"
Three elements entered into the life which offered itself to these
children: behind them a past forever destroyed, moving uneasily on its
ruins with all the fossils of centuries of absolutism; before them the
aurora of an immense horizon, the first gleams of the future; and between
these two worlds--something like the Ocean which separates the old world
from Young America, something vague and floating, a troubled sea filled
with wreckage, traversed from time to time by some distant sail or some
ship breathing out a heavy vapor; the present, in a word, which separates
the past from the future, which is neither the one nor the other, which
resemble both, and where one can not know whether, at each step, one is
treading on a seed or a piece of refuse.
It was in this chaos that choice must be made; this was the aspect
presented to children full of spirit and of audacity, sons of the Empire
and grandsons of the Revolution.
As for the past, they would none of it, they had no faith in it; the
future, they loved it, but how? As Pygmalion loved Galatea: it was for
them a lover in marble and they waited for the breath of life to animate
that breast, for the blood to color those veins.
There remained then, the present, the spirit of the time, angel of the
dawn who is neither night nor day; they found him seated on a lime sack
filled with bones, clad in the mantle of egoism, and shivering in
terrible cold.
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