I was born while these facts were being accomplished[423]. Two new empires, Prussia[424] and Russia[425], preceded me by scarcely half a century on the earth; Corsica became French at the moment when I appeared[426]; I arrived in the world twenty days before Bonaparte[427]. He brought me with him. I was about to enter the navy, in 1783, when the fleet of Louis XVI. put in to Brest[428]: it carried the birth certificate of a nation[429] that had been hatched under the wings of France. My birth is connected with the birth of a man and a people, pale reflection that I was of an immense light. If we fix our eyes on the actual world, we see it, following the movement communicated by a great revolution, shaken from the East to China, which seemed closed for ever: so that our past subversions would be nothing and the noise of Napoleon's fame be hardly audible in the general topsy-turviness of the nations, even as he, Napoleon, drowned all the noises of our ancient globe. The Emperor left us in a condition of prophetic agitation. We, the ripest and most advanced State, display numerous symptoms of decadence. Just as a sick man in danger becomes preoccupied with what awaits him in his grave, a nation which feels itself decaying grows restless as to its future fate. Hence the political heresies which succeed one another. The old European order is expiring; our present contests will appear puerile struggles in the eyes of posterity. Nothing more exists; authority of experience and age, birth or genius, talent or virtue: all are denied; a few individuals clamber to the top of the ruins, proclaim themselves giants and roll down to the bottom as pygmies. With the exception of a score of men who will survive and who were destined to hold the torch across the murky steppes upon which we are entering, with the exception of those few men, a generation which bore within it an abundant intelligence, acquired knowledge, germs of success of all kinds has stifled these in a restlessness as unproductive as its arrogance is barren. Nameless multitudes are agitated without knowing why, like the popular associations of the middle-ages: famished flocks which recognise no shepherd, which rush from the plain to the mountain and from the mountain to the plain, disdaining the experience of the herdsmen hardened to the wind and sun. In the life of that city, all is transitory: religion and morals cease to be admitted, or else each interprets them after his own fashion. Among things of an inferior nature, even in power of conviction and existence, a man's renown throbs for barely an hour, a book grows old in a day, writers kill themselves to attract attention: one more vanity; no one hears even their last breath.