Opening with a musical and lyrical prelude, this symphonic composition was to end with a postlude. After the great storm, castaways from the shipwreck were to foregather in Switzerland, near Soleure. Royalists and regicides, Girondists and Montagnards, were to exchange reminiscences; a love episode between two of their children was to lend an idyllic touch to the aftermath of the European storm. Fragments only of this great design have been carried to completion, comprising the four dramas, _Le 14 Juillet_, _Danton_, _Les loups_, and _Le triomphe de la raison_. When these plays had been written, Rolland abandoned the scheme, to which the people, like the literary world and the stage, had given no encouragement. For more than a decade these tragedies have been forgotten. To-day, perchance, the awakening impulses of an age becoming aware of its own lineaments in the prophetic image of a world convulsion, may arouse in the author an impulse to complete what was so magnificently begun. CHAPTER XIII THE FOURTEENTH OF JULY 1902 Of the four completed revolutionary dramas, _Le 14 Juillet_ stands first in point of historic time. Here we see the Revolution as one of the elements of nature. No conscious thought has formed it; no leader has guided it. Like thunder from a clear sky comes the aimless discharge of the tensions that have accumulated among the people. The thunderbolt strikes the Bastille; the lightning flash illumines the soul of the entire nation. This piece has no heroes, for the hero of the play is the multitude. "Individuals are merged in the ocean of the people," writes Rolland in the preface. "He who limns a storm at sea, need not paint the details of every wave; he must show the unchained forces of the ocean. Meticulous precision is a minor matter compared with the impassioned truth of the whole." In actual fact, this drama is all tumultuous movement; individuals rush across the stage like figures on the cinematographic screen; the storming of the Bastille is not the outcome of a reasoned purpose, but of an overwhelming, an ecstatic impulse.