The Stock Exchange, the Palace of Justice, and the Parliament building have been talked about quite a bit the past few days. These three buildings were specifically threatened by three young men who were fortunately stopped just in time.

 

Nothing can be hidden from the honorable journalists. They revealed the triple conspiracy, and their colleagues in the police department immediately apprehended the conspirators.

 

Once again the men of the press and the police have earned the gratitude of that portion of the population that doesn’t yet appreciate the picturesque charm of palaces in ruin, and the strange beauty of fallen buildings.

 

The public won’t be stingy with its thanks. The services rendered will be rewarded with solid cash. Civic virtues must be encouraged. Secret funds will dance, and the ball will be led by society’s saviors.

 

All the better! Because it is edifying to see that if there is a small number of clever exploiters among our enemies, the great mass of them is made up of imbeciles who push the limits of naivete all the way to the horizon.

 

How could these dimwits believe that anarchists would consider blowing up parliament at this time?

 

When the Members of Parliament are on vacation!

 

You have to be completely out of it to think that revolutionaries would choose such a moment.

 

If only from common courtesy, we would wait for everyone’s return, after the vacation season.

 

Still, the other morning, while Paris shopkeepers were arranging their wares, they told themselves, with their robust good sense:

 

«There can be no mistake. They want to undermine the foundations of our centuries-old monuments. We are faced with a new conspiracy».

 

Come, come, good shopkeepers! You are wandering onto the plains of the absurd. This conspiracy you speak of isn’t new. If it’s about tearing down the worm-eaten edifices of the society we hate, well, this has been in preparation for a long time.

 

This is what we have always plotted to do.

 

The temple of the Stock Exchange — where faithful Catholics and fervent Jews gather for the rituals and affairs of petty commerce — the temple of the Stock Exchange should, in fact, disappear; and soon.

 

The money-handlers will in turn be handled by the heavy caress of crumbling stones.

 

Then the Stock Exchange game will no longer be played. Those skillful strokes that bring millions to corporations — whose reason for being is to speculate on wheat and to organize famines — will be no more.

 

Those behind the scenes: the brokers and the bankers — gold’s priests — will sleep their final sleep beneath the ruins of their temple.

 

In this resting place, the financiers will give us pleasure.

 

As for the judges, it’s well known that they are never so handsome as when they march towards death. It’s a real pleasure to see them then.

 

History is full of striking sketches of prosecutors and judges who the people made suffer from time to time. It must be admitted that the agony of these men was aesthetically appealing.

 

And what a superb spectacle, a commotion at the palace of Justice. Quesnay held down by a column that has broken his spine, trying hard to assume the look of a Beaurepaire struck down during the Crusades. Cabot, quoting Balzac with his dying breath. Anquetil, next to the witty Croupi, shouting:

 

«Nothing is lost...we are lying beneath our judge’s benches».

 

The scene would have such grandeur that, good souls that we are, we would sincerely feel bad for the defeated. We would no longer want to remember the ignominy of the red robes — dyed with the blood of the poor. We would forget that the judiciary was cowardly and cruel.

 

It will be the ineffable pardon.

 

And if Atthalin himself — the specialist in political trials — with his head slightly cracked, were to ask to be taken to a rest home, we would gallantly grant the sick man’s wish.

 

In truth, you don’t have to be an anarchist to be seduced by the coming demolitions.

 

All those who society lashes in the innermost depths of their being instinctively want vengeance.

 

A thousand institutions of the old world are marked with a fatal sign.

 

Those affiliated with the conspiracy have no need to hope for a distant better future; they know a sure way to seize joy immediately:

 

Destroy passionately!