His legs are trembling; he wonders if he ought to be kneeling.
And I, I feel myself diminished, cut back, returned through the cycles of time to the little that I am.
* * * * * * Up there, borne by the flag-draped rostrum, a man is speaking.

He lifts a sculptural head aloft, whose hair is white as marble.
At my distance I can hardly hear him.

But the wind carries me some phrases, louder shouted, of his peroration.

He is preaching resignation to the people, and the continuance of things.

He implores them to abandon finally the accursed war of classes, to devote themselves forever to the blessed war of races in all its shapes.
After the war there must be no more social utopias, but discipline instead, whose grandeur and beauty the war has happily revealed, the union of rich and poor for national expansion and the victory of France in the world, and sacred hatred of the Germans, which is a virtue in the French.