A woman’s voice calls this brute to arms. An enemy is overrunning the land. Joan the virgin—“my Joan,” Michelet calls her—whose heart bleeds when blood is shed, frees her country. A shadow, however, soon obscures this gracious vision from Jacques’s eyes. The vast monarchical incubus rises between the people and their ideal. Our historian turns in disgust from the later French kings. He has neither time nor heart to write their history, so passes quickly from Louis XI. to the great climax of his drama—the Revolution. There we find his hero, emerging at last from tyranny and oppression. Freedom and happiness are before him. Alas! his eyes, accustomed to the dim light of dungeons, are dazzled by the sun of liberty; he strikes friend and foe alike. In the solitary galleries of the “Archives” Michelet communes with the great spirits of that day, Desaix, Marceau, Kleber,—elder sons of the Republic, who whisper many secrets to their pupil as he turns over faded pages tied with tri-colored ribbons, where the cities of France have written their affection for liberty, love-letters from Jacques to his mistress. Michelet is happy. His long labor is drawing to an end. The great epic which he has followed as it developed through the centuries is complete. His hero stands hand in hand before the altar with the spouse of his choice, for whose smile he has toiled and struggled. The poet-historian sees again in the _Fête de la Fédération_ the radiant face of his vision, the true face of France, _La Dulce_. Through all the lyricism of this master’s work one feels that he has “lived” history as he wrote it, following his subject from its obscure genesis to a radiant apotheosis. The faithful companion of Michelet’s age has borne witness to this power which he possessed of projecting himself into another age and living with his subject. She repeats to those who know her how he trembled in passion and burned with patriotic emotion in transcribing the crucial pages of his country’s history, rejoicing in her successes and depressed by her faults, like the classic historian who refused with horror to tell the story of his compatriots’ defeat at Cannæ, saying, “I could not survive the recital.” “Do you remember,” a friend once asked Madame Michelet, “how, when your husband was writing his chapters on the Reign of Terror, he ended by falling ill?” “Ah, yes!” she replied. “That was the week he executed Danton. We were living in the country near Nantes. The ground was covered with snow. I can see him now, hurrying to and fro under the bare trees, gesticulating and crying as he walked, ‘How can I judge them, those great men? How can I judge them?’ It was in this way that he threw his ‘thousand souls’ into the past and lived in sympathy with all men, an apostle of universal love. After one of these fecund hours he would drop into his chair and murmur, ‘I am crushed by this work. I have been writing with my blood!’”