Chapter I (2)

Christophe was seeking the real public, the public which believes in the emotions of art as in those of life, and feels them with a virgin soul. And he was vaguely attracted by the new promised world--the people. The memories of his childhood, Gottfried and the poor, who had revealed to him the living depths of art, or had shared with him the sacred bread of music, made him inclined to believe that his real friends were to be found among such people. Like many another young man of a generous heart and simple faith, he cherished great plans for a popular art, concerts, and a theater for the people, which he would have been hard put to it to define. He thought that a revolution might make it possible to bring about a great artistic renascence, and he pretended that he had no other interest in the social movement. But he was hoodwinking himself: he was much too alive not to be attracted and drawn onward by the sight of the most living activity of the time.

In all that he saw he was least of all interested in the middle-class theorists. The fruit borne by such trees is too often sapless: all the juices of life are wasted in ideas. Christophe did not distinguish between one idea and another. He had no preference even for ideas which were his own when he came upon them congealed in systems. With good-humored contempt he held aloof from the theorists of force as from the theorists of weakness. In every comedy the one ungrateful part is that of the _raisonneur_. The public prefers not only the sympathetic characters to him, but the unsympathetic characters also. Christophe was like the public in that. The _raisonneurs_ of the social question seemed tiresome to him. But he amused himself by watching the rest, the simple, the men of conviction, those who believed and those who wanted to believe, those who were tricked and those who wanted to be tricked, not to mention the buccaneers who plied their predatory trade, and the sheep who were made to be fleeced. His sympathy was indulgent towards the pathetically absurd little people like fat Canet. Their mediocrity was not offensive to him as it was to Olivier. He watched them all with affectionate and mocking interest: he believed that he was outside the piece they were playing: and he did not see that little by little he was being drawn into it. He thought only of being a spectator watching the wind rush by. But already the wind had caught him, and was dragging him along into its whirling cloud of dust.

* * * * *

The social drama was twofold. The piece played by the intellectuals was a comedy within a comedy; the people hardly heeded it. The real drama was that of the people. It was not easy to follow it: the people themselves did not always know where they were in it. It was all unexpected, unforeseen.

It was not only that there was much more talk in it than action. Every Frenchman, be he burgess or of the people, is as great an eater of speeches as he is of bread. But all men do not eat the same sort of bread. There is the speech of luxury for delicate palates, and the more nourishing sort of speech for hungry gullets. If the words are the same, they are not kneaded into the same shape: taste, smell, meaning, all are different.

The first time Olivier attended a popular meeting and tasted of the fare he lost his appetite: his gorge rose at it, and he could not swallow. He was disgusted by the platitudinous quality of thought, the drab and uncouth clumsiness of expression, the vague generalizations, the childish logic, the ill-mixed mayonnaise of abstractions and disconnected facts. The impropriety and looseness of the language were not compensated by the raciness and vigor of the vulgar tongue. The whole thing was compounded of a newspaper vocabulary, stale tags picked up from the reach-me-downs of middle-class rhetoric. Olivier was particularly amazed at the lack of simplicity. He forgot that literary simplicity is not natural, but acquired: it is a thing achieved by the people of the elect. Dwellers in towns cannot be simple: they are rather always on the lookout for far-fetched expressions.

Olivier did not understand the effect such turgid phrases might have on their audience. He had not the key to their meaning. We call foreign the languages of other races, and it never occurs to us that there are almost as many languages in our nation as there are social grades. It is only for a limited few that words retain their traditional and age-old meaning: for the rest they represent nothing more than their own experience and that of the group to which they belong. Many of such words, which are dead for the select few and despised by them, are like an empty house, wherein, as soon as the few are gone, new energy and quivering passion take up their abode. If you wish to know the master of the house, go into it.

That Christophe did.

* * * * *

He had been brought into touch with the working-classes by a neighbor of his who was employed on the State Railways. He was a little man of forty-five, prematurely old, with a pathetically bald head, deep-sunken eyes, hollow cheeks, a prominent nose, fleshy and aquiline, a clever mouth, and malformed ears with twisted lobes: the marks of degeneracy. His name was Alcide Gautier. He was not of the people, but of the lower middle-class.

He came of a good family who had spent all they had on the education of their only son, but, for want of means, had been unable to let him go through with it. As a very young man he had obtained one of those Government posts which seem to the lower middle-class a very heaven, and are in reality death,--living death.--Once he had gone into it, it had been impossible for him to escape. He had committed the offense--(for it is an offense in modern society)--of marrying for love a pretty workgirl, whose innate vulgarity had only increased with time. She gave him three children and he had to earn a living for them. This man, who was intelligent and longed with all his might to finish his education, was cramped and fettered by poverty. He was conscious of latent powers in himself which were stifled by the difficulties of his existence: he could not take any decisive step. He was never alone. He was a bookkeeping clerk and had to spend his days over purely mechanical work in a room which he had to share with several of his colleagues who were vulgar chattering creatures: they were for ever talking of idiotic things and avenged themselves for the absurdity of their existence by slandering their chiefs and making fun of him and his intellectual point of view which he had not been prudent enough to conceal from them. When he returned home it was to find an evil-smelling charmless room, a noisy common wife who did not understand him and regarded him as a humbug or a fool. His children did not take after him in anything: they took after their mother. Was it just that it should be so? Was it just? Nothing but disappointment and suffering and perpetual poverty, and work that took up his whole day from morning to night, and never the possibility of snatching an hour for recreation, an hour's silence, all this had brought him to a state of exhaustion and nervous irritability.--Christophe, who had pursued his acquaintance with him, was struck by the tragedy of his lot: an incomplete nature, lacking sufficient culture and artistic taste, yet made for great things and crushed by misfortune. Gautier clung to Christophe as a weak man drowning grasps at the arm of a strong swimmer. He felt a mixture of sympathy and envy for Christophe. He took him to popular meetings, and showed him some of the leaders of the syndicalist party to which he belonged for no other reason than his bitterness against society. For he was an aristocrat gone wrong. It hurt him terribly to mix with the people.

Christophe was much more democratic than he--the more so as nothing forced him to be so--and enjoyed the meetings. The speeches amused him. He did not share Olivier's feeling of repulsion: he was hardly at all sensible of the absurdities of the language. In his eyes a windbag was as good as any other man. He affected a sort of contempt for eloquence in general. But though he took no particular pains to understand their rhetoric, he did feel the music which came through the man who was speaking and the men who were listening. The power of the speaker was raised to the hundredth degree by the echo thrown back from hie hearers. At first Christophe only took stock of the speakers, and he was interested enough to make the acquaintance of some of them.

The man who had the most influence on the crowd was Casimir Joussier,--a little, pale, dark man, between thirty and thirty-five, with a Mongolian cast of countenance, thin, puny, with cold burning eyes, scant hair, and a pointed beard. His power lay not so much in his gesture, which was poor, stilted, and rarely in harmony with the, words,--not so much in his speech, which was raucous and sibilant, with marked pauses for breathing,--as in his personality and the emphatic assurance and force of will which emanated from it. He never seemed to admit the possibility of any one thinking differently from himself: and as what he thought was what his audience wanted to think they had no difficulty in understanding one another. He would go on saying thrice, four times, ten times, the things they expected him to say: he never stopped hammering the same nail with a tenacious fury: and his audience, following his example, would hammer, hammer, hammer, until the nail was buried deep in the flesh.--Added to this personal ascendancy was the confidence inspired by his past life, the _prestige_ of many terms in prison, largely deserved by his violent writings. He breathed out an indomitable energy: but for the seeing eye there was revealed beneath it all an accumulated fund of weariness, disgust with so much continual effort, anger against fate. He was one of those men who every day spend more than their income of vitality. From his childhood on he had been ground down by work and poverty. He had plied all sorts of trades: journeyman glass-blower, plumber, printer: his health was ruined: he was a prey to consumption, which plunged him into fits of bitter discouragement and dumb despair of the cause and of himself: at other times it would raise him up to a pitch of excitement. He was a mixture of calculated and morbid violence, of policy and recklessness. He was educated up to a certain point: he had a good knowledge of many things, science, sociology, and his various trades: he had a very poor knowledge of many others: and he was just as cocksure with both: he had Utopian notions, just ideas, ignorance in many directions, a practical mind, many prejudices, experience, and suspicion and hatred of burgess society. That did not prevent his welcoming Christophe. His pride was tickled by being sought out by a well-known artist. He was of the race of leaders, and, whatever he did, he was brusque with ordinary workmen. Although in all good faith he desired perfect equality, he found it easier to realize with those above than with those beneath him.

Christophe came across other leaders of the working-class movement. There was no great sympathy between them. If the common fight--with difficulty--produced unity of action, it was very far from creating unity of feeling. It was easy to see the external and purely transitory reality to which the distinction between the classes corresponded. The old antagonisms were only postponed and marked: but they continued to exist. In the movement were to be found men of the north and men of the south with their fundamental scorn of each other. The trades were jealous of each other's wages, and watched each other with an undisguised feeling of superiority to all others in each. But the great difference lay--and always will lie--in temperament. Foxes and wolves and horned beasts, beasts with sharp teeth, and beasts with four stomachs, beasts that are made to eat, and beasts that are made to be eaten, all sniffed at each other as they passed in the herd that had been drawn together by the accident of class and common interest: and they recognized each other: and they bristled.

Christophe sometimes had his meals at a little creamery and restaurant kept by a former colleague of Gautier's, one Simon, a railway clerk who had been dismissed for taking part in a strike. The shop was frequented by syndicalists. There were five or six of them who used to sit in a room at the back, looking on to an inclosed courtyard, narrow and ill-lit, from which there arose the never-ceasing desperate song of two caged canaries straining after the light. Joussier used to come with his mistress, the fair Berthe, a large coquettish young woman, with a pale face, and a purple cap, and merry, wandering eyes. She had under her thumb a good-looking boy, Léopold Graillot, a journeyman mechanic, who was clever and rather a _poseur_: he was the esthete of the company. Although he called himself an anarchist, and was one of the most violent opponents of the burgess-class, his soul was typical of that class at its very worst. Every morning for years he had drunk in the erotic and decadent news of the halfpenny literary papers. His reading had given him a strongly addled brain. His mental subtlety in imagining the pleasures of the senses was allied in him with an absolute lack of physical delicacy, indifference to cleanliness, and the comparative coarseness of his life. He had acquired a taste for an occasional glass of such adulterated wine--the intellectual alcohol of luxury, the unwholesome stimulants of unhealthy rich men. Being unable to take these pleasures in the flesh, he inoculated his brain with them. That means a bad tongue in the morning and weakness in the knees. But it puts you on an equality with the rich. And you hate them.

Christophe could not bear him. He was more in sympathy with Sebastien Coquard, an electrician, who, with Joussier, was the speaker with the greatest following. He did not overburden himself with theories. He did not always know where he was going. But he did go straight ahead. He was very French. He was heavily built, about forty, with a big red face, a round head, red hair, a flowing beard, a bull neck, and a bellowing voice. Like Joussier, he was an excellent workman, but he loved drinking and laughter. The sickly Joussier regarded his superabundant health with the eyes of envy: and, though they were friends, there was always a simmering secret hostility between them.

Amélie, the manageress of the creamery, a kind creature of forty-five, who must have been pretty once, and still was, in spite of the wear of time, used to sit with them, with some sewing in her hands, listening to their talk with a jolly smile, moving her lips in time to their words: every now and then she would drop a remark into the discussion, and she would emphasize her words with a nod of her head as she worked. She had a married daughter and two children of seven and ten--a little girl and a boy--who used to do their home lessons at the corner of a sticky table, putting out their tongues, and picking up scraps of conversations which were not meant for their ears.

On more than one occasion Olivier tried to go with Christophe. But he could not feel at ease with these people. When these working-men were not tied down by strict factory hours or the insistent scream of a hooter, they seemed to have an incredible amount of time to waste, either after work, or between jobs, in loafing or idleness. Christophe, being in one of those periods when the mind has completed one piece of work and is waiting until a new piece of work presents itself, was in no greater hurry than they were: and he liked sitting there with his elbows on the table, smoking, drinking, and talking. But Olivier's respectable burgess instincts were shocked, and so were his traditional habits of mental discipline, and regular work, and scrupulous economy of time: and he did not relish such a waste of so many precious hours. Besides that, he was not good at talking or drinking. Above all there was his physical distaste for it all, the secret antipathy which raises a physical barrier between the different types of men, the hostility of the senses, which stands in the way of the communion of their souls, the revolt of the flesh against the heart. When Olivier was alone with Christophe he would talk most feelingly about the duty of fraternizing with the people: but when he found himself face to face with the people, he was impotent to do anything, in spite of his good will. Christophe, on the other hand, who laughed at his ideas, could, without the least effort, meet any workman he chanced to come across in brotherhood. It really hurt Olivier to find himself so cut off from these men. He tried to be like them, to think like them, to speak like them. He could not do it. His voice was dull, husky, had not the ring that was in theirs. When he tried to catch some of their expressions the words would stick in his throat or sound queer and strange. He watched himself; he was embarrassed, and embarrassed them. He knew it. He knew that to them he was a stranger and suspect, that none of them was in sympathy with him, and then, when he was gone, everybody would sigh with relief: "Ouf!" As he passed among them he would notice hard, icy glances, such hostile glances as the working-classes, embittered by poverty, cast at any comfortable burgess. Perhaps Christophe came in for some of it too: but he never noticed it.

Of all the people in that place the only ones who showed any inclination to be friendly with Olivier were Amélie's children. They were much more attracted by their superior in station than disposed to hate him. The little boy was fascinated by the burgess mode of thought: he was clever enough to love it, though not clever enough to understand it: the little girl, who was very pretty, had once been taken by Olivier to see Madame Arnaud, and she was hypnotized by the comfort and ease of it all: she was silently delighted to sit in the fine armchairs, and to feel the beautiful clothes, and to be with lovely ladies: like the little simpleton she was, she longed to escape from the people and soar upwards to the paradise of riches and solid comfort. Olivier had no desire or taste for the cultivation of these inclinations in her: and the simple homage she paid to his class by no means consoled him for the silent antipathy of her companions. Their ill-disposition towards him pained him. He had such a burning desire to understand them! And in truth he did understand them, too well, perhaps: he watched them too closely, and he irritated them. It was not that he was indiscreet in his curiosity, but that he brought to bear on it his habit of analyzing the souls of men and his need of love.

It was not long before he perceived the secret drama of Joussier's life: the disease which was undermining his constitution, and the cruelty of his mistress. She loved him, she was proud of him: but she had too much vitality: he knew that she was slipping away from him, would slip away from him: and he was aflame with jealousy. She found his jealousy diverting: she was for ever exciting the men about her, bombarding them with her eyes, flinging around them her sensual provocative atmosphere: she loved to play with him like a cat. Perhaps she deceived him with Graillot. Perhaps it pleased her to let him think so. In any case if she were not actually doing so, she very probably would. Joussier dared not forbid her to love whomsoever she pleased: did he not profess the woman's right to liberty equally with the man's? She reminded him of that slyly and insolently one day when he was upbraiding her. He was delivered up to a terrible struggle within himself between his theories of liberty and his violent instincts. At heart he was still a man like the men of old, despotic and jealous: by reason he was a man of the future, a Utopian. She was neither more nor less than the woman of yesterday, to-morrow, and all time.--And Olivier, looking on at their secret duel, the savagery of which was known to him by his own experience, was full of pity for Joussier when he realized his weakness. But Joussier guessed that Olivier was reading him: and he was very far from liking him for it.

There was another interested witness, an indulgent spectator of this game of love and hate. This was the manageress, Amélie. She saw everything without seeming to do so. She knew life. She was an honest, healthy, tranquil, easy-going woman, and in her youth had been free enough. She had been in a florist's shop: she had had a lover of the class above her own: she had had other lovers. Then she had married a working-man. She had become a good wife and mother. But she understood everything, all the foolish ways of the heart, Joussier's jealousy, as well as the young woman's desire for amusement. She tried to help them to understand each other with a few affectionate words:

"You must make allowances: it is not worth while creating bad blood between you for such a trifle...."

She was not at all surprised when her words produced no result....

"That's the way of the world. We must always be torturing ourselves...."

She had that splendid carelessness of the people, from which misfortune of every sort seems harmlessly to glide. She had had her share of unhappiness. Three months ago she had lost a boy of fifteen whom she dearly loved: it had been a great grief to her: but now she was once more busy and laughing. She used to say:

"If one were to think of these things one could not live."

So she ceased to think of it. It was not selfishness. She could not do otherwise: her vitality was too strong: she was absorbed by the present: it was impossible for her to linger over the past. She adapted herself to things as they were, and would adapt herself to whatever happened. If the revolution were to come and turn everything topsy-turvy she would soon manage to be standing firmly on her feet, and do everything that was there to do; she would be in her place wherever she might be set down. At heart she had only a modified belief in the revolution. She had hardly any real faith in anything whatever. It is hardly necessary to add that she used to consult the cards in her moments of perplexity, and that she never failed to make the sign of the cross when she met a funeral. She was very open-minded and very tolerant, and she had the skepticism of the people of Paris, that healthy skepticism which doubts, as a man breathes, joyously. Though she was the wife of a revolutionary, nevertheless she took up a motherly and ironical attitude towards her husband's ideas and those of his party--and those of the other parties,--the sort of attitude she had towards the follies of youth--and of maturity. She was never much moved by anything. But she was interested in everything. And she was equally prepared for good and bad luck. In fine, she was an optimist.

"It's no good getting angry.... Everything settles itself so long as your health is good...."

That was clearly to Christophe's way of thinking. They did not need much conversation to discover that they belonged to the same family. Every now and then they would exchange a good-humored smile, while the others were haranguing and shouting. But, more often, she would laugh to herself as she looked at Christophe, and saw him being caught up by the argument to which he would at once bring more passion than all the rest put together.

* * * * *

Christophe did not observe Olivier's isolation and embarrassment. He made no attempt to probe down to the inner workings of his companions. But he used to eat and drink with them, and laugh and lose his temper. They were never distrustful of him, although they used to argue heatedly enough. He did not mince his words with them. At bottom he would have found it very hard to say whether he was with or against them. He never stopped to think about it. No doubt if the choice had been forced upon him he would have been a syndicalist as against Socialism and all the doctrines of the State--that monstrous entity, that factory of officials, human machines. His reason approved of the mighty effort of the cooperative groups, the two-edged ax of which strikes at the same time at the dead abstractions of the socialistic State, and at the sterility of individualism, that corrosion of energy, that dispersion of collective force in individual frailties,--the great source of modern wretchedness for which the French Revolution is in part responsible.

But Nature is stronger than reason. When Christophe came in touch with the syndicates--those formidable coalitions of the weak--his vigorous individuality drew back. He could not help despising those men who needed to be linked together before they could march on--to the fight; and if he admitted that it was right for them to submit to such a law, he declared that such a law was not for him. Besides, if the weak and the oppressed are sympathetic, they cease altogether to be so when they in their turn become oppressors. Christophe, who had only recently been shouting out to the honest men living in isolation: "Unite! Unite!" had a most unpleasant sensation when for the first time he found himself in the midst of such unions of honest men, all mixed up with other men who were less honest, and yet were endowed with their force, their rights, and only too ready to abuse them. The best people, those whom Christophe loved, the friends whom he had met in The House, on every floor, drew no sort of profit from these fighting combinations. They were too sensitive at heart and too timid not to be scared: they were fated to be the first to be crushed out of existence by them. Face to face with the working-class movement they were in the same position as Olivier and the most warmly generous of the young men of the middle-class. Their sympathies were with the workers organizing themselves. But they had been brought up in the cult of liberty: now liberty was exactly what the revolutionaries cared for least of all. Besides, who is there nowadays that cares for liberty? A select few who have no sort of influence over the world. Liberty is passing through dark days. The Popes of Rome proscribe the light of reason. The Popes of Paris put out the light of the heavens. And M. Pataud puts out the lights of the streets. Everywhere imperialism is triumphant: the theocratic imperialism of the Church of Rome: the military imperialism of the mercantile and mystic monarchies: the bureaucratic imperialism of the republics of Freemasonry and covetousness: the dictatorial imperialism of the revolutionary committees. Poor liberty, thou art not in this world!... The abuse of power preached and practised by the revolutionaries revolted Christophe and Olivier. They had little regard for the blacklegs who refuse to suffer for the common cause. But it seemed abominable to them that the others should claim the right to use force against them.--And yet it is necessary to take sides. Nowadays the choice in fact lies not between imperialism and liberty, but between one imperialism and another. Olivier said:

"Neither. I am for the oppressed."

Christophe hated the tyranny of the oppressors no less. But he was dragged into the wake of force in the track of the army of the working-classes in revolt.

He was hardly aware that it was so. He would tell his companions in the restaurant that he was not with them.

"As long as you are only out for material interests," he would say, "you don't interest me. The day when you march out for a belief then I shall be with you. Otherwise, what have I to do with the conflict between one man's belly and another's? I am an artist; it is my duty to defend art; I have no right to enroll myself in the service of a party. I am perfectly aware that recently certain ambitious writers, impelled by a desire for an unwholesome popularity, have set a bad example. It seems to me that they have not rendered any great service to the cause which they defended in that way: but they have certainly betrayed art. It is our, the artists', business to save the light of the intellect. We have no right to obscure it with your blind struggles. Who shall hold the light aloft if we let it fall? You will be glad enough to find it still intact after the battle. There must always be workers busy keeping up the fire in the engine, while there is fighting on the deck of the ship. To understand everything is to hate nothing. The artist is the compass which, through the raging of the storm, points steadily to the north."

They regarded him as a maker of phrases, and said that, if he were talking of compasses, it was very clear that he had lost his: and they gave themselves the pleasure of indulging in a little friendly contempt at his expense. In their eyes an artist was a shirker who contrived to work as little and as agreeably as possible.

He replied that he worked as hard as they did, harder even, and that he was not nearly so afraid of work. Nothing disgusted him so much as _sabotage_, the deliberate bungling of work, and skulking raised to the level of a principle.

"All these wretched people," he would say, "afraid for their own skins!... Good Lord! I've never stopped working since I was eight. You people don't love your work; at heart you're just common men.... If only you were capable of destroying the Old World! But you can't do it. You don't even want to. No, you don't even want to. It is all very well for you to go about shrieking menace and pretending you're going to exterminate the human race. You have only one thought: to get the upper hand and lie snugly in the warm beds of the middle-classes. Except for a few hundred poor devils, navvies, who are always ready to break their bones or other people's bones for no particular reason,--just for fun--or for the pain, the age-old pain with which they are simply bursting, the whole lot of you think of nothing but deserting the camp and going over to the ranks of the middle-classes on the first opportunity. You become Socialists, journalists, lecturers, men of letters, deputies, Ministers.... Bah! Bah! Don't you go howling about so-and-so! You're no better. You say he is a traitor?... Good. Whose turn next? You'll all come to it. There is not one of you who can resist the bait. How could you? There is not one of you who believes in the immortality of the soul. You are just so many bellies, I tell you. Empty bellies thinking of nothing but being filled."

Thereupon they would all lose their tempers and all talk at once. And in the heat of the argument it would often happen that Christophe, whirled away by his passion, would become more revolutionary than the others. In vain did he fight against it: his intellectual pride, his complacent conception of a purely esthetic world, made for the joy of the spirit, would sink deep into the ground at the sight of injustice. Esthetic, a world in which eight men out of ten live in nakedness and want, in physical and moral wretchedness? Oh! come! A man must be an impudent creature of privilege who would dare to claim as much. An artist like Christophe, in his inmost conscience, could not but be on the side of the working-classes. What man more than the spiritual worker has to suffer from the immorality of social conditions, from the scandalously unequal partition of wealth among men? The artist dies of hunger or becomes a millionaire for no other reason than the caprice of fashion and of those who speculate on fashion. A society which suffers its best men to die or gives them extravagant rewards is a monstrous society: it must be swept and put in order. Every man, whether he works or no, has a right to a living minimum.

Every kind of work, good or mediocre, should be rewarded, not according to its real value--(who can be the infallible judge of that?)--but according to the normal legitimate needs of the worker. Society can and should assure the artist, the scientist, and the inventor an income sufficient to guarantee that they have the means and the time yet further to grace and honor it. Nothing more. The _Gioconda_ is not worth a million. There is no relation between a sum of money and a work of art: a work of art is neither above nor below money: it is outside it. It is not a question of payment: it is a question of allowing the artist to live. Give him enough to feed him, and allow him to work in peace. It is absurd and horrible to try to make him a robber of another's property. This thing must be put bluntly: every man who has more than is necessary for his livelihood and that of his family, and for the normal development of his intelligence, is a thief and a robber. If he has too much, it means that others have too little. How often have we smiled sadly to hear tell of the inexhaustible wealth of France, and the number of great fortunes, we workers, and toilers, and intellectuals, and men and women who from our very birth have been given up to the wearying task of keeping ourselves from dying of hunger, often struggling in vain, often seeing the very best of us succumbing to the pain of it all,--we who are the moral and intellectual treasure of the nation! You who have more than your share of the wealth of the world are rich at the cost of our suffering and our poverty. That troubles you not at all: you have sophistries and to spare to reassure you: the sacred rights of property, the fair struggle for life, the supreme interests of that Moloch, the State and Progress, that fabulous monster, that problematical Better to which men sacrifice the Good,--the Good of other men.--But for all that, the fact remains, and all your sophistries will never manage to deny it: "You have too much to live on. We have not enough. And we are as good as you. And some of us are better than the whole lot of you put together."

* * * * *

So Christophe was affected by the intoxication of the passions with which he was surrounded. Then he was astonished at his own bursts of eloquence. But he did not attach any importance to them. He was amused by such easily roused excitement, which he attributed to the bottle. His only regret was that the wine was not better, and he would belaud the wines of the Rhine. He still thought that he was detached from revolutionary ideas. But there arose the singular phenomenon that Christophe brought into the discussion, if not the upholding of them, a steadily increasing passion, while that of his companions seemed in comparison to diminish.

As a matter of fact, they had fewer illusions than he. Even the most violent leaders, the men who were most feared by the middle-classes, were at heart uncertain and horribly middle-class. Coquard, with his laugh like a stallion's neigh, shouted at the top of his voice and made terrifying gestures: but he only half believed what he was saying: it was all for the pleasure of talking, giving orders, being active: he was a braggart of violence. He knew the cowardice of the middle-classes through and through, and he loved terrorizing them by showing that he was stronger than they: he was quite ready to admit as much to Christophe, and to laugh over it. Graillot criticized everything, and everything anybody tried to do: he made every plan come to nothing. Joussier was for ever affirming, for he was unwilling ever to be in the wrong. He would be perfectly aware of the inherent weakness of his line of argument, but that would make him only the more obstinate in sticking to it: he would have sacrificed the victory of his cause to his pride of principle. But he would rush from extremes of bullet-headed faith to extremes of ironical pessimism, when he would bitterly condemn the lie of all systems of ideas and the futility of all efforts.

The majority of the working-classes were just the same. They would suddenly relapse from the intoxication of words into the depths of discouragement. They had immense illusions: but they were based upon nothing: they had not won them in pain or forged them for themselves: they had received them ready-made, by that law of the smallest effort which led them for their amusements to the slaughter-house and the blatant show. They suffered from an incurable indolence of mind for which there were only too many excuses: they were like weary beasts asking only to be suffered to lie down and in peace to ruminate over their end and their dreams. But once they had slept off their dreams there was nothing left but an even greater weariness and the doleful dumps. They were for ever flaring up to a new leader: and very soon they became suspicious of him and spurned him. The sad part of it all was that they were never wrong: one after another their leaders were dazzled by the bait of wealth, success, or vanity: for one Joussier, who was kept from temptation by the consumption under which he was wasting away, a brave crumbling to death, how many leaders were there who betrayed the people or grew weary of the fight! They were victims of the secret sore which was devouring the politicians of every party in those days: demoralization through women and money, women and money,--(the two scourges are one and the same).--In the Government as in the ministry there were men of first-rate talent, men who had in them the stuff of which great statesmen are made--(they, might have been great statesmen in the days of Richelieu, perhaps);--but they lacked faith and character: the need, the habit, the weariness of pleasure, had sapped them: when they were engaged upon vast schemes they fumbled into incoherent action, or they would suddenly fling up the whole thing, while important business was in progress, desert their country or their cause for rest and pleasure. They were brave enough to meet death in battle: but very few of the leaders were capable of dying in harness, at their posts, never budging, with their hands upon the rudder and their eyes unswervingly fixed upon the invisible goal.

The revolution was hamstrung by the consciousness of the fundamental weakness. The leaders of the working-classes spent part of their time in blaming each other. Their strikes always failed as a result of the perpetual dissensions between the leaders and the trades-unions, between the reformers and the revolutionaries--and of the profound timidity that underlay their blustering threats--and of the inherited sheepishness that made the rebels creep once more beneath the yoke upon the first legal sentence,--and of the cowardly egoism and the baseness of those who profited by the revolt of others to creep a little nearer the masters, to curry favor and win a rich reward for their disinterested devotion. Not to speak of the disorder inherent in all crowds, the anarchy of the people. They tried hard to create corporate strikes which should assume a revolutionary character: but they were not willing to be treated as revolutionaries. They had no liking for bayonets. They fancied that it was possible to make an omelette without eggs. In any case, they preferred the eggs to be broken by other people.

Olivier watched, observed, and was not surprised. From the very outset he had recognized the great inferiority of these men to the work which they were supposed to be accomplishing: but he had also recognized the inevitable force that swept them on: and he saw that Christophe, unknown to himself, was being carried on by the stream. But the current would have nothing to do with himself, who would have asked nothing better than to let himself be carried away.

It was a strong current: it was sweeping along an enormous mass of passions, interest, and faith, all jostling, pushing, merging into each other, boiling and frothing and eddying this way and that. The leaders were in the van; they were the least free of all, for they were pushed forward, and perhaps they had the least faith of all: there had been a time when they believed: they were like the priests against whom they had so loudly railed, imprisoned by their vows, by the faith they once had had, and were forced to profess to the bitter end. Behind them the common herd was brutal, vacillating, and short-sighted. The great majority had a sort of random faith, because the current had now set in the direction of Utopia: but a little while, and they would cease to believe because the current had changed. Many believed from a need of action, a desire for adventure, from romantic folly. Others believed from a sort of impertinent logic, which was stripped of all common sense. Some believed from goodness of heart. The self-seeking only made use of ideas as weapons for the fight: their eye was for the main chance: they were fighting for a definite sum as wages for a definite number of hours' work. The worst of all were nursing a secret hope of wreaking a brutal revenge for the wretched lives they had led.

But the current which bore them all along was wiser than they: it knew where it was going. What did it matter that at any moment it might dash up against the dyke of the Old World! Olivier foresaw that a social revolution in these days would be squashed. But he knew also that revolution would achieve its end through defeat as well as through victory: for the oppressors only accede to the demands of the oppressed when the oppressed inspire them with fear. And so the violence of the revolutionaries was of no less service to their cause than the justice of that cause. Both violence and justice were part and parcel of the plan of that blind and certain force which moves the herd of human kind....

_"For consider what you are, you whom the Master has summoned. If the body be considered there are not many among you who are wise, or strong, or noble. But He has chosen the foolish things of the world to confound the wise; and He has chosen the weak things of the world to confound the strong: and He has chosen the vile things of the world and the despised things, and the things that are not, to the destruction of those things that are...."_

And yet, whatever may be the Master who orders all things,--(Reason or Unreason),--and although the social organization prepared by syndicalism might constitute a certain comparative stage in progress for the future, Olivier did not think it worth while for Christophe and himself to scatter the whole of their power of illusion and sacrifice in this earthy combat which would open no new world. His mystic hopes of the revolution were dashed to the ground. The people seemed to him no better and hardly any more sincere than the other classes: there was not enough difference between them and others. In the midst of the torrent of interests and muddy passions, Olivier's gaze and heart were attracted by the little islands of independent spirits, the little groups of true believers who emerged here and there like flowers on the face of the waters. In vain do the elect seek to mingle with the mob: the elect always come together,--the elect of all classes and all parties,--the bearers of the fire of the world. And it is their sacred duty to see to it that the fire in their hands shall never die down.

Olivier had already made his choice.

A few houses away from that in which he lived was a cobbler's booth, standing a little below the level of the street,--a few planks nailed together, with dirty windows and panes of paper. It was entered by three steps down, and you had to stoop to stand up in it. There was just room for a shelf of old shoes, and two stools. All day long, in accordance with the classic tradition of cobbling, the master of the place could be heard singing. He used to whistle, drum on the soles of the boots, and in a husky voice roar out coarse ditties and revolutionary songs, or chaff the women of the neighborhood as they passed by. A magpie with a broken wing, which was always hopping about on the pavement, used to come from a porter's lodge and pay him a visit. It would stand on the first step at the entrance to the booth and look at the cobbler. He would stop for a moment to crack a dirty joke with the bird in a piping voice, or he would insist on whistling the _Internationale_. The bird would stand with its beak in the air, listening gravely: every now and then it would bob with its beak down by way of salutation, and it would awkwardly flap its wings in order to regain its balance: then it would suddenly turn round, leaving the cobbler in the middle of a sentence, and fly away with its wing and a bit on to the back of a bench, from whence it would hurl defiance at the dogs of the quarter. Then the cobbler would return to his leather, and the flight of his auditor would by no means restrain him from going through with his harangue.

He was fifty-six, with a jovial wayward manner, little merry eyes under enormous eyebrows, with a bald top to his head rising like an egg out of the nest of his hair, hairy ears, a black gap-toothed mouth that gaped like a well when he roared with laughter, a very thick dirty beard, at which he used to pluck in handfuls with his long nails that were always filthy with wax. He was known in the district as Daddy Feuillet, or Feuillette, or Daddy la Feuillette--and to tease him they used to call him La Fayette: for politically the old fellow was one of the reds: as a young man he had been mixed up in the Commune, sentenced to death, and finally deported: he was proud of his memories, and was always rancorously inclined to lump together Badinguet, Galliffet, and Foutriquet. He was a regular attendant at the revolutionary meetings, and an ardent admirer of Coquard and the vengeful idea that he was always prophesying with much beard-wagging and a voice of thunder. He never missed one of his speeches, drank in his words, laughed at his jokes with head thrown back and gaping mouth, foamed at his invective, and rejoiced in the fight and the promised paradise. Next day, in his booth, he would read over the newspaper report of the speeches: he would read them aloud to himself and his apprentice: and to taste their full sweetness he would have them read aloud to him, and used to box his apprentice's ears if he skipped a line. As a consequence he was not always very punctual in the delivery of his work when he had promised it: on the other hand, his work was always sound: it might wear out the user's feet, but there was no wearing out his leather....

The old fellow had in his shop a grandson of thirteen, a hunchback, a sickly, rickety boy, who used to run his errands, and was a sort of apprentice. The boy's mother had left her family when she was seventeen to elope with a worthless fellow who had sunk into hooliganism, and before very long had been caught, sentenced, and so disappeared from the scene. She was left alone with the child, deserted by her family, and devoted herself to the upbringing of the boy Emmanuel. She had transferred to him all the love and hatred she had had for her lover. She was a woman of a violent and jealous character, morbid to a degree. She loved her child to distraction, brutally ill-treated him, and, when he was ill, was crazed with despair. When she was in a bad temper she would send him to bed without any dinner, without so much as a piece of bread. When she was dragging him along through the streets, if he grew tired and would not go on and slipped down to the ground, she would kick him on to his feet again. She was amazingly incoherent in her use of words, and she used to pass swiftly from tears to a hysterical mood of gaiety. She died. The cobbler took the boy, who was then six years old. He loved him dearly: but he had his own way of showing it, which consisted in bullying the boy, battering him with a large assortment of insulting names, pulling his ears, and clouting him over the head from morning to night by way of teaching him his job: and at the same time he grounded him thoroughly in his own social and anti-clerical catechism.

Emmanuel knew that his grandfather was not a bad man: but he was always prepared to raise his arm to ward off his blows: the old fellow used to frighten him, especially on the evenings when he got drunk. For Daddy la Feuillette had not come by his nickname for nothing: he used to get tipsy twice or thrice a month: then he used to talk all over the place, and laugh, and act the swell, and always in the end he used to give the boy a good thrashing. His bark was worse than his bite. But the boy was terrified: his ill-health made him more sensitive than other children: he was precociously intelligent, and he had inherited a fierce and unbalanced capacity for feeling from his mother. He was overwhelmed by his grandfather's brutality, and also by his revolutionary harangues,--(for the two things went together: it was particularly when the old man was drunk that he was inclined to hold forth).--His whole being quivered in response to outside impressions, just as the booth shook with the passing of the heavy omnibuses. In his crazy imagination there were mingled, like the humming vibrations of a belfry, his day-to-day sensations, the wretchedness of his childhood, his deplorable memories of premature experience, stories of the Commune, scraps of evening lectures and newspaper feuilletons, speeches at meetings, and the vague, uneasy, and violent sexual instincts which his parents had transmitted to him. All these things together formed a monstrous grim dream-world, from the dense night, the chaos and miasma of which there darted dazzling rays of hope.