So it had been in Bamberg and Wurzburg, in Geneva two generations back, in Alsace scarce as many years back: at Edinburgh in Scotland where thirty persons had suffered in one day--ten years ago that; in the district of Como, where a round thousand had suffered! Nobility had not availed to save some, nor court-favour others; nor wealth, nor youth, nor beauty.

And what had he or she to urge, what had they to put forward that would in the smallest degree avail them?
That could even for a moment stem or avert the current of popular madness which power itself had striven in vain to dam.

Nothing! And yet he did not blench, nor would he; being half French and of good blood, at a time when good French blood ran the more generously for a half century of war.

He would not have blenched, even if he had not, from the sunlit view of God's earth and heaven which lay before his eyes, drawn other thoughts than that one of his own littleness and insignificance.

As this view of vale and mountain had once before lifted his judgment above the miasma of a cruel superstition, so it raised him now above creeping fears and filled him with confidence in something more stable than magistrates or mobs.