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La Vendée by Anthony Trollope
page 4 of 603 (00%)
within a few miles of each other, and though of different ages, and very
different dispositions, they had come to Paris together since the
commencement of the revolution.

M. de Lescure was a married man, about twenty-seven years of age, of
grave and studious habits, but nevertheless of an active temperament.
He was humane, charitable, and benevolent: his strongest passion was the
love of his fellow-creatures; his pure heart had glowed, at an early
age, with unutterable longings for the benefits promised to the human
race by the school of philosophy from which the revolution originated.
Liberty and fraternity had been with him principles, to have realized
which he would willingly have sacrificed his all; but at the
commencement of the revolution he had seen with horror the successive
encroachments of the lower classes, and from conscience had attached
himself to the Crown. Hitherto he had been without opportunity of
showing the courage for which he was afterwards so conspicuous; he did
not even himself know that he was a brave man; before, however, his
career was ended, he had displayed the chivalry of a Bayard, and
performed the feats of a Duguescin. A perfect man, we are told, would
be a monster; and a certain dry obstinacy of manner, rather than of
purpose, preserved de Lescure from the monstrosity of perfection.
Circumstances decreed that the latter years of his life should be spent
among scenes of bloodshed; that he should be concerned in all the
horrors of civil war; that instruments of death should be familiar to
his hands, and the groans of the dying continually in his ears. But
though the horrors of war were awfully familiar to him, the harshness
of war never became so; he spilt no blood that he could spare, he took
no life that he could save. The cruelty of his enemies was unable to
stifle the humanity of his heart; even a soldier and a servant of the
republic became his friend as soon as he was vanquished.
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