"None of us, who have lived through the troubles and excitements, shall escape the eyes of history. Who can flatter himself that he shall be found stainless in a time of frenzy when none has the entire use of his reason? Let us then be full of indulgence for others; let us excuse that of which we cannot approve. Such is human weakness, that talent, genius, virtue itself are sometimes able to overstep the limits of duty. M. Chénier worshipped liberty: can we ascribe it to him as a crime? The knights themselves, were they to issue from their tombs, would follow the light of our century. We should see that illustrious alliance formed between honour and liberty, as under the reign of the Valois, upon our monuments. Gothic battlements crowned with infinite grace the orders borrowed from the Greeks. Is not liberty the greatest of benefits and the first of man's needs? It kindles genius, it elevates the heart, it is as necessary to the friend of the Muses as the air he breathes. The arts are, to a certain point, able to live in dependence, because they make use of a language apart, which is not understood by the crowd; but letters, which speak an universal language, pine and perish in irons. How shall one compose pages worthy of the future, if one must forbid one's self, in writing, every magnanimous sentiment, every great and powerful thought? Liberty is so naturally the friend of science and literature, that she takes refuge with them when she is banished from the midst of the peoples; and it is we, gentlemen, whom she charges to write her annals and to revenge her on her enemies, to hand down her name and her cult to posterity for all time. To prevent any mistake in the interpretation of my thought, I declare that I am here speaking only of the liberty which is born of order and gives birth to laws, and not of that liberty which is the daughter of license and the mother of slavery. The wrong of the author of Charles IX did not, therefore, lie in offering his incense to the former of these divinities, but in believing that the rights which she gives us are incompatible with a monarchical form of government. A Frenchman displays in his opinions that independence which other nations show in their laws. Liberty is for him a sentiment rather than a principle, and he is a citizen by instinct and a subject by choice. If the writer whose loss you are mourning had made this reflection, he would not have embraced in one and the same love the liberty that creates and the liberty that destroys. [Sidenote: My speech concluded.]