them, and the exterior or universal interest, the symbolic value which
the centuries have given them.

"This Arch," continued Tchernoff, "is French within, with its names
of battles and generals open to criticism. On the outside, it is the
monument of the people who carried through the greatest revolution
for liberty ever known. The glorification of man is there below in
the column of the place Vendome. Here there is nothing individual. Its
builders erected it to the memory of la Grande Armee and that Grand
Army was the people in arms who spread revolution throughout Europe. The
artists, great inventors, foresaw the true significance of this work.
The warriors of Rude who are chanting the Marseillaise in the group
at the left are not professional soldiers, they are armed citizens,
marching to work out their sublime and violent mission. Their nudity
makes them appear to me like sans-culottes in Grecian helmets. . . .
Here there is more than the glory and egoism of a great nation. All
Europe is awake to new life, thanks to these Crusaders of Liberty. . . .
The nations call to mind certain images. If I think of Greece, I see the
columns of the Parthenon; Rome, Mistress of the World, is the Coliseum
and the Arch of Trajan; and revolutionary France is the Arc de
Triomphe."

The Arch was even more, according to the Russian. It represented a
great historical retaliation; the nations of the South, called the
Latin races, replying, after many centuries, to the invasion which had
destroyed the Roman jurisdiction--the Mediterranean peoples spreading
themselves as conquerors through the lands of the ancient barbarians.
Retreating immediately, they had swept away the past like a tidal
wave--the great surf depositing all that it contained. Like the waters
of certain rivers which fructify by overflowing, this recession of the