how far should you go to be heard?

"At that period, apparently indifferent, something of a revolutionary thrill was vaguely felt. Whispers coming from the depths of '89 and '92 were in the air. Young Paris was, excuse the expression, in the process of molting. People were transformed almost with suspecting it, by the very movement of the time. The hand which moves over the dial moves also among souls.

Each one took the step forward which was before him. Royalists became liberals, liberals became democrats.

It was like a rising tide, complicated by a thousand ebbs; the peculiarity of the ebb is to make mixtures; thence very singular combinations of ideas; men worshiped at the same time Napoleon and liberty. We are now writing history. These were the mirages of that day. Opinions pass through phases. Voltarian royalism, a grotesque variety, had a fellow not less strange, Bonapartist liberalism.

Other groups of minds were more serious. They fathomed principle; they attached themselves to right. They longed for the absolute, they caught glimpses of the infinite realizations; the absolute by its very rigidity pushes the mind toward the boundless, and makes it float in the illimitable. There is nothing like dream to create the future. Utopia today, flesh and blood tomorrow."