The idea of these horrible and repulsive scenes, the necessary preliminaries of the dishes I saw served at table, made me hold animal food in disgust, and butchers in horror. “Although the necessity of conforming to the customs of society has since made me eat what others eat, I shall preserve a rational (_raisonnée_) dislike to flesh dishes, and I have always found it difficult not to consider the trade of a butcher almost on a par with that of the executioner. I lived, then, till I was twelve on bread, milk-products, vegetables and fruit. My health was not the less robust, nor my growth the less rapid; and perhaps it is to that _regimen_ that I owed the beauty of feature, the exquisite sensibility, the serene sweetness of character and temper that I preserved till that date.”[254] Some years before the publication of his _Fall of an Angel_, Lamartine, from the height of the National Tribune, had given significant expression to the feeling of all the more thoughtful minds, vague though it was, of the urgent need of some new and better principle to inspire and govern human actions than any hitherto tried:-- “I see [he exclaimed] men who, alarmed by the repeated shocks of our political commotions, await from providence a social revolution, and look around them for some man, a philosopher, to arise--_a doctrine_ which shall come to take violent possession of the government of minds (_une doctrine qui vienne s’emparer violemment du gouvernement des esprits_), and reinvigorate the staggered (_ébranlé_) world. They hope, they invoke, they look for this power, which shall impose itself by inherent right (_de son plein droit_) as the Arbitrator and Supreme Ruler of the Future.” But a few years earlier, in the same place, a still more positive protest--not the less noteworthy because futile--was heard upon the occasion of a discussion as to the introduction into France of foreign “Cattle,” when one of the Deputies, Alexandre de Laborde, maintained that flesh-meat is but an _object of luxury_; and was supported, at least, by one or two other thoughtful deputies who had the courage of their better convictions. It deserves to be noted that while the Left seemed not unfavourable to the humaner feeling, the Centre apathetic, and the Right derisively antagonistic, the minister of the King (Charles X.) threw all the weight of his position into the materialistic side of the scales. Thus this feeble and last public attempt in France to stop the torrent of Materialism proved abortive.[255] XLIV. MICHELET. 1797-1874.