Fleeting joy! The peoples that are in the dark forget the past; they see only the present, and despise you.

Forgive them, they know not what they do.

Despise you! Great Heaven! despise France?
And who are they?
What language do they speak?
What books have they in their hands?
What names do they know by heart?
What is the placard pasted on the walls of their theatres?
What forms do their arts assume, their laws, their manners, their clothing, their pleasures, their fashions?
What is the great date for them, as for us?
'89! If they take France from out their hearts, what remains to them?
O my people! Though it be fallen and fallen for ever, is Greece despised?
Is Italy despised?
Is France despised?
Look at those breasts, they are your nurse; look at that womb, it is your mother.
If she sleeps, if she is in a lethargy, silence, and off with your hat.
If she is dead, to your knees! The exiles are scattered; destiny has blasts which disperse men like a handful of ashes.

Some are in Belgium, in Piedmont, in Switzerland, where they do not enjoy liberty; others are in London, where they have no roof to shelter them.

One, a peasant, has been torn from his native field; another, a soldier, has only a fragment of his sword, which was broken in his hand; another, an artisan, is ignorant of the language of the country, he is without clothes and without shoes, he knows not if he shall eat food to-morrow; another has left behind him a wife and children, a dearly loved group, the object of his labour, and the joy of his life; another has an old mother with grey hairs, who weeps for him; another an old father, who will die without seeing him again; another is a lover,--he has left behind him some adored being, who will forget him; they raise their heads and they hold out their hands to one another; they smile; there is no nation that does not stand aside with respect as they pass, and contemplate with profound emotion, as one of the noblest spectacles which destiny can offer to men, all those serene consciences, all those broken hearts.
They suffer and are silent; in them the citizen has sacrificed the man; they look with firmness on adversity, they do not cry out even under the pitiless rod of misfortune: _Civis Romanus sum!_ But at eve, when one dreams,--when everything in the strange city of the stranger is involved in melancholy, for what seems cold by day becomes funereal in twilight,--but at night, when sleep does not close one's eyes, hearts the most stoical open to mourning and dejection.