contending principles, with history on the march, clearing the past away
and seeking to bring more truth, justice, and happiness in the future.
But in practice, if one only considered the horrid daily cuisine of the
sphere, what an unbridling of egotistical appetite one beheld, what an
absorbing passion to strangle one's neighbour and triumph oneself alone!
Among the various groups one found but an incessant battle for power and
the satisfactions that it gives. "Left," "Right," "Catholics,"
"Republicans," "Socialists," the names given to the parties of twenty
different shades, were simply labels classifying forms of the one burning
thirst to rule and dominate. All questions could be reduced to a single
one, that of knowing whether this man, that man, or that other man should
hold France in his grasp, to enjoy it, and distribute its favours among
his creatures. And the worst was that the outcome of the great
parliamentary battles, the days and the weeks lost in setting this man in
the place of that man, and that other man in the place of this man, was
simply stagnation, for not one of the three men was better than his
fellows, and there were but vague points of difference between them; in
such wise that the new master bungled the very same work as the previous
one had bungled, forgetful, perforce, of programmes and promises as soon
as ever he began to reign.

However, Pierre's thoughts invincibly reverted to Laveuve, whom he had
momentarily forgotten, but who now seized hold of him again with a quiver
as of anger and death. Ah! what could it matter to that poor old wretch,
dying of hunger on his bed of rags, whether Mege should overthrow
Barroux's ministry, and whether a Vignon ministry should ascend to power
or not! At that rate, a century, two centuries, would be needed before
there would be bread in the garrets where groan the lamed sons of labour,
the old, broken-down beasts of burden. And behind Laveuve there appeared
the whole army of misery, the whole multitude of the disinherited and the