To this we will only make one remark. Assuredly, if the language which a nation or a province has spoken is worthy of interest, there is a thing still more worthy of attention and study, and that is the language which a wretchedness has spoken. It is the language which has been spoken in France, for instance, for more than four centuries, not only by a wretchedness, but by every wretchedness, by every human wretchedness possible. And then, we insist upon the fact, to study social deformities and infirmities, and point them out for cure, is not a task in which choice is permissible. The historian of morals and ideas has a mission no less austere than the historian of events. The latter has the surface of civilization, the struggles of crowned heads, the births of princes, the marriages of kings, assemblies, great public men and revolutions,--all the external part; the other historian has the interior,--the basis, the people that labors, suffers, and waits, the crushed woman, the child dying in agony, the dull warfare of man with man, obscene ferocities, prejudices, allowed iniquities, the subterranean counter-strokes of the law, the secret revolutions of minds, the indistinct shivering of multitudes, those who die of hunger, the barefooted, the bare-armed, the disinherited, the orphans, the unhappy, the infamous, and all the ghosts that wander about in obscurity. He must go down with his heart full of charity and severity, at once as a brother and as a judge, into the impenetrable dungeons in which crawl pell-mell those who bleed and those who wound, those who weep and those who cure, those who fast and those who devour, those that endure evil, and those who commit it. Are the duties of the historians of hearts and souls inferior to those of the historians of external facts? Can we believe that Alighieri has less to say than Machiavelli? Is the lower part of civilization, because it is deeper and more gloomy, less important than the upper? Do we know the mountain thoroughly if we do not know the caverns?