interminable arguments. Almost all conveniently adopt social,
literary, or political prejudices, to do away with the need of having
opinions, just as they adapt their conscience to the standard of the
Code or the Tribunal of Commerce. Having started early to become men
of note, they turn into mediocrities, and crawl over the high places
of the world. So, too, their faces present the harsh pallor, the
deceitful coloring, those dull, tarnished eyes, and garrulous, sensual
mouths, in which the observer recognizes the symptoms of the
degeneracy of the thought and its rotation in the circle of a special
idea which destroys the creative faculties of the brain and the gift
of seeing in large, of generalizing and deducing. No man who has
allowed himself to be caught in the revolutions of the gear of these
huge machines can ever become great. If he is a doctor, either he has
practised little or he is an exception--a Bichat who dies young. If a
great merchant, something remains--he is almost Jacques Coeur. Did
Robespierre practise? Danton was an idler who waited. But who,
moreover has ever felt envious of the figures of Danton and
Robespierre, however lofty they were? These men of affairs, _par
excellence_, attract money to them, and hoard it in order to ally
themselves with aristocratic families. If the ambition of the
working-man is that of the small tradesman, here, too, are the same
passions. The type of this class might be either an ambitious
bourgeois, who, after a life of privation and continual scheming,
passes into the Council of State as an ant passes through a chink; or
some newspaper editor, jaded with intrigue, whom the king makes a peer
of France--perhaps to revenge himself on the nobility; or some notary
become mayor of his parish: all people crushed with business, who, if
they attain their end, are literally _killed_ in its attainment. In
France the usage is to glorify wigs. Napoleon, Louis XVI., the great
rulers, alone have always wished for young men to fulfil their