Time & Perspective Quote by Alfred de Vigny

Even when a story looks “factual,” de Vigny is reminding you it arrives like a rumor wearing a uniform. His sly, almost scientific phrasing - “reckon mathematically” - is a Romantic poet borrowing the prestige of reason to expose reason’s limits. History, he argues, is not raw data but a compound: first mixed by “public opinion,” then re-mixed by “the author.” By the time it reaches the reader, it’s “at third hand,” buffered by two acts of interpretation that feel invisible precisely because they’re so ordinary.

The subtext is less about cynicism than about power. “Public opinion” doesn’t just comment on events; it pre-selects what counts as an event, what deserves memory, what can be forgotten without guilt. Then the author - even the conscientious one - imposes narrative shape: motives clarified, accidents given meaning, chaos turned into plot. The “double composition” is a warning against treating history as a transparent window; it’s closer to stained glass, beautiful and deliberate, colored by the values of the people doing the telling.

Context matters: de Vigny writes in a 19th-century France that had whiplashed through revolution, empire, restoration. Official histories were constantly being rewritten to justify whoever held the pen and the police. His line anticipates modern media skepticism without the buzzwords: truth isn’t only threatened by lies; it’s quietly transformed by consensus and craft. The real target is the reader’s complacency - the urge to confuse proximity to a narrative with proximity to the “original fact.”