In normal doses, fear, indispensable to action and thought, stimulates our senses and our mind; without it, no action at all. But when it is excessive, when it invades and overwhelms us, fear is transformed into a harmful principle, into cruelty. A man who trembles dreams of making others tremble, a man who lives in terror ends his days in ferocity. Hence the case of the Roman emperors. Anticipating their own murders, they consoled themselves by massacres . . . The discovery of a first conspiracy awakened and released in them the monster. And it was into cruelty that they withdrew in order to
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