Quien sabe?
Whoever would think of buying eleven or thirteen eggs?
No one, for 10 and 12 are our small tyrants.
Who would make a present of nine or ninety-nine francs to his own son?
No one, for 10 is a great tyrant, and 100 greater than 10.
Who has never felt the yoke of numbers one thousand and one hundred thousand? who is never in subjection to the tyranny of the million, both in language and mode of life?
And centuries, too, which are only so many figures, what a number of theories they have evoked from the depths of history; how many false names have they not written in the anagraphs of time; how many revolutions have they not postponed; how many others have they aroused, merely on account of the tyranny of a number?
For some years we have had before our eyes one of the most deplorably humiliating examples of our view of this arithmetical incubus, the decline of the nineteenth century to make room for the twentieth.
Six years are still wanting till this numerical cataclysm. Who knows how many books will be written on the century dying out, how many prophecies on the century following it; what torrents of philosophy and ink to discuss the passing of the number 19 to that of 20?