Having enjoyed that, I am ashamed of being excited by the
visionary sorrows of heroes and heroines.
'I had a friend,' he continued, 'a Benedictine, who is now ninety-seven.
He was, therefore, about thirteen when Louis XVI. began to reign. He is a
man of talents and knowledge, has always lived in the world, has attended
to all that he has seen and heard, and is still unimpaired in mind, and
so strong in body that when I leave him he goes down to embrace me, after
the fashion of the eighteenth century, at the bottom of his staircase.'
'And what effect,' I asked, 'has the contemplation of seventy years of
revolution produced in him? Does he look back, like Talleyrand, to the
_ancien regime_ as a golden age?'
'He admits,' said Tocqueville, 'the material superiority of our own age,
but he believes that, intellectually and morally, we are far inferior to
our grandfathers. And I agree with him. Those seventy years of revolution
have destroyed our courage, our hopefulness, our self-reliance, our
public spirit, and, as respects by far the majority of the higher
classes, our passions, except the vulgarest and most selfish ones--vanity
and covetousness.
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