that he has no "illusions" about peasants or the "average man,"
brings forward his own specific of a quite different nature: "Do you
think that if France, instead of being governed on the whole by the
crowd, were in the power of the mandarins, we should be where we are
now? If, instead of having wished to enlighten the lower classes, we
had busied ourselves with instructing the higher, we should not have
seen M. de Keratry proposing the pillage of the duchy of Baden."

In the great war of our own time with the same foes, our
professional advocates of "preparedness," our cheerful chemists, our
scientific "intellectuals"--all our materialistic thinkers hard-
shell and soft-shell,--took the position of Flaubert, just
presented; reproached us bitterly for our slack, sentimental
pacificism; and urged us with all speed to emulate the scientific
spirit of our enemy. There is nothing more instructive in this
correspondence than to observe how this last fond illusion falls
away from Flaubert under the impact of an experience which
demonstrated to his tortured senses the truth of the old Rabelaisian
utterance, that "science without conscience is the ruin of the
soul."

"What use, pray," he cries in the last disillusion, "is science,
since this people abounding in scholars commits abominations worthy
of the Huns and worse than theirs, because they are systematic,
cold-blooded, voluntary, and have for an excuse, neither passion nor
hunger?" And a few months later, he is still in mad anguish of
desolation:

"I had some illusions! What barbarity! What a slump! I am wrathful
at my contemporaries for having given me the feelings of a brute of