France is of the same quality, as a people, as Greece and Rome; she is Athenian through the beautiful, and Roman through her grandeur. Besides, she is good, and is more often than other nations in the humor for devotion and sacrifice. Still, this humor takes her and leaves her; and this is the great danger for those who run when she merely wishes to walk, or who walk when she wishes to halt. France has her relapses into materialism, and at seasons the ideas which obstruct this sublime brain have nothing that recalls French grandeur, and are of the dimensions of a Missouri or a South Carolina. What is to be done? The giantess plays the dwarf, and immense France feels a fancy for littleness. That is all. To this nothing can be said, for peoples like planets have the right to be eclipsed. And that is well, provided that light return and the eclipse does not degenerate into night. Dawn and resurrection are synonymous, and the reappearance of light is synonymous with the existence of the Ego. Let us state these facts calmly. Death on a barricade, or a tomb in exile, is an acceptable occasion for devotion, for the real name of devotion is disinterestedness. Let the abandoned be abandoned, let the exiles be exiled, and let us confine ourselves to imploring great nations not to recoil too far when they do recoil. Under the pretext of returning to reason, it is not necessary to go too far down the incline. Matter exists, the moment exists, interests exist, the stomach exists, but the stomach must not to the sole wisdom. Momentary life has its rights, we admit, but permanent life has them also. Alas! To have mounted does not prevent falling, and we see this in history more frequently than we wish; a nation is illustrious, it tastes of the ideal, then it bites into the mud and finds it good, and when we ask it why it abandons Socrates for Falstaff, it replies, "Because I like statesmen."