10/15 If I have a mission, I have nothing to fear. If I have no mission, if I am mistaken, if, instead of living the twenty-five or thirty years I need to accomplish my work, I am stabbed to the heart like Caesar, or knocked over by a cannon-ball like Berwick, Providence will have had its reasons for acting so, and on Providence will devolve the duty of providing for France. When Rome followed his body, mourning, and burned the houses of his murderers, when the Eternal City turned its eyes to the four quarters of the globe, asking whence would come the genius to stay her civil wars, when she trembled at the sight of drunken Antony and treacherous Lepidus, she never thought of the pupil of Apollonius, the nephew of Caesar, the young Octavius. |