The light tissue of habit and of rational ideas in which
civilization has enveloped man, is torn asunder and is floating in
rags around him; the bare arms of the savage show themselves, and
they are striking out. The only guide he has for his conduct is
that of primitive days, the startled instinct of a craving stomach.
Henceforth that which rules in him and through him is animal
necessity with its train of violent and narrow suggestions,
sometimes sanguinary and sometimes grotesque. Incompetent or
savage, in all respects like a Negro monarch, his sole political
expedients are either the methods of a slaughter house or the dreams
of a carnival. Two commissioners whom Roland, Minister of the
Interior, sends to Lyons, are able to see within a few days the
carnival and the slaughter-house.[34] - On the one hand the
peasants, all along the road, arrest everybody; the people regard
every traveler as an aristocrat who is running away - which is so
much the worse for those who fall into their hands.
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