Chapter I: Receive a Handsome Gift (2)

“Socialist-republican principles endow every man, every citizen, with a dogma of pride which assures his moral value. If a man be a socialist-republican, he finds within himself the exact level of his scope of faculties, which in no wise oppress the scope of other person’s faculties.”

And then came endless preaching. My father’s conviction, sincere faith, and absolute certainty of the truth of his ideas, gave him such persuasive eloquence that no child of eleven could resist, especially one whom he treated as a beloved disciple.

One evening my father solemnly gave me a small guide entitled, “Twenty-one short precepts on the duties of a sincere Socialist-republican,” which Saint Paul would not have disavowed. He had composed it for me and for his peasant and workingmen proselytes.

XXIX

TALKS ABOUT NATURE

I was very fond of play, but, as I took my rôle of socialist-republican disciple so much in earnest, I seized every opportunity, like my father, of preaching its doctrines.

In the evenings, after dinner, which we took rather early, the children of the neighbourhood used to gather under the lime trees, in the large square, which was situated near our house. Our elders sat and chatted with one another, while the boys and girls, myself at the head, played at revolution. The sons and daughters of the parents whom my father had “converted” were all on my side, while the lukewarm, or ignorant, usually received chastisement, or finally came over to our party.

While my father crammed my mind with politics, he did not forget to foster my passion for nature, the smallest manifestations of which he deified. He delighted in proving to me that it was useless for man to seek beyond nature for unattainable chimeras, for the infinite which our finite conception was unable to understand, and for the immaterial, which our materiality can never satisfactorily explain. He laid particular stress on this point; he unveiled to me all the great and small laws of life and movement, both those which rule the motion of the universe so splendidly, and those which govern the world of ants, whose ways and manners he had already taught me. But the great demonstrations furnished by ants, however much they impressed my mind, always made me laugh, for this reason: An old neighbour of ours, Madame Viet, seemed to have but one occupation in life, that of destroying ants, and but one subject of conversation, the “frumions” (as she called them, in _patois_) which she had scalded during the day, and whose dead bodies she kept, whenever she could, to count them at night, either in imagination or in reality. As soon as she would appear outside her door, after a very curt “good-morning” to her neighbours, she would start a long conversation about the ants. In all the neighbourhood and at home we all joked about Madame Viet and the quantity of ants she destroyed.

Her granddaughter, whose father was a large farmer in the adjacent country, was one of my schoolmates at Chauny; she spent a few days of each week during the holidays with her grandmother, and was the first to laugh about the ants. Whenever I went to see Saint-Just’s sister, Madame Decaisne and the Chevalier, I was always asked for news of our friend and her “frumions.” The more she killed the more they reappeared in greater numbers; it really seemed as if they were brought by some one during the night into her courtyard.

We had some beehives, and I delighted in watching their daily, never-varying work, about which my old Homer had sung thousands of years before. My father, desiring to convince me that men and animals are what we make them by kindness and education, taught me, little by little, how to tame my bees. I used to take them sugar and flowers, and they never stung me.

“It is because you love them,” said my father, “and they know it well.”

I was as fond of my Blérancourt bees as of my Chauny pigeons, and came to know their ways, their work, their tastes, and their organisation. I used to talk to them, and they understood me as well as did my pigeons.

“You see,” said my father, “nature amply suffices for the need of observation, of sociability and love which exists in man. He is, himself, the conscious reflection of the whole life of the universe. If you wish to worship something, worship the sun, the God that gives you life, that surrounds you with heat, that illuminates all things, and, under whose rays, everything grows, everything comes to life and palpitates.”

Under the powerful and incessant pressure of my father’s mind, I gradually came to see everything from his point of view. Anyone mentioning the words “apostleship” or “holiness,” would at once have made me think of my father, whose charity and kindness were without bounds.

I was unwilling to return to Chauny and to the school, now occupying the place of my beloved lost garden. I begged my father to delay my departure from Blérancourt, under pretext of my studying with him. He had begun with me a course of Greek history which he desired to finish. He was perfecting me as a “poetess,” and the verses I sent to grandmother, who was very fond of poetry, were considered much superior to my first attempts, both by Blondeau and my friend Charles. In this way I reached Christmas, and the impress of both republicanism and paganism became more and more developed in my mind. My father’s ideas fell into ground already prepared for them by heredity. And then, who could have resisted so much warmth of heart, such a passionate love of the beautiful and the good?

Winter set in very severely at the end of October, and we met so many poorly clad people on the roads that my father and I felt ashamed of our warm clothing, and it often happened that we returned home without wraps or shoes. My mother, who was also charitable, but in a sensible way, gave away only warm clothing; and she would abuse my father and scold me for being as foolish as he was.

Liénard had given back to me my large travelling-purse, and begged to be allowed to offer me the little things we had bought together at Boulogne-sur-Mer. This money was of the greatest use to us for our poor, but it was soon exhausted.

My father would have spent millions had he possessed them. He could not be trusted with money, for he gave it instantly away.

My mother, who had carefully saved up the money for the tilbury, sent it to Liénard, knowing well that if she confided it to my father he would without fail give it to the poor, and not replace his worn-out carriage. He was, however, most desirous of having a new one, the old carriage being much too heavy when the wheels were covered with mud, which was the case eight months out of the year, on the badly kept roads around Blérancourt at that time.

My mother never allowed my father any loose money; but if his patients’ bills were small at Decaisne’s, the chemist, a nephew of Saint-Just, when the end of each month came, there were painful surprises for my mother’s slender purse, when the butcher, the baker, and grocer had to be paid. Added to this, my father often found that people were too poor to pay for his visits. If he did not grow rich, he at least grew in influence, and his republican proselytes numbered hundreds. Blérancourt was now becoming a centre of violent agitation. The most revolutionary pamphlets were read there; a large fair was held in the town every month, and my father’s ideas reached all the surrounding villages; the propaganda became more and more active. Nothing was talked of but reforms, progress, the lowering of the census, the accession to political life, not only of the educated class, but also of the lower classes.

In my letters to grandmother I told her, of course, as cleverly as I could, of my new opinions, but only of those of republican tendency and touching upon nature. Without discussing them, she answered that she was anxious about me, that, becoming republican first, I would surely become a socialist, and, from being a worshipper of nature, turn pagan and atheist, like my father; that it was the logical outcome of such an education, and that there was no escaping it. She added that my father was disloyal to her in destroying in my mind what she had implanted there.

XXX

A SERIOUS ACCIDENT

During the first days of December an excited correspondence about me began between my father and my grandmother, which increased in violence. She declared she would not consent to my staying away until Christmas; that she had been deprived of my presence too long; that I was her sole reason for living, and that she insisted on my returning to her at the end of the week we had just begun.

“If you do not send her back to me,” wrote grandmother, “I shall alter my will; you will have nothing, and Juliette can wait for the _dot_ you will save up for her.”

This was my father’s answer:

“I am preparing her to marry a workman!”

When my father told me his answer, I said to him:

“That is a joke, is it not?”

“No,” he answered, “it is my dearest wish.”

“It is not mine!” I answered curtly. “I would give up my life for our cause, but I have no taste for the slow torture of married life out of my own sphere.”

“Juliette!”

“It is true, papa, and I will never, never marry a man who is my inferior.”

“Well, where is your theory of equality?”

“Equality of rights--yes, papa, I believe in that with all my heart, but equality in manners and ways of life--no, never!”

My father was angry and I was sulky.

During the day a cartload of wood was brought to the door, and, fearing a fall of snow, my father, my mother, and myself helped to carry in the logs. As I stooped to pick some up in my arms, my father, taking up one of the logs, gave me such a blow that I screamed with pain. I stood up and found the blood flowing from my temple and left eye. My father, under the impression that he had destroyed my eye, had one of his fits of madness. His only fault was his extreme violence of temper. In one of his rages he had killed a dog of whom he was very fond. In another, because his brother-in-law, a man as tall and as strong as himself, had somewhat roughly treated his wife, my father’s sister, he would have killed him also, if they had not been separated.

He brandished his log of wood furiously, and cried out:

“I would rather see my daughter dead than living with only one eye! I shall kill her and myself afterwards!”

My mother tried in vain to hold him back. The gardener endeavoured to wrest the log from him. I suffered intensely. I was half blinded, and I, too, thought my eye was gone. I was not afraid of death; I was only afraid that my father would commit the crime of killing himself and me.

It was a horrible moment. I was paralysed, but, seeing that my father was on the point of escaping from my mother and the gardener, I rushed into the house, and with all my might held the door shut which separated my father from the crime he was about to commit.

My mother kept crying out to him that he would end on the scaffold and dishonour his family. Blattier, the gardener, besought him, saying: “Monsieur Lambert, as good as you are, you are surely not going to do such a dreadful thing!”

I mastered myself, and said to my father in calm tones, through the door:

“Very well, papa, you mean to kill me, but let me first go upstairs for a minute to wash my eye and see whether it is really gone.”

I let go the door--it did not open. My father, who was struggling against their terrified supplications, was dumfounded at the sound of my calm voice. He let fall his log of wood, and leaned against the wall, and, from my little room, where I was bathing my eye, I could hear his sobs and cries of grief.

My heart stood still when I turned up my eyelid. My eyebrow was cut open, but I could see. I folded a wet handkerchief over the wound with one hand, and ran to my father. I looked angrily at him. I was furious with him for not knowing how to master his violent temper, and I felt that but for my calmness, the presence of mind of a mere child, he would have killed me.

“You see,” I said, coldly, “my eye is not put out. It would have been useless to kill me. Only my eyebrow is cut, and I am going to Decaisne’s to have it dressed.”

“Juliette!” cried both of my parents. I did not heed them, but ran to Decaisne. I told him I had hurt myself and that my father was so nervous about it he was unable to treat the wound.

Grandmother arrived next day to take me away. I had not spoken a single word to my father, or answered any of his questions, for I thought that he deserved severe blame.

Grandmother never guessed anything of the truth about this lamentable event, but she thought me feverish. I told her quite naturally before my father, how I had hurt myself, and she never gave a second thought to such a simple fact as the sudden shutting of a door on me, which was the version I gave her. My father winced under my protecting lies. I think he would have much preferred a scene of violent reproach to my calm indulgence.

I kissed him coldly as I left. Tears ran down his face, which induced grandmother to give him a passionate embrace.

“Come, my son,” she said, “we will divide her, and each take half, for she belongs solely to us.”

My mother at these words grew angry with me.

“You are clever enough to make yourself beloved,” she said in my ear, kissing me coldly, “but I do not see what you gain by the exaggerated love you inspire. Remember the log of wood!”

Grandmother got into the carriage. My father heard my mother’s last words, and was about to give way once more to his violent temper, but calmed himself, and said to me, kissing me with all his heart:

“Juliette, my darling child, forgive me!”

XXXI

“LIBERTY, EQUALITY, AND FRATERNITY”

When I stayed with my father I missed my grandmother--her liveliness, her fancies, her caprices, her gracious tenderness, and her maternal feeling. Grandfather’s wit amused and rested me, and to be without Blondeau’s devotion and my friend Charles’s admiration was a great deprivation. But as soon as I returned to grandmother I felt myself an orphan. I was nervous, my mind was empty, I was stupefied, and became more childlike, more enervated, less fit for “the struggle for life,” a phrase which grandfather indulged in too frequently and used on all occasions.

These allusions to the “struggle for life” sometimes came up in such a droll manner in conversation that they made us all laugh, but I often thought that these same struggles did really exist, and were anything but droll. Had I not already experienced them? The memory of that scene of my father’s violence rose so tragically in my mind that it seemed to impress me much more when I invoked it than at the time when I endured the pain. Then, too, my father’s strange, insane idea of marrying me to a workman never left my mind.

I had sometimes dreamed of a cottage or a farm, with a gentleman for a husband, but never of a “lodging,” with a weaver’s loom or a carpenter’s block in the centre of the room, waiting for “my man” to return from taking his work home, having “finished his day.”

I could have no doubts about my deep and growing love for the people--a love which in my days of enthusiasm seemed capable of enabling me to sacrifice my very life for their cause; I wished to help them and to serve them, but to form a part of them,--I, whom generations of ancestors had elevated above them--that I could never do.

I recalled Saint-Just’s words, which his sister often repeated to me in speaking of the elegance of the young Jacobite, “the people’s friend.” He said:

“I wish to raise the people up to me, and desire to see them one day dressed as I am myself, but I will never lower myself to them nor wear their blue blouse.”

My father, on the contrary, delighted to wear the _sayon_ of the Gauls, the peasant’s blouse, and workman’s smock-frock. He failed, however, to induce my mother to dress herself as a woman of the people.

To be sure, when I stayed with my aunts I gladly wore the peasant costume, which they had worn for years, but then they saw no one--they had retired from the world but had always remained gentlewomen. They had not chosen that mode of dress to become one of the lower class. Their ways, their conversation, their lives, showed the refinement of their caste. The contrast between their refinement and the peasant garb pleased them, because it was rustic and made them think of Trianon; whereas the contrast sought by my father would have made one think rather of the women who sat and knitted by the guillotine, the “tricoteuses” of the Revolution.

One day I had a discussion with my father on this subject, and told him I would much rather see the “white caps” (the name given in Picardy to the peasant women) wearing hats like mine--although at that time such a thing was not dreamed of, though doubtless they would have been pleased to don them--than I should care to wear their caps.

Notwithstanding reservations of this kind, or rather in spite of our different ways of interpreting the idea of equality, which I wished to be elevating and not lowering, I agreed entirely with my father as to the forms of republican principles and as to the social and democratic programme which I had accepted. I neither laid aside nor disowned my little book, wherein were inscribed the twenty-one principles of the future.

My mother and grandmother both reproached my father for forcing my young mind and causing it to ripen too soon, to which he replied:

“She can think what she pleases later. Either what I have taught her will satisfy her, as it satisfies me--and I think it will, for she resembles me more than any other member of the family--or she will throw off my ideas, as I threw off, in one night, the teachings of the seminary.”

The end of 1847 fixed in my mind the political convictions which I have kept, without modification, for more than thirty-five years. My father’s great abilities, his immense goodness, his love of the people, his disinterestedness, all of which filled up the void in his conceptions, made me for many years his disciple.

He believed, and made others believe, that the people possessed, in a latent degree, all the virtues, and that it would be necessary only to put them in possession of all their social and political rights for them to be worthy of both.

In my father’s enthusiasm for “the masses” there was both the affirmation of a strong ideal and also a great deal of ingenuousness. I see it now, alas! Our sentimentality was not made of false sentiment, but of a valiant faith in the necessity of justice and in a proper proportion of social benefits. For us of the “middle class” to contribute to the happiness of the people involved a certain sacrifice which was not lacking in generosity or grandeur.

The belief in universal fraternity, the hope that each nation might participate in the freedom of other nations, developed the finest of all qualities--abnegation and heroism in the men who filled prominent rôles in 1848.

It could not be truthfully said, however, that practical, feasible ideas possessed the minds of the revolutionists of 1847, since a young girl, eleven and a half years old, as I was at that time, could be initiated into all the revolutionary plans, could understand them, be enthusiastic about them, and strive for their accomplishment. These plans were undoubtedly somewhat infantile.

Grandmother, to whom I had talked a great deal, was quite taken with the sentimentality of the idea of regeneration and with the honest appearance of character of the Liberals and the Republicans, at that time united. She began to think that the “hirelings of royalty” were corrupted, and that Louis Philippe was too unyielding to reform and to progress. Little by little she was being brought around to my father’s way of thinking. Blondeau, although an office-holder, thought as I did.

Grandfather had received orders from his Bonapartist committee not to fear socialism, but, on the contrary, to encourage it, and he approved and supported my most eccentric ideas.

My father, to my great surprise, was not pleased with grandmother’s half conversion. I had thought he would rejoice in it.

“If the middle class, who yesterday were still royalists, become republicans, why, then, when we do have a republic they will spoil the country and turn it royalist. We shall do much better to go slowly and to form new generations according to our principles than to rally elements which will create a selfish and middle-class republic instead of a democratic-socialist--otherwise, generous--republic. I see already,” my father added, “all the harm that Odilon Barrot is doing.”

He expressed ideas entirely opposite to those of my aunts, who accused Ledru-Rollin of misleading the campaign of the reformists, while he accused Odilon Barrot of turning this campaign aside from its end.

My father became every day more fanatical in his ideas. His opinions became more and more intolerant. Was this the reason of the violence of his character? Whenever he spoke, either to friends or to myself, of the future, he always spoke of the rising tide which it would soon be impossible to stem.

“Our principles clash, all things are as yet in conflict; we ourselves are powerless to be logical, and our country is bringing forth monstrous things,” said my father. “Everything is abnormal, because too many things are being elaborated at the same time. There is such a thirst for reform that when the first one is made others will follow which will overstep all we have ever imagined. That is the reason why King Louis Philippe, very sensibly, for the sake of his own security, will have none. As to myself,” added my father, “would an electoral reform satisfy me, would the combination of other intellects satisfy me, either? What do I desire? To undermine everything, according to my master, Proudhon, in his ‘Economical Contradictions,’ or to renew everything, according to my other master, Victor Considérant, as he teaches in his ‘Principles of Socialism: A Manifesto of Democracy in the Twentieth Century’? What I do desire with all my heart, and that which is absolutely necessary, and without which we shall lose our heads, and exact from the revolution reforms on which no thought has been bestowed, and which are neither ripened nor likely to live--what I do desire is to make somewhere, anywhere, an experiment of socialism, of association, and of life in common, a phalanstery. Then, indeed, the possibilities of a social change might be proved.”

XXXII

“VIVE LA RÉPUBLIQUE!”

I returned to school, in spite of the pain it gave me. Happily for me, Maribert had not come back. By degrees I regained my influence. Stirring political events were following each other in quick succession, and drew the attention of my young friends whom I had interested in the importance of what was going on.

Even in the provinces public opinion was irritated by the obstinacy of King Louis Philippe and of Monsieur Guizot, and by the insufficiency of a servile House, whose majority was bought. Everyone said--and we also, the young female politicians of the Mesdemoiselles André’s school, especially, declared--that “the hour for reforms had sounded!”

It was affirmed that King Louis Philippe pretended to fear nothing and to laugh at Odilon Barrot and Ledru-Rollin.

Much was said concerning a banquet about to take place in the First Arrondissement of Paris, and of seditious cries already heard. We called them “cries of deliverance.” When we shook hands with one another every morning we murmured, in low tones: “Long live Reform! Down with Guizot!”

We knew, and kept saying among ourselves, that the people, the great people, “were stirring in their deep masses.”

And, lo! one day we heard that many of these inoffensive people had been massacred for making a purely legal demonstration; that King Louis Philippe, after trying twice to form a ministry, and that the Duchess of Orléans, after a semblance of regency, were in flight; then we heard, in quick succession, that the people had erected barricades, that the National Guard had behaved like heroes, and that the Republic was proclaimed!

The Republic! and what a grand Republic! My father’s and mine, one that began by recognizing the people and their right to work!

The Republic had just ratified this privilege, and the people’s delegates had said, in words worthy of ancient Greece:

“The people have three months of misery to give to the service of the Republic.”

“The people,” said the _Democratie Pacifique_, “have behaved admirably and have shown themselves worthy of every liberty. They have proved their moral maturity. Not a single robbery, nor a single attack on private property has been committed.” The ragged poor who guarded the Palace of the Tuileries had put placards along the corridors, reading: “Death to all thieves!” They had also protected the bank treasure.

France once again was at the head of nations, and gave a new example of her national grandeur.

My father arrived on the 26th of February. He could not stay quiet at Blérancourt, and felt that he must share his joy with me.

Grandmother did not appear over-anxious about the revolution.

Grandfather raged. He had thought that the overthrowing of the Orléans dynasty could be but to the sole advantage of Louis Napoleon. He fell upon the first triumphant Republican,--his son-in-law,--who came under his hands, and also upon his stupidly democratic Republic, and none of us could force him to beat a retreat. My father laughed, grandmother smiled, and I said:

“Ah! poor grandfather, with our Republic I am afraid your Bonaparte is in a bad way, however socialistic he may have pretended to be.”

I can remember that at the end of dinner on that 26th of February, grandfather, who, to console himself for his disappointment, had added a few bottles of his old Mâcon wine to his usual allowance, said to us, with eyes rounder than ever:

“Well, I can see as clear as daylight into the future.”

“Grandfather, it is eight o’clock in the evening.”

“I see your Republic--do you hear, Lambert? do you hear, Juliette?--thrown to the ground by my Bonaparte. I repeat it, so that you may hear: revolutions always end in empires.”

Grandmother, Blondeau, and especially my father and I, laughed heartily at him.

At school, how excited and curious and frightened they all were! Half the pupils were missing and were shut up at home, as it was thought the revolution might spread in the provinces. The workmen of the glass manufactory were all for the Republic. They would doubtless proclaim it at Chauny, make a revolution on their own account, and perhaps commit pillage.

Mademoiselle André and her younger sister sent for me as soon as I arrived at school. They had long known of my father’s opinions and guessed at mine. They wished to put themselves under our protection.

“Well, Juliette, how pleased your father must be at the news, as he has always been a republican. Have you seen him?”

“Yes, Mademoiselle, he came yesterday, and he is overjoyed. He says that France is now, at last, worthy of her history; that she will govern herself; that all the European nations will admire us, and perhaps imitate us; that it is now the coming to power of the people, of the real people, not the corrupted middle class, and that----”

“That will do,” said the elder Mademoiselle André, sharply. “Please keep to yourself these beautiful opinions of your father. I forbid you to speak of them here.”

“In the class-room, Mademoiselle?”

“In the class-room or at recreation.”

I looked Mademoiselle André straight in the face. I was nearly as tall as she was. I answered:

“I cannot promise that, Mademoiselle, for we number a good many republicans in school. And no one can forbid us to speak of, and to love, the Republic.”

“But France has not accepted your Republic,” said Mademoiselle Sophie.

“She will accept it, Mademoiselle, for now the people can vote.”

The Mesdemoiselles André were torn by conflicting feelings--the imperative desire to hush me, which I perfectly understood from the tone in which Mademoiselle Sophie said: “Ah! Juliette, how sad it is to be divided between being obliged to be harsh to the daughter of a friend and the fear of irritating republican sentiments. When you next see your father, Juliette, you can tell him from us how sincerely we hope that his Republic will calm France instead of disturbing her.”

I made my curtsey and went into the class-room. Curious glances followed me. I answered by signs that an important affair had happened. All my schoolmates were aware of my having been called into the drawing-room by “Mesdemoiselles.”

I had a tri-coloured cockade pinned inside my bodice. I took it out and held it in the palm of my hand, under the half-raised cover of my desk. I showed it to my neighbour, and slipped it into her hand; she did the same to her neighbour. In an instant my cockade went the round of our long table, unperceived by our governess. My friends knew then that “Mesdemoiselles” had spoken to me about the Republic!

The class became highly excited; we were all restless and inattentive. Not one of us had learned her lessons or written her exercises, and there seemed to be but one answer:

“Mademoiselle, I have had no time for my lessons on account of the Republic.”

“Mademoiselle, I have had no time to study, on account of the Republic!”

“I wonder what interest the Republic can have for you?” said our governess, in a most disdainful tone, and shrugging her shoulders.

A voice was heard to answer, amid general silence. It was mine:

“Why, Mademoiselle, the Republic is most exciting to us!”

An approving murmur upheld me. Mademoiselle was silent, and looked amazed at me, and I saw it struck her that if I had dared to answer her as I had, it was because I thought I had the right to do so.

The exit of the class was something like a small riot.

It was our Republic, and we, the _Frondeuses_, owned it! The King in exile, republicans and democrats in power, it was simply a triumph! Surrounded and questioned, I did not know which of my friends to answer first.

“What did Mesdemoiselles say to you?” was the general query.

I told them what had passed, and, if it had been possible, they would have crowned me with laurels. “That was right! That is what I call brave and firm; that was just the thing to say; your true republican answer was what it should have been!” was the approving comment on my action.

I repeated for my friends’ benefit every word my father had said: “The Republic was marvellous; we were to have complete liberty and no authority.” Doubtless, and especially now, in the beginning of things, we were not to be impertinent to our governesses, but we should very soon be able to make them feel that, although younger and less clever than they, the Republic considered us their equals!

What discussions, what plans, what different ways of understanding Government there were! “I would do this! I would act thus!” we said. We each of us wanted so many different things, that it was agreed at last that we, the initiated, the _Frondeuses_, should each make out a programme, which should be read in recess next day, and that which seemed to us the best form of government should be decided upon by vote. Our young minds were filled with the current words of the day.

The uniting of “abilities” was decidedly quite insufficient as a reform; on that point everyone agreed; everybody must vote, men, women, and especially schoolgirls. We had conceived in our minds a foreshadowing of true universal suffrage, and later we were firmly convinced that we had invented it.

The opening of national workshops pleased my father greatly. He wrote to me that at last the people were to be happy; that one hundred thousand citizens were fed by the State and worked for it. He thought at that time, with many others, that Louis Blanc was secretly at the head of the founding and organizing of the national workshops, and his confidence in them grew thereby.

“All other nations admire us, and all will later imitate us,” added my father at the end of his long letter. “The Republic is to arm every Frenchman, so that all shall be prepared to join in delivering other nations.”

My father came to see us again in March. Alas! he seemed already very uneasy. The national assembly was full of reactionists. The Montagne had no authority. True, the establishing of the Republic had taken everyone by surprise. Nothing was ready; certain reforms had been pushed through, certain measures had been too hurried, but the feelings of all the republicans were so noble, so proud, so disinterested, there was such a belief among them in right, in justice, in the divine voice of the people, that it was better not to be disquieted with their indecision, nor to be too hard on mistakes already committed.

In my father’s opinion, the worst of it was the fact that the whole world had its eyes upon us, and that the dream of a Republic and universal fraternity could be realised only by the Republic of France giving definitely, and at once, the example she owed to the world.

My father had just been elected Mayor of Blérancourt. His friends and disciples would never have allowed another to hold power there, however small that power might be, nor that he should not be able to possess the possibility of realising all that his enthusiasm and generosity promised for the Republic.

Grandmother and I went to Blérancourt to see them plant the tree of Liberty, but it displeased us to behold my father attending this ceremony dressed in a blue blouse. His tri-coloured scarf was tied so as to show the red only. Already my father declared: “Of the three colours, we like only the red.” White seemed to him too Legitimist, and blue too Orléanist.

“Juliette,” asked grandmother, in my ear, as we were starting for the ceremony, “do you like that blouse? does it not shock your taste?”

“It is partly blue, at any rate, grandmother,” I answered, laughing; “and, with papa’s ideas, it might have been all red!”

A young poplar tree was brought and planted in a large hole prepared for it in the market-place.

My father, since the Republic had been declared in the name of liberty, had become reconciled with the priest, who now blessed the tree of Liberty.

In his speech the priest declared that if the Republic realized the evangelical ideals of its programme, incarnated in the names of liberty, equality, and fraternity, it would be the finest form of government existing; but, in order to accomplish this, it was necessary that all republicans should be as sincere, as generous, and, he cleverly added, as Christian in heart, if not in form, and as devoted to the poor as the new Mayor.

In a speech full of ardour, which carried me away, and with a fiery eloquence which fascinated grandmother, my father answered the priest that no one could deny that the Republic, and its principles of liberty, equality, and fraternity, was born from the Gospel; that Christ was the first of all socialists and republicans; that a true republican should possess all the Christian virtues, and that Christianity was the finest human formula ever conceived.

I was amazed. My father added: “All that has reference to the temporal power of the Church is admirable. It is more advanced than we socialists in the understanding and the practice of association. We have a great deal to learn from her, but it is time that she herself should learn from us the worship of nature, and allow herself to be penetrated by the truth of science!”

“My dear Mayor,” said the vicar to my father after the ceremony, “you would accept the Christian religion with your eyes shut under the condition that it should be heathenish.”

“In return,” said my father, laughingly, to the vicar, “accept my heathen religion, springing from the love of nature, under the condition that it inspires Christian virtues.”

“Never! never!” replied the vicar, smiling. “You have said that we are in advance of you in the conception of association and of life in common; we are also in advance of you from a religious point of view. Christianity represents the present and the future!” And he added, mockingly: “Paganism will continue to be more and more a thing of the past.”

“So be it!” the Mayor replied, gaily, leading off the vicar, who came to breakfast with us.

“I believe,” said my father, in the manner of one proposing a toast, at the end of the repast, “in an absolute, undeniable way, that the Republic is the consecration of liberty, of conscience, and of tolerance, and I, as Mayor, will prove to you, reverend vicar, with what largeness, what elevation of ideas, with what grandeur we democratic-socialist republicans understand liberty!”

XXXIII

“OTHER TIMES, OTHER MANNERS”

My progress as a student suffered considerably from my serious political preoccupation.

My father came to see us every week, most anxious to keep me well advised of all passing events. He gave me cuttings, selected and cleverly classified, from the _Democratie Pacifique_, and brought me books, pamphlets, and proclamations. One would have thought that it was very necessary that I should be instructed about the acts of the members of the Provisionary Government and with the writings of those who showed themselves the most ardent among the reformers. The study of the French language, of history, geography, and literature, were secondary things to the author of my being.

Besides, in truth, who knew whether the French tongue might not become universal; whether the history of kings would be able to keep its footing amid the events of the great revolutionary outburst; whether the geography of our planet was not going to be changed in such a way by the fraternity of peoples that it would be almost useless to learn it under the form given to it by the odious past?

The future meant progress, light, new things! All the old forms were to be banished. But, by a strange contradiction, which, however, seemed to strike no one, this progress, this light, these new things continued to be based on the evangelical principles of liberty, equality, and on the morality of Christ, “the Precursor,” the first Socialist.

In the jargon of the epoch, the Republic of Pericles, of Socrates, of Plato, mingled its history with that of the great French Revolution. The beauty of Athenian art alternated with the porridge of Sparta; the naked feet, or the _sabots_, of the soldiers of the fourteen armies with the magnificence of the festivals of the Goddess of Reason.

There was no escaping the qualifications given to all men and to all things--what we call “saws” to-day. The integrity of Saint-Just’s character, Robespierre’s austerity, Danton’s power, Ledru-Rollin’s love of the people, Proudhon’s overwhelming courage, the sublime social theories of Pierre Leroux, of Cabet, of Louis Blanc, woman’s superiority as shown by Tousseuel in his _Esprit des Bêtes_, and by Fourier in his _Phalanstère_, and by George Sand--all this kind of talk studded the speeches of orators in small towns and villages to such a degree that many orations were almost identical, no matter what subject was treated. To improvise was easy; the speakers simply wove phrases together, and the sonority of the words lulled their listeners as a well-known air will do.

The oratorical art of the Republic of 1848 in the provinces was analogous to the music of the hand-organs which delighted the whole land at that time.

When grandmother or grandfather begged my father to lay aside his fine phraseology and do them the honour of initiating them into the details of such of his governmental conceptions as could possibly be realised, he answered:

“Anything is better than what existed before! we are about to take a plunge into the unknown; no matter what happens, we shall at least come out of the ruts in which the chariot of State has stuck in the mud for centuries. The French Revolution made a grand effort to urge the horses of the chariot to gallop, but Bonaparte bestrode them and drove them back. It is for us to drive them forward again.”

In spite of his increasing reservation of opinion on certain men whom he began to suspect of being lukewarm, my father’s optimism was as sincere as my own. Illusions, the love of the unforeseen, of the romantic, the absolute ignorance of the possibility of the realisation of an idea, the most infantile simplicity held sway in my father’s mind as it possessed the minds of the greater number of the men of 1848 whom I have known; but what a passion of devotedness moved them, what thirst for sacrifices to be made for the holy cause of the people, what generosity, what loyal abandonment of the privileges of their caste, what sincere fraternity, what conviction that “the humble class” was ripe for equality, what indignation against the appetite for enjoyment, against egotism, against Guizot’s celebrated formula, “Grow rich!”

The men of 1848 were apostles and saints. At no other epoch has there been more honesty, more virtue, more noble simplicity. They were not political men, they were souls in love with the ideal. They were all as sincere as my father; all have a right to absolute respect, and no one could have lived beside them without honouring and cherishing their memory.

They were old-fashioned, if you like. All parties become old-fashioned in time, but how few men, before and since 1848, have possessed their youthful hearts, their high inspirations, their love of devotedness and of sacrifice!

My memory preserves their noble faces crowned with laurels, while the lucky, the rich, opportunists, men of business and of politics, whose aim was personal gain, those who, victorious, said to one another: “It is our turn to enjoy!” who repeated among themselves: “The most important attribute of power is the spoils”--such men are as vile in my mind as is the vileness of their disciples.

Not one among the republicans of 1848 thought of obtaining a better position from his passage to power, not one grew richer. If they did not accomplish what they dreamed for the people, it was not because they threw their principles overboard when they obtained possession of the great city of Paris; it was because their conception of social and human happiness was too beautiful to be realised, and because the people, first of all, refused to make a trial of their theories.

Later, I knew the greater part of these “imbeciles,” as Ernest Picard called them. They resembled my father. Their doubts--and they had many!--were of too recent date to have dried up their souls; they no longer believed in a divine Christ; they still believed in a human one. They worshipped that mysterious Science which replaced for them the supernatural, and which had not then brought all its brutality to light in crushing man under machinery.

They were internationalists, not foregoing by so being their legitimate pride of race, not accepting without resistance being conquered by an enemy, not admitting or imitating the utilitarian ideas of national groupings morally inferior to themselves, but in order to infuse into other nations their principles of love and of regeneration.

My father said to me, towards the end of April, that he saw the distance grow wider every day between his hopes and the actual events taking place.

“I am afraid,” he added, “that our Republic will be only a rose-water Republic, of the kind which some day will be dyed with blood. The ‘yellow gloves’ of the _National_ are the masters, and are delivering the Republic over to ambitious men.”

My grandmother, on the contrary, declared herself quite satisfied with the Republic, which she found in no wise frightful, as she had feared it would be.

“Jean Louis, I am getting on very well with your Republic!” she would say to my father.

At first my father answered: “Wait a little, mother;” later he replied: “You are more satisfied than I am.” One day he burst forth: “By Heaven! if the Republic suits you, it is because it is made for your benefit! The Orléanists might as well return; they will have nothing to change in favour of the middle class.”

My father became soon, in the most bitter sense of the word, a malcontent. Of course I became a malcontent also.

XXXIV