At the present time the mightiest efforts of the world were directed against social injustice,—and unconsciously were tending to the production of fresh injustice.

And, in truth, such injustice had waxed great and plain to see since the working-classes, growing in numbers and power, had become part of the essential machinery of the State. But in spite of the declamations of the tribunes and bards of the people, their condition was not worse, but rather better than it had ever been in the past: and the change had come about not because they suffered more, but because they had grown stronger. Stronger by reason of the very power of the hostile ranks of Capital, by the fatality of economic and industrial development which had banded the workers together in armies ready for the fight, and, by the use of machinery, had given weapons into their hands, and had turned every foreman into a master with power over light, lightning, movement, all the energy of the world. From this enormous mass of elementary forces, which only a short time ago the leaders of men were trying to organize, there was given out a white heat, electric waves gradually permeating the whole body of human society.

It was not by reason of its justice, or its novelty, or the force of the ideas bound up in it that the cause of the people was stirring the minds of the intelligent middle-class, although they were fain to think so. Its appeal lay in its vitality.

Its justice? Justice was everywhere and every day violated thousands of times without the world ever giving a thought to it. Its ideas? Scraps of truth, picked up here and there and adjusted to the interests and requirements of one class at the expense of the other classes. Its creed was as absurd as every other creed,—the Divine Right of Kings, the Infallibility of the Popes, Universal Suffrage, the Equality of Man,—all equally absurd if one only considers them by their rational value and not in the light of the force by which they are animated. What did their mediocrity matter? Ideas have never conquered the world as ideas, but only by the force they represent. They do not grip men by their intellectual contents, but by the radiant vitality which is given off from them at certain periods in history. They give off as it were a rich scent which overpowers even the dullest sense of smell. The loftiest and most sublime idea remains ineffective until the day when it becomes contagious, not by its own merits, but by the merits of the groups of men in whom it becomes incarnate by the transfusion of their blood. Then the withered plant, the rose of Jericho, comes suddenly to flower, grows to its full height, and fills all the air with its powerful aroma.—Some of the ideas which were now the flaming standard under which the working-classes were marching on to the assault upon the capitalistic citadel, emanated from the brains of dreamers of the comfortable classes. While they had been left in their comfortable books, they had lain dead: items in a museum, mummies packed away in glass cases with no one to look at them. But as soon as the people laid hands on them, they had become part and parcel of the people, they had been given their feverish reality, which deformed them while it gave them life, breathing into such abstract reason, their hallucinations, and their hopes, like a burning wind of Hegira. They were quickly spread from man to man. Men succumbed to them without knowing from whom they came or how they had been brought. They were no respecters of persons. The moral epidemic spread and spread: and it was quite possible for limited creatures to communicate it to superior men. Every man was unwittingly an agent in the transmission.

Such phenomena of intellectual contagion are to be observed in all times and in all countries: they make themselves felt even in aristocratic States where there is the endeavor to maintain castes hermetically sealed one against the other. But nowhere are they more electric than in democracies which preserve no sanitary barrier between the elect and the mob. The elect are contaminated at once whatever they do to fight against it. In spite of their pride and intelligence they cannot resist the contagion; for the elect are much weaker than they think. Intelligence is a little island fretted by the tides of humanity, crumbling away and at last engulfed. It only emerges again on the ebb of the tide.—One wonders at the self-denial of the French privileged classes when on the night of August 4 they abdicated their rights. Most wonderful of all, no doubt, is the fact that they could not do otherwise. I fancy a good many of them when they returned home must have said to themselves: "What have I done? I must have been drunk...." A splendid drunkenness! Blessed be wine and the vine that gives it forth! It was not the privileged classes of old France who planted the vine whose blood brought them to drunkenness. The wine was extracted, they had only to drink it. He who drank must lose his wits. Even those who did not drink turned dizzy only from the smell of the vat that caught them as they passed. The vintages of the Revolution!... Hidden away in the family vaults there are left only a few empty bottles of the wine of '89: but our grandchildren's children will remember that their great-grandfathers had their heads turned by it.

It was a sourer wine but a wine no less strong that was mounting to the heads of the comfortable young people of Olivier's generation. They were offering up their class as a sacrifice to the new God, Deo ignoto:—the people.

* * * * *

To tell the truth, they were not all equally sincere. Many of them were only able to see in the movement an opportunity of rising above their class by affecting to despise it. For the majority it was an intellectual pastime, an oratorical enthusiasm which they never took altogether seriously. There is a certain pleasure in believing that you believe in a cause, that you are fighting, or will fight, for it,—or at least could fight. There is a by no means negligible satisfaction in the thought that you are risking something. Theatrical emotions.

They are quite innocent so long as you surrender to them simply without any admixture of interested motive.—But there were men of a more worldly type who only played the game of set purpose: the popular movement was to them only a road to success. Like the Norse pirates, they made rise of the rising tide to carry their ships up into the land: they aimed at reaching the innermost point of the great estuaries so as to be left snugly ensconced in the conquered cities when the sea fell back once more. The channel was narrow and the tide was capricious: great skill was needed. But two or three generations of demagogy have created a race of corsairs who know every trick and secret of the trade. They rushed boldly in with never even so much as a glance back at those who foundered on the way.

This piratical rabble is made up of all parties: thank Heaven, no party is responsible for it. But the disgust with which such adventurers had inspired the sincere and all men of conviction had led some of them to despair of their class. Olivier came in contact with rich young men of culture who felt very strongly that the comfortable classes were moribund and that they themselves were useless. He was only too much inclined to sympathize with them. They had begun by believing in the reformation of the people by the elect, they had founded Popular Universities, and taken no account of the time and money spent upon them, and now they were forced to admit the futility of their efforts: their hopes had been pitched too high, their discouragement sank too low. The people had either not responded to their appeal or had run away from it. When the people did come, they understood everything all wrong, and only assimilated the vices and absurdities of the culture of the superior classes. And in the end more than one scurvy knave had stolen into the ranks of the burgess apostles, and discredited them by exploiting both people and apostles at the same time. Then it seemed to honest men that the middle-class was doomed, that it could only infect the people who, at all costs, must break free and go their way alone. So they were left cut off from all possibility of action, save to predict and foresee a movement which would be made without and against themselves. Some of them found in this the joy of renunciation, the joy of deep disinterested human sympathy feeding upon itself and the sacrifice of itself. To love, to give self! Youth is so richly endowed that it can afford to do without repayment: youth has no fear of being left despoiled. And it can do without everything save the art of loving.—Others again found in it a pleasurable rational satisfaction, a sort of imperious logic: they sacrificed themselves not to men so much as to ideas. These were the bolder spirits. They took a proud delight in deducing the fated end of their class from their reasoned arguments. It would have hurt them more to see their predictions falsified than to be crushed beneath the weight of circumstance. In their intellectual intoxication they cried aloud to those outside: "Harder! Strike harder! Let there be nothing left of us!"—They had become the theorists of violence.

Of the violence of others. For, as usual, these apostles of brute force were almost always refined and weakly people. Many of them were officials of the State which they talked of destroying, industrious, conscientious, and orderly officials.

Their theoretical violence was the throwback from their weakness, their bitterness, and the suppression of their vitality. But above all it was an indication of the storms brewing all around them. Theorists are like meteorologists: they state in scientific terms not what the weather will be, but what the weather is. They are weathercocks pointing to the quarter whence the wind blows. When they turn they are never far from believing that they are turning the wind.

The wind had turned.

Ideas are quickly used up in a democracy, and the more quickly they are propagated, the more quickly are they worn out. There are any number of Republicans in France who in less than fifty years have grown disgusted with the Republic, with Universal Suffrage, with all the manifestations of liberty won with such blind intoxication! After the fetish worship of numbers, after the gaping optimism which had believed in the sanctity of the majority and had looked to it for the progress of humanity, there came the wind of brute force: the inability of the majority to govern themselves, their venality, their corruption, their base and fearful hatred of all superiority, their oppressive cowardice, raised the spirit of revolt: the minorities of energy—every kind of minority—appealed from the majority to force. A queer, yet inevitable alliance was brought about between the royalists of the Action Francaise and the syndicalists of the C. G. T. Balzac speaks somewhere of the men of his time who "though aristocrats by inclination, yet became Republicans in spite, of themselves, only to find many inferiors among their equals."—A scant sort of pleasure. Those who are inferior must be made to accept themselves as such: and to bring that about there is nothing to be done but to create an authority which shall impose the supremacy of the elect—of either class, working or burgess—upon the oppressive majority. Our young intellectuals, being proud and of the better class, became royalists or revolutionaries out of injured vanity and hatred of democratic equality. And the disinterested theorists, the philosophers of brute force, like good little weathercocks, reared their heads above them and were the oriflammes of the storm.

Last of all there was the herd of literary men in search of inspiration—men who could write and yet knew not what to write: like the Greeks at Aulis, they were becalmed and could make no progress, and sat impatiently waiting for a kindly wind from any quarter to come and belly out their sails.—There were famous men among them, men who had been wrenched away from their stylistic labors and plunged into public meetings by the Dreyfus affair. An example which had found only too many followers for the liking of those who had set it. There was now a mob of writing men all engrossed in politics, and claiming to control the affairs of the State. On the slightest excuse they would form societies, issue manifestoes, save the Capitol. After the intellectuals of the advance guard came the intellectuals of the rear: they were much of a muchness. Each of the two parties regarded the other as intellectual and themselves as intelligent. Those who had the luck to have in their veins a few drops of the blood of the people bragged about it: they dipped their pens into it, wrote with it.—They were all malcontents of the burgess class, and were striving to recapture the authority which that class had irreparably lost through its selfishness. Only in rare instances were these apostles known to keep up their apostolic zeal for any length of time. In the beginning the cause meant a certain amount of success to them, success which in all probability was in no wise due to their oratorical gifts. It gave them a delicious flattery for their vanity. Thereafter they went on with less success and a certain secret fear of being rather ridiculous. In the long-run the last feeling was apt to dominate the rest, being increased by the fatigue of playing a difficult part for men of their distinguished tastes and innate skepticism. But they waited upon the favor of the wind and of their escort before they could withdraw. For they were held captive both by wind and escort. These latter-day Voltaires and Joseph de Maistres, beneath their boldness in speech and writing, concealed a dread uncertainty, feeling the ground, being fearful of compromising themselves with the young men, and striving hard to please them and to be younger than the young. They were revolutionaries or counter-revolutionaries merely as a matter of literature, and in the end they resigned themselves to following the literary fashion which they themselves had helped to create.

The oddest of all the types with which Olivier came in contact in the small burgess advance guard of the Revolution was the revolutionary who was so from timidity.

The specimen presented for his immediate observation was named Pierre Canet. He was brought up in a rich, middle-class, and conservative family, hermetically sealed against any new idea: they were magistrates and officials who had distinguished themselves by crabbing authority or being dismissed: thick-witted citizens of the Marais who flirted with the Church and thought little, but thought that little well. He had married, for want of anything better to do, a woman with an aristocratic name, who had no great capacity for thought, but did her thinking no less well than he. The bigoted, narrow, and retrograde society in which he lived, a society which was perpetually chewing the cud of its own conceit and bitterness, had finally exasperated him,—the more so as his wife was ugly and a bore. He was fairly intelligent and open-minded, and liberal in aspiration, without knowing at all clearly in what liberalism consisted: there was no likelihood of his discovering the meaning of liberty in his immediate surroundings. The only thing he knew for certain was that liberty did not exist there: and he fancied that he had only to leave to find it. On his first move outwards he was lucky enough to fall in with certain old college friends, some of whom had been smitten with syndicalistic ideas. He was even more at sea in their company than in the society which he had just quitted: but he would not admit it: he had to live somewhere: and he was unable to find people of his own cast of thought (that is to say, people of no cast of thought whatever), though, God knows, the species is by no means rare in France! But they are ashamed of themselves: they hide themselves, or they take on the hue of one of the fashionable political colors, if not of several, all at once. Besides, he was under the influence of his friends.

As always happens, he had particularly attached himself to the very man who was most different from himself. This Frenchman, French, burgess and provincial to his very soul, had become the fidus Achates of a young Jewish doctor named Manousse Heimann, a Russian refugee, who, like so many of his fellow-countrymen, had the twofold gift of settling at once among strangers and making himself at home, and of being so much at his ease in any sort of revolution as to rouse wonder as to what it was that most interested him in it: the game or the cause. His experiences and the experiences of others were a source of entertainment to him. He was a sincere revolutionary, and his scientific habit of mind made him regard the revolutionaries and himself as a kind of madmen. His excited dilettantism and his extreme instability of mind made him seek the company of men the most opposite. He had acquaintances among those in authority and even among the police: he was perpetually prying and spying with that morbid and dangerous curiosity which makes so many Russian revolutionaries seem to be playing a double game, and sometimes reduces the appearance to reality. It is not treachery so much as versatility, and it is thoroughly disinterested. There are so many men of action to whom action is a theater into which they bring their talents as comedians, quite honestly prepared at any moment to change their part! Manousse was as faithful to the revolutionary part as it was possible for him to be: it was the character which was most in accord with his natural anarchy, and his delight in demolishing the laws of the countries through which he passed. But yet, in spite of everything, it was only a part. It was always impossible to know how much was true and how much invented in what he said, and even he himself was never very sure. He was intelligent and skeptical, endowed with the psychological subtlety of his twofold nationality, could discern quite marvelously the weaknesses of others, and his own, and was extremely skilful in playing upon them, so that he had no difficulty in gaining an ascendancy over Canet. It amused him to drag this Sancho Panza into Quixotic pranks. He made no scruple about using him, disposing of his will, his time, his money,—not for his own benefit, (he needed none, though no one knew how or in what way he lived),—but in the most compromising demonstrations of the cause. Canet submitted to it all: he tried to persuade himself that he thought like Manousse. He knew perfectly well that this was not the case: such ideas scared him: they were shocking to his common sense. And he had no love for the people. And, in addition, he had no courage. This big, bulky, corpulent young man, with his clean-shaven pinkish face, his short breathing, his pleasant, pompous, and rather childish way of speaking, with a chest like the Farnese Hercules, (he was a fair hand at boxing and singlestick), was the most timid of men. If he took a certain pride in being taken for a man of a subversive temper by his own people, in his heart of hearts he used to tremble at the boldness of his friends. No doubt the little thrill they gave him was by no means disagreeable as long as it was only in fun. But their fun was becoming dangerous. His fervent friends were growing aggressive, their hardy pretensions were increasing: they alarmed Canet's fundamental egoism, his deeply rooted sense of propriety, his middle-class pusillanimity. He dared not ask: "Where are you taking me to?" But, under his breath, he fretted and fumed at the recklessness of these young men who seemed to love nothing so much as breaking their necks, and never to give a thought as to whether they were not at the same time running a risk of breaking other people's.—What was it impelled him to follow them? Was he not free to break with them? He had not the courage. He was afraid of being left alone, like a child who gets left behind and begins to whimper. He was like so many men: they have no opinions, except in so far as they disapprove of all enthusiastic opinion: but if a man is to be independent he must stand alone, and how many men are there who are capable of that? How many men are there, even amongst the most clear sighted, who will dare to break free of the bondage of certain prejudices, certain postulates which cramp and fetter all the men of the same generation? That would mean setting up a wall between themselves and others. On the one hand, freedom in the wilderness, on the other, mankind. They do not hesitate: they choose mankind, the herd. The herd is evil smelling, but it gives warmth. Then those who have chosen pretend to think what they do not in fact think. It is not very difficult for them: they know so little what they think!... "Know thyself!"... How could they, these men who have hardly a Me to know? In every collective belief, religious or social, very rare are the men who believe, because very rare are the men who are men. Faith is an heroic force: its fire has kindled but a very few human torches, and even these have often flickered. The apostles, the prophets, even Jesus have doubted. The rest are only reflections,—save at certain hours when their souls are dry and a few sparks falling from a great torch set light to all the surface of the plain: then the fire dies down, and nothing gleams but the glowing embers beneath the ashes. Not more than a few hundred Christians really believe in Christ. The rest believe that they believe, or else they only try to believe.

Many of these revolutionaries were like that. Our friend Canet tried hard to believe that he was a revolutionary: he did believe it. And he was scared at his own boldness.

All these comfortable people invoked divers principles: some followed the bidding of their hearts, others that of their reason, others again only their interests: some associated their way of thinking with the Gospel, others with M. Bergson, others, again, with Karl Marx, with Proudhon, with Joseph de Maistre. with Nietzsche, or with M. Sorel. There were men who were revolutionaries to be in the fashion, some who were so out of snobbishness, and some from shyness: some from hatred, others from love: some from a need of active, hot-headed heroism: and some in sheer slavishness, from the sheeplike quality of their minds. But all, without knowing it, were at the mercy of the wind. All were no more than those whirling clouds of dust which are to be seen like smoke in the far distance on the white roads in the country, clouds of dust foretelling the coming of the storm.

Olivier and Christophe watched the wind coming. Both of them had strong eyes. But they used them in different ways. Olivier, whose clear gaze, in spite of himself, pierced to the very inmost thoughts of men, was saddened by their mediocrity: but he saw the hidden force that sustained them: he was most struck by the tragic aspect of things. Christophe was more sensible of their comic aspect. Men interested him, ideas not at all. He affected a contemptuous indifference towards them. He laughed at Socialistic Utopias. In a spirit of contradiction and out of instinctive reaction against the morbid humanitarianism which was the order of the day, he appeared to be more selfish than he was: he was a self-made man, a sturdy upstart, proud of his strength of body and will, and he was a little too apt to regard all those who had not his force as shirkers. In poverty and alone he had been able to win through: let others do the same! Why all this talk of a social question? What question? Poverty?

"I know all about that," he would say. "My father, my mother, I myself, we have been through it. It's only a matter of getting out of it."

"Not everybody can," Olivier would reply. "What about the sick and the unlucky?"

"One must help them, that's all. But that is a very different thing from setting them on a pinnacle, as people are doing nowadays. Only a short while ago people were asserting the odious doctrine of the rights of the strongest man. Upon my word, I'm inclined to think that the rights of the weakest are even more detestable: they're sapping the thought of to-day, the weakest man is tyrannizing over the strong, and exploiting them. It really looks as though it has become a merit to be diseased, poor, unintelligent, broken,—and a vice to be strong, upstanding, happy in righting, and an aristocrat in brains and blood. And what is most absurd of all is this, that the strong are the first to believe it.... It's a fine subject for a comedy, my dear Olivier!"

"I'd rather have people laugh at me than make other people weep."

"Good boy!" said Christophe. "But, good Lord, who ever said anything to the contrary? When I see a hunchback, my back aches for him.... We're playing the comedy, we won't write it."

He did not suffer himself to be bitten by the prevalent dreams of social justice. His vulgar common sense told him and he believed that what had been would be.

"But if anybody said that to you about art you'd be up in arms against him."

"May be. Anyhow, I don't know about anything except art. Nor do you. I've no faith in people who talk about things without knowing anything about them."

Olivier's faith in such people was no greater. Both of them were inclined to push their distrust a little too far: they had always held aloof from politics. Olivier confessed, not without shame, that he could not remember ever having used his rights as an elector: for the last ten years he had not even entered his name at the mairie.

"Why," he asked, "should I take part in a comedy which I know to be futile? Vote? For whom should I vote? I don't see any reason for choosing between two candidates, both of whom are unknown to me, while I have only too much reason to expect that, directly the election is over, they will both be false to all their professions of faith. Keep an eye on them? Remind them of their duty? It would take up the whole of my life, with no result. I have neither time, nor strength, nor the rhetorical weapons, nor sufficient lack of scruple, nor is my heart steeled against all the disgust that action brings. Much better to keep clear of it all. I am quite ready to submit to the evil. But at least I won't subscribe to it."

But, in spite of his excessive clear-sightedness, Olivier, to whom the ordinary routine of politics was repulsive, yet preserved a chimerical hope in a revolution. He knew that it was chimerical: but he did not discard it. It was a sort of racial mysticism in him. Not for nothing does a man belong to the greatest destructive and constructive people of the Western world, the people who destroy to construct and construct to destroy,—the people who play with ideas and life, and are for ever making a clean sweep so as to make a new and better beginning, and shed their blood in pledge.

Christophe was endowed with no such hereditary Messianism. He was too German to relish much the idea of a revolution. He thought that there was no changing the world. Why all these theories, all these words, all this futile uproar?

"I have no need," he would say, "to make a revolution—or long speeches about revolution—in order to prove to my own satisfaction that I am strong. I have no need, like these young men of yours, to overthrow the State in order to restore a King or a Committee of Public Safety to defend me. That's a queer way of proving your strength! I can defend myself. I am not an anarchist: I love all necessary order and I revere the laws which govern the universe. But I don't want an intermediary between them and myself. My will knows how to command, and it knows also how to submit. You've got the classics on the tip of your tongue. Why don't you remember your Corneille: 'Myself alone, and that is enough.' Your desire for a master is only a cloak for your weakness. Force is like the light: only the blind can deny it. Be strong, calmly, without all your theories, without any act of violence, and then, as plants turn to the sun, so the souls of the weak will turn to you."

But even while he protested that he had no time to waste on political discussions, he was much less detached from it all than he wished to appear. He was suffering, as an artist, from the social unrest. In his momentary dearth of strong passion he would sometimes pause to look around and wonder for what people he was writing. Then he would see the melancholy patrons of contemporary art, the weary creatures of the upper-classes, the dilettante men and women of the burgess-class, and he would think:

"What profits it to work for such people as these?" In truth there was no lack of men of refinement and culture, men sensitive to skill and craft, men even who were not incapable of appreciating the novelty or—(it is all the same)—the archaism of fine feeling. But they were bored, too intellectual, not sufficiently alive to believe in the reality of art: they were only interested in tricks,—tricks of sound, or juggling with ideas; most of them were distraught by other worldly interests, accustomed to scattering their attention over their multifarious occupations, none of which was "necessary." It was almost impossible for them to pierce the outer covering of art, to feel its heart deep down: art was not flesh and blood to them; it was literature. Their critics built up their impotence to issue from dilettantism into a theory, an intolerant theory. When it happened that a few here and there were vibrant enough to respond to the voice of art, they were not strong enough to bear it, and were left disgruntled and nerve-ridden for life. They were sick men or dead. What could art do in such a hospital?—And yet in modern society he was unable to do without these cripples: for they had money, and they ruled the Press: they only could assure an artist the means of living. So then he must submit to such humiliation: an intimate and sorrowful art, music in which is told the secret of the artist's inmost life, offered up as an amusement—or rather as a palliative of boredom, or as another sort of boredom—in the theaters or in fashionable drawing-rooms, to an audience of snobs and worn-out intellectuals.

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, Leopold 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.

Amelie, 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 Amelie'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, Amelie. 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.

The cobbler used sometimes to drag his apprentice with him to Amelie's restaurant. There it was that Olivier noticed the little hunchback with the voice of a lark. Sitting and never talking to the workpeople, he had had plenty of time to study the boy's sickly face, with its jutting brow and shy, humiliated expression: he had heard the coarse jokes that had been thrown at the boy, jokes which were met with silence and a faint shuddering tremor. During certain revolutionary utterances he had seen the boy's soft brown eyes light up with the chimerical ecstasy of the future happiness,—a happiness which, even if he were ever to realize it, would make but small difference in his stunted life. At such moments his expression would illuminate his ugly face in such a way as to make its ugliness forgotten. Even the fair Berthe was struck by it; one day she told him of it, and, without a word of warning, kissed him on the lips. The boy started back: he went pale and shuddering, and flung away in disgust. The young woman had no time to notice him: she was already quarreling with Joussier. Only Olivier observed Emmanuel's uneasiness: he followed the boy with his eyes, and saw him withdraw into the shadow with his hands trembling, head down, looking down at the floor, and darting glances of desire and irritation at the girl. Olivier went up to him, spoke to him gently and politely and soothed him.... Who can tell all that gentleness can bring to a heart deprived of all consideration? It is like a drop of water falling upon parched earth, greedily to be sucked up. It needed only a few words, a smile, for the boy Emmanuel in his heart of hearts to surrender to Olivier, and to determine to have Olivier for his friend. Thereafter, when he met him in the street and discovered that they were neighbors, it seemed to him to be a mysterious sign from Fate that he had not been mistaken. He used to watch for Olivier to pass the booth, and say good-day to him: and if ever Olivier were thinking of other things and did not glance in his direction, then Emmanuel would be hurt and sore.

It was a great day for him when Olivier came into Daddy Feuillette's shop to leave an order. When the work was done Emmanuel took it to Olivier's rooms; he had watched for him to come home so as to be sure of finding him in. Olivier was lost in thought, hardly noticed him, paid the bill, and said nothing: the boy seemed to wait, looked from right to left, and began reluctantly to move away. Olivier, in his kindness, guessed what was happening inside the boy: he smiled and tried to talk to him in spite of the awkwardness he always felt in talking to any of the people. But now he was able to find words simple and direct. An intuitive perception of suffering made him see in the boy—(rather too simply)—a little bird wounded by life, like himself, seeking consolation with his head under his wing, sadly huddled up on his perch, dreaming of wild flights into the light. A feeling that was something akin to instinctive confidence brought the boy closer to him: he felt the attraction of the silent soul, which made no moan and used no harsh words, a soul wherein he could take shelter from the brutality of the streets; and the room, thronged with books, filled with bookcases wherein there slumbered the dreams of the ages, filled him with an almost religious awe. He made no attempt to evade Olivier's questions: he replied readily, with sudden gasps and starts of shyness and pride: but he had no power of expression. Carefully, patiently, Olivier unswathed his obscure stammering soul: little by little he was able to read his hopes and his absurdly touching faith in the new birth of the world. He had no desire to laugh, though he knew that the dream was impossible, and would never change human nature. The Christians also have dreamed of impossible things, and they have not changed human nature. From the time of Pericles to the time of M. Fallieres when has there been any moral progress?... But all faith is beautiful: and when the light of an old faith dies down it is meet to salute the kindling of the new: there will never be too many. With a curious tenderness Olivier saw the uncertain light gleaming in the boy's mind. What a strange mind it was!... Olivier was not altogether able to follow the movement of his thoughts, which were incapable of any sustained effort of reason, progressing in hops and jerks, and lagging behind in conversation, unable to follow, clutching in some strange way at an image called up by a word spoken some time before, then suddenly catching up, rushing ahead, weaving a commonplace thought or an ordinary cautious phrase into an enchanted world, a crazy and heroic creed. The boy's soul, slumbering and waking by fits and starts, had a puerile and mighty need of optimism: to every idea in art or science thrown out to it, it would add some complacently melodramatic tag, which would link it up with and satisfy its own chimerical dreams.

As an experiment Olivier tried reading aloud to the boy on Sundays. He thought that he was most likely to be interested by realistic and familiar stories: he read him Tolstoy's Memories of Childhood. They made no impression on the boy: he said:

"That's quite all right. Things are like that. One knows that."

And he could not understand why anybody should take so much trouble to write about real things....

"He's just a boy," he would say disdainfully, "just an ordinary little boy."

He was no more responsive to the interest of history: and science bored him: it was to him no more than a tiresome introduction to a fairy-tale: the invisible forces brought into the service of man were like terrible genii laid low. What was the use of so much explanation? When a man finds something it is no good his telling how he found it, he need only tell what it is that he has found. The analysis of thought is a luxury of the upper-classes. The souls of the people demand synthesis, ideas ready-made, well or ill, or rather ill-made than well, but all tending to action, and composed of the gross realities of life, and charged with electricity. Of all the literature open to Emmanuel that which most nearly touched him was the epic pathos of certain passages in Hugo and the fuliginous rhetoric of the revolutionary orators, whom he did not rightly understand, characters who no more understood themselves than Hugo did. To him as to them the world was not an incoherent collection of reasons or facts, but an infinite space, steeped in darkness and quivering with light, while through the night there passed the beating of mighty wings all bathed in the sunlight. Olivier tried in vain to make him grasp his cultivated logic. The boy's rebellious and weary soul slipped through his fingers: and it sank back with a sigh of comfort and relief into the indeterminate haze and the chafing of its own sensation and hallucinations, like a woman in love giving herself with eyes closed to her lover.

Olivier was at once attracted and disconcerted by the qualities in the child so much akin to his own:—loneliness, proud weakness, idealistic ardor,—and so very different,—the unbalanced mind, the blind and unbridled desires, the savage sensuality which had no idea of good and evil, as they are defined in ordinary morality. He had only a partial glimpse of that sensuality which would have terrified him had he known its full extent. He never dreamed of the existence of the world of uneasy passions stirring and seething in the heart and mind of his little friend. Our bourgeois atavism has given us too much wisdom. We dare not even look within ourselves. If we were to tell a hundredth part of the dreams that come to an ordinary honest man, or of the desires which come into being in the body of a chaste woman, there would be a scandal and an outcry. Silence such monsters! Bolt and bar their cage! But let us admit that they exist, and that in the souls of the young they are insecurely fettered.—The boy had all the erotic desires and dreams which we agree among ourselves to regard as perverse: they would suddenly rise up unawares and take him by the throat: they would come in gusts and squalls: and they only gained in intensity and heat through the irritation set up by the isolation to which his ugliness condemned him. Olivier knew nothing of all this. Emmanuel was ashamed in his presence. He felt the contagion of such peace and purity. The example of such a life was a taming influence upon him. The boy felt a passionate love for Olivier. And his suppressed passions rushed headlong into tumultuous dreams of human happiness, social brotherhood, fantastic aviation, wild barbaric poetry—a whole heroic, erotic, childish, splendid, vulgar world in which his intelligence and his will were tossed hither and thither in mental loafing and fever.

He did not have much time for indulging himself in this way, especially in his grandfather's booth, for the old man was never silent for a minute on end, but was always whistling, hammering, and talking from morning to night; but there is always room for dreams. How many voyages of the mind one can make standing up with wide-open eyes in the space of a second!—Manual labor is fairly well suited to intermittent thought. The working-man's mind would be hard put to it without an effort of the will to follow a closely reasoned chain of argument: if he does manage to do so he is always certain to miss a link here and there: but in the intervals of rhythmic movement ideas crop up and mental images come floating to the surface: the regular movements of the body send them flying upwards like sparks under the smith's bellows. The thought of the people! It is just smoke and fire, a shower of glittering sparks fading away, glowing, then fading away once more! But sometimes a spark will be carried away by the wind to set fire to the dried forests and the fat ricks of the upper-classes....

Olivier procured Emmanuel a place in a printing house. It was the boy's wish, and his grandfather did not oppose it; he was glad to see his grandson better educated than himself, and he had a great respect for printer's ink. In his new trade the boy found his work more exhausting than in the old: but he felt more free to think among the throng of workers than in the little shop where he used to sit alone with his grandfather.

The best time of day was the dinner hour. He would escape and get right away from the horde of artisans crowding round the little tables on the pavement and into the wineshops of the district, and limp along to the square hard by: and there he would sit astride a bench under a spreading chestnut-tree, near a bronze dancing faun with grapes in his hands, and untie his brown-paper parcel of bread and meat, and munch it slowly, surrounded by a little crowd of sparrows. Over the green turf little fountains spread the trickling web of their soft rain. Round-eyed, slate-blue pigeons cooed in a sunlit tree. And all about him was the perpetual hum of Paris, the roar of the carriages, the surging sea of footsteps, the familiar street-cries, the gay distant whistle of a china-mender, a navvy's hammer ringing out on the cobblestones, the noble music of a fountain—all the fevered golden trappings of the Parisian dream.—And the little hunchback, sitting astride his bench, with his mouth full, never troubling to swallow, would drowse off into a delicious torpor, in which he lost all consciousness of his twisted spine and his craven soul, and was all steeped in an indeterminate intoxicating happiness.

"... Soft warm light, sun of justice that art to shine for us to-morrow, art thou not shining now? It is all so good, so beautiful! We are rich, we are strong, we are hale, we love ... I love, I love all men, all men love me.... Ah! How splendid it all is! How splendid it will be to-morrow!..."

* * * * *

The factory hooters would sound: the boy would come to his senses, swallow down his mouthful, take a long drink at the Wallace fountain near by, slip back into his hunchbacked shell, and go limping and hobbling back to his place in the printing works in front of the cases of magic letters which would one day write the Mene, Mene, Tekel, Upharsin, of the Revolution.

Daddy Feuillet had a crony, Trouillot, the stationer on the other side of the street. He kept a stationery and haberdashery shop, in the windows of which were displayed pink and green bonbons in green bottles, and pasteboard dolls without arms or legs. Prom either side of the street, one standing on his doorstep, the other in his shop, the two old men used to exchange winks and nods and a whole elaborate code of pantomimic gesture. At intervals, when the cobbler was tired of hammering, and had, as he used to say, the cramp in his buttocks, they would hail each other, La Feuillette in his shrill treble, Trouillot with a muffled roar, like a husky calf; and they would go off together and take a nip at a neighboring bar. They were never in any hurry to return. They were both infernally loquacious. They had known each other for half a century. The stationer also had played a little walking-on part in the great melodrama of 1871. To see the fat placid creature with his black cap on his head and his white blouse, and his gray, heavy-dragoon mustache, and his dull light-blue bloodshot eyes with heavy pouches under the lids, and his flabby shining cheeks, always in a perspiration, slow-footed, gouty, out of breath, heavy of speech, no one would ever have thought it. But he had lost none of the illusions of the old days. He had spent some years as a refugee in Switzerland, where he had met comrades of all nations, notably many Russians, who had initiated him in the beauties of anarchic brotherhood. On that point he disagreed with La Feuillette, who was a proper Frenchman, an adherent of the strong line and of absolutism in freedom. For the rest, they were equally firm in their belief in the social revolution and the working-class salente of the future. Each was devoted to a leader in whose person he saw incarnate the ideal man that each would have liked to be. Trouillot was for Joussier, La Feuillette for Coquard. They used to engage in interminable arguments about the points on which they were divided, being quite confident that the thoughts upon which they agreed were definitely decided;—(and they were so sure of their common ground that they were never very far from believing, in their cups, that it was a matter of hard fact).—The cobbler was the more argumentative of the two. He believed as a matter of reason: or at least he flattered himself that he did, for, Heaven knows, his reason was of a very peculiar kind, and could have fitted the foot of no other man. However, though he was less skilled in argument than in cobbling, he was always insisting that other minds should be shod to his own measure. The stationer was more indolent and less combative, and never worried about proving his faith. A man only tries to prove what he doubts himself. He had no doubt. His unfailing optimism always made him see things as he wanted to see them, and not see things or forget them immediately when they were otherwise. Whether he did so wilfully or from apathy he saved himself from trouble of any sort: experience to the contrary slipped off his hide without leaving a mark.—The two of them were romantic babies with no sense of reality, and the revolution, the mere sound of the name of which was enough to make them drunk, was only a jolly story they told themselves, and never knew whether it would ever happen, or whether it had actually happened. And the two of them firmly believed in the God of Humanity merely by the transposition of the habits they had inherited from their forbears, who for centuries had bowed before the Son of Man.—It goes without saying that both men were anti-clerical.