He recalled his thoughts on the first day, when he was alone in the silent cloister; he wished to be another stone in the Cathedral, without thought, without feeling, to spend the rest of his life fixed to that ruin, with the embryonic life of the fungus on the buttress, but the spirit of the outside world had entered in with him.
Luna remembered how travellers in time of plague had crossed the sanitary cordon--they were well and happy, nothing betrayed the infection in their bodies; but the poisonous germs travelled in the folds of their clothes and in their hair, carrying death without knowing it, helping it to leap all barriers and obstacles, without being in the least aware of it.

He was the same, but instead of spreading death, he spread tumultuous and rebellious life.

The protest of the lower orders that had been surging throughout the world, for more than a century, had entered with him into this still remaining fragment of the sixteenth century.

He had awakened those men, who had been like the sleepers in the legend, motionless in their cave for ages, while the centuries rolled on and the world was transformed.
The awakening of these people was sudden and violent, like that of a people in revolution.

They were ashamed of the old errors that they had worshipped, and this made them receive as gospel everything that was new, without quailing before the consequences.
It was the faith of a people which, once it takes form, rushes onwards, accepting everything, justifying everything, the only requirement being its novelty, and casting aside contemptuously those traditional principles which it had just abandoned.
The cowardly submission of Silver Stick was the first victory of those more daring souls who formed Luna's surrounding.