"No matter!" said Olivier. "My poor dear Christophe, you cannot know the delight of being free. It is worth while paying for it with so much danger, and suffering, and even death. To be free, to feel that every mind about you--yes, even the knave's--is free, is a delicious pleasure which it is impossible to express: it is as though your soul were soaring through the infinite air. It could not live otherwise. What should I do with the security you offer me, and your order and your impeccable discipline, locked up in the four walls of your Imperial barracks? I should die of suffocation. Air! give me air, more and more of it! Liberty, more and more of that!" "There must be law in the world," replied Christophe. "Sooner or later the master cometh." But Olivier laughed and reminded Christophe of the saying of old Pierre de l'Estoile: _It is as little in the power of all the dominions of the earth to curb the French liberty of speech, as to bury the sun in the earth or to shut it up inside a hole._ * * * * * Gradually Christophe grew accustomed to the air of boundless liberty. From the lofty heights of French thought, where those minds dream that are all light, he looked down upon the slopes of the mountain at his feet, where the heroic elect, fighting for a living faith, whatever faith it be, struggle eternally to reach the summit:--those who wage the holy war against ignorance, disease, and poverty: the fever of invention, the mental delirium of the modern Prometheus and Icarus conquering the light and marking out roads in the air: the Titanic struggle between Science and Nature, being tamed;--lower down, the little silent band, the men and women of good faith, those brave and humble hearts, who, after a thousand efforts, have climbed half-way, and can climb no farther, being held bound in a dull and difficult existence, while in secret they burn away in obscure devotion:--lower still, at the foot of the mountain, in a narrow gorge between rocky crags, the endless battle, the fanatics of abstract ideas and blind instincts, fiercely wrestling, with never a suspicion that there may be something beyond, above the wall of rocks which hems them in:--still lower, swamps and brutish beasts wallowing in the mire.--And everywhere, scattered about the sides of the mountain, the fresh flowers of art, the scented strawberry-plants of music, the song of the streams and the poet birds. And Christophe asked Olivier: "Where are your people? I see only the elect, all sorts, good and bad." Olivier replied: