M. BERGERET: “Are you speaking of Republics in general, or only of our own?”
M. LANTAIGNE: “Obviously I am considering neither the Roman Republic, nor the Dutch, nor the Swiss, but only the French. For these governments have nothing in common save the name, and you will not charge me with judging them by the name by which they call themselves, nor by those points in which they seem, one and all, opposed to monarchy—an opposition which is not in itself necessarily to be condemned; but the Republic in France means nothing more than the lack of a prince and the want of a governing power. And this nation was too old at the time of the amputation for one not to fear that it would die of it.”
M. BERGERET: “Yet France has already survived the Empire by twenty-seven years, the _bourgeois_-king by forty-eight years, and the legitimate sovereign by sixty-six years.”
M. LANTAIGNE: “Say rather that for a century France, wounded to death, has been dragging out a miserable remnant of life in alternate fits of fever and prostration. And do not imagine that I flatter the past or base my regrets on lying pictures of an age of gold which never existed. The conditions of national life are quite familiar to me. Its hours are marked by perils, its days by disasters. And it is just and necessary that it should be so. Its life, like that of individual men, if it were exempt from trials, would have no meaning. The early history of France is full of crimes and expiations. God ceaselessly chastened this nation with the zeal of an untiring love, and in the time of the kings His mercy spared her no suffering. But, being then Christian, her woes were useful and precious to her. In them she recognised the ennobling power of chastisement. From them she derived her lessons, her merits, her salvation, her power, and her renown. Now her sufferings have no longer any meaning for her; she neither understands them nor acquiesces in them. Whilst undergoing the test she rebels against it. And the demented state expects good fortune! It is in losing faith in God that one loses, along with the idea of the absolute, the knowledge of the relative and even the historic sense. God alone informs the logical sequence of human events which, without Him, would no longer follow one another in a rational and conceivable manner. And for the last hundred years the history of France has been an enigma for the French. Yet even in our days there was one solemn hour of hope and expectation.