Page:The Jail, Experiences in 1916.pdf/143

 Napoleon III,—no, this book did not proceed from his pen. The spirit might have been his, the involuntary tendency, above all, might have been his, but this work was not produced by him. That unfortunate political intriguer, who let himself be led into a Sedan, the clumsy stylist, whose journalistic draft discovered in the Tuileries after September 2nd 1870, aroused only a compassionate smile, this weary "Sphinx", gliding through the diaries of the Goncourts,—decidedly did not possess such a fund of intellect as to be able to produce the history of Julius Caesar. It was Duruy, Victor Duruy, to whom Bonapartism, or I should rather say Napoleonism, was a religion, who certainly wrote this work from the first line to the last—the Sphinx, at the most, attended to the archaeological discoveries relating to ancient Gaul. The history of the Roman Empire, which Duruy issued under his own name, is a direct continuation of Julius Caesar—the same style, the same spirit. It is Duruy of whose enthusiastic Napoleonic creed in the preface to the memoirs of Barras I could not help thinking as l read: that before the countenance of eternity it is no crime to have people slain. That the human plant has a claim only to a short span of life, he who cuts it down before its time, helps it, for it then springs up anew. But it is a crime to degrade and dishonour the soul of a nation—man passes away—the soul is left, new mortals are born, but there is no means to bring about the uplifting of the soul, for wounds inflicted on the soul are deep, and heal very slowly. And Napoleon I did not commit the crime of damaging the soul of a nation. And a nation which often hastens to dissolution and decay, is preserved by war, as by a necessary surgical operation,—but how great was the error of Duruy, whose view and knowledge of the past was so clear, in respect of events and persons of the present. Precisely this Napoleon Ill, whose throne was to be supported both by Julius