What matter, then, if Michelet was the least trustworthy of historians since he was the most personal and the most evocative?
As for the others, they simply ferreted around among the old state papers, clipped them, and, following M.Taine's example, arranged, ticketed, and mounted their sensational gleanings in logical sequence, rejecting, of course, everything that did not advance the case they were trying to make.

They denied themselves imagination and enthusiasm and claimed that they did not invent.

True enough, but they did none the less distort history by the selection they employed.

And how simply and summarily they disposed of things! It was discovered that such and such an event occurred in France in several communities, and straightway it was decided that the whole country lived, acted, and thought in a certain manner at a certain hour, on a certain day, in a certain year.
No less than Michelet they were doughty falsifiers, but they lacked his vision.

They dealt in knickknacks, and their trivialities were as far from creating a unified impression as were the pointillistic puzzles of modern painters and the word hashes cooked up by the decadent poets.
And worst of all, thought Durtal, the biographers.