"<p>When the century was young, I was young; and because we were young, of course, we were both revolutionaries. Then time passed, and the century, and its children, entered manhood; and they wanted to grow old wisely. I wished to put on slippers or a saloon coat; I wished to throw away all the slogans of the revolution, because time had ripened them in my heart and in my mind, and I knew that liberty, equality, and fraternity were not as perfect ideals in practice as I had believed when I was young and a revolutionary. I already wanted to talk about the fact that it is more difficult to preserve than to throw away the old and create a new one from the pots; I already wanted to reconcile with the people, to build order, to bring in all the flags. But time has not allowed me to do that. And I had to know that I must remain hopelessly revolutionary, because the generation that follows me is, mysteriously, not revolutionary at all; I have no one to whom, in the order of nature and human affairs, I can hand over the flag; I must remain a protester and a blockade-maker, because I live in an age whose young people willingly assume all the limitations that the century and I, when we were young, did not assume.</p> <p>Toothlessly and with a greying hair, I am forced to remain a revolutionary who stubbornly repeats the promises of freedom of thought, equality and fraternity, in which he perhaps no longer believes so absolutely. I must remain a sans-culotte* even in my old age when it would have been so nice to have worn a saloon coat for once!</p>"