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I have faced alike the bourrans of the steppes and the Samieli of Shamo, and the result of my vandal life is best epitomized in those grand but grim words of Bossuet: 'On trouve au fond de tout le vide et le neant. Nineteen years ago, to satisfy my hunger, I set out to hunt the daintiest food this world could furnish, and, like other fools, have learned finally, that life is but a huge, mellow, golden Osher, that mockingly sifts its bitter dust upon our eager lips.
Pan-Germanism is by no means a shape of mists, and Germany is anything but a Neant where thought and effort are likely to lose themselves without sound or trace. It is a powerful and voracious organisation, full of unscrupulous self-confidence, whose appetite for aggrandisement will only be limited by the power of helping itself to the severed members of its friends and neighbours.
Let her starve him, make him a slave, a bankrupt, or what not, he must submit, as the savage does to the hail and the lightning. "Laissez-faire," says the "Science du neant," the "Science de la misere," as it has truly and bitterly been called; "Laissez- faire." Analyse economic questions if you will: but beyond analysis you shall not step.
Until, however, the functions of his office, under our amended colonial constitution, are more clearly defined until that middle term which shall reconcile the faithful discharge of his responsibility to the Imperial Government and the province with the maintenance of the quasi-monarchical relation in which he now stands towards the community over which he presides, be discovered and agreed upon, he must be content to tread along a path which is somewhat narrow and slippery, and to find that incessant watchfulness and some dexterity are requisite to prevent him from falling, on the one side into the néant of mock sovereignty, or on the other into the dirt and confusion of local factions.
In this new-world Cabaret de Neant he drowned his impatience of soul in a Walpurgis Night of five-cent beer and fusel-oil whiskey. But his time would come, he repeated drunkenly, as he watched with his haggard hound's eyes the meretricious and tragic merriment of the revelers about him his time would come! Blake did not look up as he heard the door open and the woman step into the room.
She was always bored; and her later letters are a series of variations on the perpetual theme of 'ennui. 'C'est une maladie de l'âme, she says, 'dont nous afflige la nature en nous donnant l'existence; c'est le ver solitaire qui absorbe tout. And again, 'l'ennui est l'avant-goût du néant, mais le néant lui est préférable. Her existence had become a hateful waste a garden, she said, from which all the flowers had been uprooted and which had been sown with salt.
Gone the wild loves, the bravuras, the camaraderie of warm night skies in the old Boulevard de Clichy, supplanted now with a strident concatenation of Coney Island sideshows: the "Cabaret de l'Enfer," with its ballyhoo made up as Satan, the "Cabaret du Ciel," with its "grotto" smelling of Sherwin-Williams' light blue paint, the "Cabaret du Néant," with its Atlantic City plate glass trick of metamorphosing the visiting doodle into a skeleton, the "Lune Rousse," with its mean Marie Lloyd species of lyrical concupiscence, the "Quat'-z-Arts," with its charge of two francs the glass of beer and its concourse of loafers dressed up like Harry B. Smith "poets," in black velvet, corduroy grimpants and wiggy hirsutal cascades to impress "atmosphere" on the minds of the attendant citizenry of Louisville.
Her expectations, more or less vaguely expressed, give the measure of her ignorance of that Neant which for so many years had remained hidden behind this phantom of invincible armies. Neant! In a way, yes! And yet perhaps Prince Bismarck has let himself be led away by the seduction of a good phrase into the use of an inexact form.
When Danton was condemned to the guillotine, he said, flinging a pellet of bread at the nose of his respectable judge, 'Mon individu sera bientot dans le neant. My patrimony is there already! I am loaded with debts. I see before me, on the one side, ruin or suicide; on the other side, wedlock and wealth."
Hell might afford my miseries a shelter. This is the Puritan sentiment, the preoccupation with sin and predestination; but read the much more terrible words of Sénancour, expressive of the Catholic, not the Protestant, despair, when he makes his Obermann say, "L'homme est périssable. Il se peut; mais périssons en résistant, et, si le néant nous est réservé, ne faisons pas que ce soit une justice."
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