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It was not once but a hundred times that my
wife, my colleagues, and I heard such questions and
such remarks from the lips of these simple men, and
they revived our own courage and dispelled our own
doubts. How can one reconcile this with the shameful
phenomena which have since appeared and which drew
from me—a few pages back—expressions of bitter irony?
Is it really the same people; that which spoke through
the lips of the martyred wretches in the ambulance
train, and that which now shamelessly displays the
basest selfishness and fraternises obviously with its
executioners and bitterest foes?
Oh! strange and disconcerting people that no one
has ever known well—not even those born of your flesh
and blood! People amongst whom gentleness is allied
to the most abject cruelty, incurable distrust to the most
vapid simplicity, a boundless spirit of sacrifice to the
most violent covetousness! People who, during the
course of six centuries of suffering and unremitting toil,
were able to erect the edifice of a mighty Empire, and
who destroyed this Empire in six months, as a child
gleefully shatters a complicated and precious toy
with a hammer! Never has the tragic antithesis of
odi et amo struck me so forcibly as when I conjure
up your image on the ruins of what was once my
country!
What is the fate reserved for you? Will you perish
through disintegration, after having been subjected to the
most degrading influences, the vilest slavery? Or, having
come back to your senses and become weary of the
increasing disorder, will you return to the beaten track
of your former existence, colourless and passive, and
will you meet without too many curses the huge bill for
your attack of madness, replacing your neck under the
yoke which was formerly your safeguard against others
and against yourself? Or again, suddenly seized with
passionate repentance, and taking your risorgimento in
hand on your own initiative, will you be capable of
giving birth to new men and a fresh system, will you
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