At the period in which the action of our story happens to be laid, this noble beginning of the new ideas had found its formula in the word _perfectibility._ It was Condorcet who eloquently outlined the doctrine, and taking no account of human weakness, predicted for it a boundless destiny. He believed in infinity so absolutely that he hoped to find the secret of the destruction of death, and everybody who used his mind, everybody who read was beginning to believe with him in the indefinite prolongation of physical life. Parmentier believed moreover that he could banish forever the spectre of famine by acclimatizing the potato. Mesmer believed that he had discovered a mysterious agent, the source of all marvels. Saint-Martin proclaimed the rehabilitation of the human soul and illumined the terrors of the old-fashioned dogmas with the dogma of infinite light. Cagliostro pretended to revive ancient magic in a natural and comprehensible way; in a word the vertigo of the future had set every brain in a whirl, from the most prosaic to the most romantic, and, at the height of that intense excitement, the present was a trifling obstacle which no one deigned to notice. The old monarchy, the unbending clergy, were still on their feet, striving to retain their crumbling power; but liberty had been inaugurated in America, and France felt that her day was at hand. She had no thought of bloodshed; pleasant chimeras exclude ideas of revenge; on the eve of the terrible storm men's minds were making holiday, and an indescribable feverish grasping for the ideal paved the way for the magnificent outburst of '89.