interrupt themselves in their own course; come back to what seems to
have been accomplished, in order to start over anew; scorn with cruel
thoroughness the half measures, weaknesses and meannesses of their first
attempts; seem to throw down their adversary only in order to enable
him to draw fresh strength from the earth, and again, to rise up against
them in more gigantic stature; constantly recoil in fear before the
undefined monster magnitude of their own objects--until finally that
situation is created which renders all retreat impossible, and the
conditions themselves cry out:

"Hic Rhodus, hic salta!" [#2 Here is Rhodes, leap here! An allusion to
Aesop's Fables.]

Every observer of average intelligence; even if he failed to follow step
by step the course of French development, must have anticipated that an
unheard of fiasco was in store for the revolution. It was enough to hear
the self-satisfied yelpings of victory wherewith the Messieurs Democrats
mutually congratulated one another upon the pardons of May 2d, 1852.
Indeed, May 2d had become a fixed idea in their heads; it had become a
dogma with them--something like the day on which Christ was to reappear
and the Millennium to begin had formed in the heads of the Chiliasts.
Weakness had, as it ever does, taken refuge in the wonderful; it
believed the enemy was overcome if, in its imagination, it hocus-pocused
him away; and it lost all sense of the present in the imaginary
apotheosis of the future, that was at hand, and of the deeds, that it
had "in petto," but which it did not yet want to bring to the scratch.
The heroes, who ever seek to refute their established incompetence
by mutually bestowing their sympathy upon one another and by pulling
together, had packed their satchels, taken their laurels in advance
payments and were just engaged in the work of getting discounted "in