectacle of apostasy....”
That is plain speaking; but she goes on to be prophetic. It would seem as if she had foreseen a war and its aftermath infinitely more terrible than that of 1870:
“We shall have to pity the German nation for its victories as much as ourselves for our defeats, because this is the first act of its moral dissolution. The drama of its degradation has begun.... It will move very quickly.... Well, the moral abasement of Germany is not the future safety of France, and if we are called upon to return to her the evil that has been done us, her collapse will not give us back her life.”
Is not that nobly said? And then her great cry:
“Frenchmen, let us love one another ... let us love one another or we are lost.”