"Armand Barbès then proceeds to tell how, instinctively inspired, and led by the approach of his last hour to a plane of lofty thought, he recalled with thrilling gratitude the source from which he drew his supreme tranquility in the face of death. He then says further: "One day I read in the _New Encyclopedia_ the superb article on _Heaven_ by John Raynaud. Passing by the irrefutable arguments with which he incidentally demolishes the heaven and hell of the Catholics, his leading thought, as taught by the druid faith, of deriving from the law of progress the infinite series of our lives, as they continuously progress in worlds that gravitate ever nearer and nearer to God, seemed to me to satisfy at once all our multiple aspirations. Do not the moral sense, the imagination, do not our desires, does not everything find there its place? Nevertheless, carried away, while I read the article, by the pre-occupations of an active republican, I gave at the time little thought to details; all I did with these was to deposit them, so to speak, undigested in my heart. But later, when picked up wounded on the street I inhabited a prison cell with the scaffold in perspective, I drew them out of the place where I held them in reserve as a last store of wealth the value of which the time had come for me to appreciate in full--and these thoughts rose naturally to my mind during my watches, already a victim bound for the executioner, during these solitary hours when I kept watch in the solemn night of death. "I beg pardon of John Raynaud, the elegant encyclopedist, for my having turned into a vile plummet, in order to meet the exigency of the moment, the pure gold of his philosophy. Thus, after confirming with some preliminary reasoning my belief in the immortality of the soul, meseems a sublime Jacob's ladder unrolled before my eyes, with its foot resting on the earth to climb heavenward, eternally, from star to star, from sphere to sphere! The cart, this planet upon which I had spent thirty years, looked to me to be one of the innumerable specks where man makes his first landing in life--whence he begins to climb upwards before God, and, when the phenomenon which we call death is accomplished, man, drawn by the attraction of progress, is forthwith re-born in a superior star with a new expansion of his being. "So you see, my children, what fortitude of soul the dogma of the perpetuity of life is able to impart. Let us, then, follow the example of our forefathers; let us follow in the footsteps of their belief; and let us, like them, _preserve our name, our tongue and our faith_." "We shall not fail in that pledge, father," answered Velleda.