Something is going to happen; something new in history.
The smoke has not yet cleared away from the battlefields. It is a mist in which people lose their way and which does not allow them to see the complete outline of things. The very actors in the recent drama are blind. Years will pass, before the mist rises and vanishes, leaving the new world visible.
Will it be the same stage setting as of yore, merely with a few lines changed? Will all these bloody efforts to suppress violence, selfishness, and pre-historic ferocity as the chief bases of society, turn out to have been in vain?
The Prince thinks bitterly of the possible disillusionment. How terrible to see primitive bestiality rise again unharmed after a cataclysm which has been accepted as a regeneration! How terrible to contemplate the failure of so many generous spirits, of so many noble minds, aspiring toward the triumph of good, anxious for peace among men, and the sweet association of people, working against war as medical societies labor to exterminate diseases!
Faith in the future suddenly animates him. The world cannot always be the same; great convulsions, when they have passed, never leave the soil the same as they found it. Will children always be annihilating each other just because their fathers and grandfathers did so? Must they look on each other with hostility because they were born on different sides of a mountain, a river, or a wood, which politics calls a frontier?
We all have two native lands! The place where we were born, and the State to which we belong. Why not generously broaden this conception to include a third country? Will not a blessed time come in which men will talk as fellow being to fellow being, without thinking whether or not History commands them to hate and kill each other? With deep love for one's land of birth, cannot they be at the same time citizens of the world?
The Prince is leaning on the balustrade, above the terraces and the harbor. His pensive walk has brought him thither, without his realizing it.
He turns his back on the sea and on the crowd which, after the concert, is beginning to thin out there below. The American musicians are passing close to him, followed by a swarm of small boys accompanying their retirement.
He looks at a gap on the horizon, between the Alps and the promontory of Monaco, where the sun has just gone down. Above the reddish expanse a star is shining with the brilliancy and luminous facets of a precious stone.
Lubimoff is thinking of the ancient fathers of poetry who sang about it three thousand years ago. Homer called it Kalistos. Sometimes the morning star and at other times the evening star, Lucifer, Vesperus, or the "Shepherds' Star," it finally received the name of Venus, because of its shining whiteness, like that of a diamond on a woman's breast.