�. Ramon de Ia Sagra ( I i98-18i1 ) . a Spanish economist. took part in the n·,·olutionary movenwnt of 18-�8 in Frann'. and wrote advocating the views of Proudhon. In 1 8'>-1- hP r·eturn!'d to Spain. and was sPveral times electpd a mPmbPr of the CortPs. HC' was. of course. not SPventy in 1 848.
as Herzen mistakenly assumes. but fifty. ( Tr.)
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-he can look at things like a poet, and from his own point of view he is right; but I don't want his words to pass without protest in such a gathering' ; and so he went on and on, with all the fire of a Spaniard and the authority of an old man.
When he had finished, twenty glasses, mine among them, were held out to clink with his.
Mickiewicz tried to retrieve his position, and said a few words of explanation, but they were unsuccessful. De la Sagra did not give way. Everyone got up from the table and Mickiewicz weht away.
There could scarcely have been a worse omen for the new journal ; it succeeded in existing after a fashion till the 1 3th of June, and its disappearance was as little noticed as its existence.
There could be no unity in the editing of it. Mickiewicz had rolled up half his imperial banner use par la gloire. The others did not dare to unfurl theirs; hampered both by him and by the committee many of the contributors abandoned the journal at the end of the month; I never sent them a single line. If the police of Napoleon had been more intelligent the Tribune des Peuples would never have been prohibited for a few lines on the 1 3th of June. With Mickiewicz's name and devotion to Napoleon, with its revolutionary mysticism and its dream of a democracy in arms, with the Bonapartes at its head, the journal might have become a veritable treasure for the President, the clean organ of an unclean cause.
Catholicism, so alien to the Slavonic genius, has a destructive effect upon it. When the Bohemians no longer had the strength to resist Catholicism, they were crushed ; in the Poles Catholicism has developed that mystical exaltation which supports them perpetually in their world of phantoms. If they are not under the direct influence of the Jesuits, then instead of liberty they either invent some idol for themselves, or come under the influence of some visionary. Messianism, that mania of Wronski's, that delirium of Towjanski's, had turned the brains of hundreds of Poles, Mickiewicz himsel£6 among them. The worship of Napoleon 6 Chagrin at the defeat of 1 830-1 and the loss of hope in the liberation of Poland bred a mood of mysticism among the Polish emigrants and contributed to the rise of ideas of Messianism. Polish Messianism was the teaching of the peculiar role of 'martyred Poland' in the history of peoples, according to which the Polish-people-Messiah was redeeming and liberating all the other peoples by its sufferings and its struggle.
The representative of this doctrine was Joseph \Vronski. a mathematician and philosopher, the author of Mrssianism. From his idealistic system, which he called 'Messianistic,' \Vronski with the aid of the 'universal
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stands in the foreground of this insanity. Napoleon had clone nothing for them; he had no love for Poland, but he liked the Poles who shed their blood for him with the titanic, poetic courage displayed in their famous cavalry attack of Somma Sierra. In 1812 Napoleon said to Narbonne: 'I want a camp in Poland, not a forum. I will not permit either Warsaw or Moscow to open a club for demagogues'-and of this man the Poles made a military incarnation of God, setting him on a level with Vishnu and Christ.
Late one winter evening in 1 848 I was walking with one of the Polish followers of Mickiewicz along the Place Vendome.
When we reached the column the Pole took off his cap. 'Is it possible? . . .' I thought, hardly daring to believe in such stupidity, and meekly asked what was his reason for taking off his cap. The Pole pointed to the bronze emperor. How can we expect men to refrain from domineering or oppressing others
\vhen it wins so much devotion!
Mickiewicz's private life was dark; there was something unfortunate about it, something gloomy, some 'visitation of God.'
His wife was for a long time out of her mind. Towjanski recited incantations over her, and is said to have done her good ; this made a great impression on Mickiewicz, but traces of her illness remained . . . things went badly with them. The last years of the great poet, who outlived himself, were spent in gloom. He died in Turkey while taking part in an absurd attempt to organise a Cossack legion, which the Turkish government would not permit to be called Polish. Before his death he wrote a Latin ode to the honour and glory of Louis-Napoleon.
After this unsuccessful attempt to take part in the magazine I withdrew even more into a small circle of friends, enlarged by the arrival of new emigres. Formerly I had sometimes visited a mathematical formula' originated by himself deduced the idea of the unity of the Slavonic peoples. The :Wessianic-mystic mood overcame Mickiewicz, too, and induced his spiritual crisis in the 1 830s and the early 1 840s, when he joined the mystic sect of the adventurer Andrei Towjanski who came to Paris from Lithuania in 1 840 and gave out that he was a prophet. In one of his letters written in 1 841 Chopin, speaking of Towjanski as a clever rogue who could dull people's wits, grieves that M. has not seen through Towjanski. 1\I.'s religious and mystic ten·
dencies left their stamp on his work in the 1 830s and 1 840s and affected his life and activity for the worse. Yet even in the years of his spiritual crisis his revolutionary inclination had the upper hand and grew steadily stronger. He found inspiration in the revolution of 1 848 and was brought ideologically closer to it and to Polish revolutionary democracy. (A.S.)
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club, and I had participated in three or four banquets, that is I had eaten cold mutton and drunk sour wine, while I listened to Pierre Leroux or Father Cabet and joined in the 'I.Harseillaise.'
Now I was sick of that, too. With profound sorrow I watched and recorded the success of the forces of dissolution and the decline of the republic, of France, of Europe. From Russia came no gleam of light in the distance, no good news, no friendly greeting: people had given up writing to me; personal, intimate, family relations were suspended. Russia lay speechless, as though dead, covered with bruises, like an unfortunate peasant-woman at the feet of her master, beaten by his heavy fists. She was then entering upon those fearful five years from which she is at last emerging now that Nicholas7 is buried.
Those five years were for me, too, the worst time of my life; I have not now such riches to lose or such beliefs to be destroyed . . . .
. . . The cholera raged in Paris; the heavy air, the sunless heat produced a languor; the sight of the frightened, unhappy population and the rows of hearses which started racing each other as they drew near the cemeteries-all this corresponded with what was happening.
The victims of the pestilence fell near by, at one's side. My mother drove to St Cloud with a friend, a lady of five-andtwenty. When they were coming back in the evening, the lady felt rather unwell; my mother persuaded her to stay the night with us. At seven o'clock the next morning they came to tell me that she had cholera. I went in to see her, and was aghast. Not one feature was unchanged; she was still handsome ; but all the muscles of her face were drawn and contracted and dark shadows lay under her eyes. With great difficulty I succeeded in finding Rayer8 at the Institute, and brought him home with me.