It would be absurd under pretext of truth to try to bring them back to the common measures of our contemporary society, for they were veritably demigods for good as for evil.
Legends are not always absurd.

The men of '93 are still near to us, but it is nevertheless with good right that legend has taken possession of them, and it is pitiable to see these men who, ten times a day, had to take resolutions where everything was at stake--their destiny, that of their ideas, and sometimes that of their country--judged as if they had been mere worthy citizens, with leisure to discuss at length every morning the garments they were to wear or the _menu_ of a dinner.

Most of the time historians have perceived only a part of the truth about them; for not only were there two men in them, almost all of them are at the same time poets, demagogues, prophets, heroes, martyrs.

To write history, then, is to translate and transpose almost continually.

The men of the thirteenth century could not bring themselves to not refer to an exterior cause the inner motions of their souls.