the twelfth century! I'm stifling in gall! These officers who break
mirrors with white gloves on, who know Sanskrit, and who fling
themselves on the champagne; who steal your watch and then send you
their visiting card, this war for money, these civilized savages
give me more horror than cannibals. And all the world is going to
imitate them, is going to be a soldier! Russia has now four millions
of them. All Europe will wear a uniform. If we take our revenge, it
will be ferocious in the last degree; and, mark my word, we are
going to think only of that, of avenging ourselves on Germany."

Under the imminence of the siege of Paris, Flaubert had drilled men,
with an out-flashing of the savage fighting spirit of his ancestors,
of which he was more than half ashamed. But at heart he is more
dismayed, more demoralized, more thoroughly prostrated than George
Sand. He has not fortitude actually to face the degree of depravity
which he has always imputed to the human race, the baseness with
which his imagination has long been easily and cynically familiar.
As if his pessimism had been only a literary pigment, a resource of
the studio, he shudders to find Paris painted in his own ebony
colors, and his own purely "artistic" hatred of the bourgeois,
translated into a principle of action, expressing itself in the
horrors of the Commune, with half the population trying to strangle
the other half. Hatred, after all, contempt and hatred, are not
quite the most felicitous watchwords for the use of human society.
Like one whose cruel jest has been taken more seriously than he had
intended and has been turned upon his own head, Flaubert considers
flight: "I cherish the following dream: of going to live in the sun
in a tranquil country." As a substitute for a physical retreat, he
buries himself in a study of Buddhism, and so gradually returns to
the pride of his intellectual isolation. As the tumult in his senses