Crillon, officially got up in his Sunday clothes, has bought the catalogue (which is sold for the benefit of the wounded) and he is struck with wonder by the list of exhibitors. He talks of titles, of coats of arms, of crowns; he seeks enlightenment in matters of aristocratic hierarchy. Once, as he stands before the row of frames, he asks:

"I say, now, which has got most talent in France—a princess or a duchess?"

He is quite affected by these things, and with his eyes fixed on the lower edges of the pictures he deciphers the signatures.

In the room which follows this shining exhibition of autographs there is a crush.

On trestles disposed around the wall trophies are arranged—peaked helmets, knapsacks covered with tawny hair, ruins of shells.

The complete uniform of a German infantryman has been built up with items from different sources, some of them stained.

In this room there was a group of convalescents from the overflow hospital of Viviers. These soldiers looked, and hardly spoke. Several shrugged their shoulders. But one of them growled in front of the German phantom, "Ah the swine!"

With a view to propaganda, they have framed a letter from a woman found in a slain enemy's pocket. A translation is posted up as well, and they have underlined the passage in which the woman says, "When is this cursed war going to end?" and in which she laments the increasing cost of little Johann's keep. At the foot of the page, the woman has depicted, in a sentimental diagram, the increasing love that she feels for her man.

How simple and obvious the evidence is! No reasonable person can dispute that the being whose private life is here thrown to the winds and who poured out his sweat and his blood in one of these rags was not responsible for having held a rifle, for having aimed it. In the presence of these ruins I see with monotonous and implacable obstinacy that the attacking multitude is as innocent as the defending multitude.

On a little red-covered table by the side of a little tacked label which says, "Cold Steel: May 9," there is a twisted French bayonet—a bayonet, the flesh weapon, which has been twisted!

"Oh, it's fine!" says a young girl from the castle.

"It isn't Fritz and Jerry, old chap, that bends bayonets!"

"No doubt about it, we're the first soldiers in the world," says Rampaille.

"We've set a beautiful example to the world," says a sprightly Member of the Upper House to all those present.

Excitement grows around that bayonet. The young girl, who is beautiful and expansive, cannot tear herself away from it. At last she touches it with her finger, and shudders. She does not disguise her pleasant emotion:—

"I confess I'm a patriot! I'm more than that—I'm a patriot and a militarist!"

All heads around her are nodded in approval. That kind of talk never seems intemperate, for it touches on sacred things.

And I, I see—in the night which falls for a moment, amid the tempest of dying men which is subsiding on the ground—I see a monster in the form of a man and in the form of a vulture, who, with the death-rattle in his throat, holds towards that young girl the horrible head that is scalped with a coronet, and says to her: "You do not know me, and you do not know, but you are like me!"

The young girl's living laugh, as she goes off with a young officer, recalls me to events.

All those who come after each other to the bayonet speak in the same way, and have the same proud eyes.

"They're not stronger than us, let me tell you! It's us that's the strongest!"

"Our allies are very good, but it's lucky for them we're there on the job."

"Ah, la, la!"

"Why, yes, there's only the French for it. All the world admires them. Only we're always running ourselves down."

When you see that fever, that spectacle of intoxication, these people who seize the slightest chance to glorify their country's physical force and the hardness of its fists, you hear echoing the words of the orators and the official politicians:—

"There is only in our hearts the condemnation of barbarism and the love of humanity."

And you ask yourself if there is a single public opinion in the world which is capable of bearing victory with dignity.

I stand aloof. I am a blot, like a bad prophet. I hear this declaration, which bows me like an infernal burden: It is only defeat which can open millions of eyes!

I hear some one say, with detestation, "German militarism——"

That is the final argument, that is the formula. Yes, German militarism is hateful, and must disappear; all the world is agreed about that—the jack-boots of the Junkers, of the Crown Princes, of the Kaiser, and their courts of intellectuals and business men, and the pan-Germanism which would dye Europe black and red, and the half-bestial servility of the German people. Germany is the fiercest fortress of militarism. Yes, everybody is agreed about that.

But they who govern Thought take unfair advantage of that agreement, for they know well that when the simple folk have said, "German militarism," they have said all. They stop there. They amalgamate the two words and confuse militarism with Germany—once Germany is thrown down there's no more to say. In that way, they attach lies to truth, and prevent us from seeing that militarism is in reality everywhere, more or less hypocritical and unconscious, but ready to seize everything if it can. They force opinion to add, "It is a crime to think of anything but beating the German enemy." But the right-minded man must answer that it is a crime to think only of that, for the enemy is militarism, and not Germany. I know; I will no longer let myself be caught by words which they hide one behind another.

The Liberal Member of the Upper House says, loud enough to be heard, that the people have behaved very well, for, after all, they have found the cost, and they must be given credit for their good conduct.

Another personage in the same group, an Army contractor, spoke of "the good chaps in the trenches," and he added, in a lower voice, "As long as they're protecting us, we're all right."

"We shall reward them when they come back," replied an old lady. "We shall give them glory, we shall make their leaders into Marshals, and they'll have celebrations, and Kings will be there."

"And there are some who won't come back."

We see several new recruits of the 1916 class who will soon be sent to the front.

"They're pretty boys," says the Member of the Upper House, good-naturedly; "but they're still a bit pale-faced. We must fatten 'em up, we must fatten 'em up!"

An official of the Ministry of War goes up to the Member of the Upper House, and says:

"The science of military preparedness is still in its beginnings. We're getting clear for it hastily, but it is an organization which requires a long time and which can only have full effect in time of peace. Later, we shall take them from childhood; we shall make good sound soldiers of them, and of good health, morally as well as physically."

Then the band plays; it is closing time, and there is the passion of a military march. A woman cries that it is like drinking champagne to hear it.

The visitors have gone away. I linger to look at the beflagged front of the War Museum, while night is falling. It is the Temple. It is joined to the Church, and resembles it. My thoughts go to those crosses which weigh down, from the pinnacles of churches, the heads of the living, join their two hands together, and close their eyes; those crosses which squat upon the graves in the cemeteries at the front. It is because of all these temples that in the future the sleep-walking nations will begin again to go through the immense and mournful tragedy of obedience. It is because of these temples that financial and industrial tyranny, Imperial and Royal tyranny—of which all they whom I meet on my way are the accomplices or the puppets—will to-morrow begin again to wax fat on the fanaticism of the civilian, on the weariness of those who have come back, on the silence of the dead. (When the armies file through the Arc de Triomphe, who is there will see—and yet they will be plainly visible—that six thousand miles of French coffins are also passing through!) And the flag will continue to float over its prey, that flag stuck into the shadowy front of the War Museum, that flag so twisted by the wind's breath that sometimes it takes the shape of a cross, and sometimes of a scythe!

Judgment is passed in that case. But the vision of the future agitates me with a sort of despair and with a holy thrill of anger.

Ah, there are cloudy moments when one asks himself if men do not deserve all the disasters into which they rush! No—I recover myself—they do not deserve them. But we, instead of saying "I wish" must say "I will." And what we will, we must will to build it, with order, with method, beginning at the beginning, when once we have been as far as that beginning. We must not only open our eyes, but our arms, our wings.

This isolated wooden building, with its back against a wood-pile, and nobody in it——

Burn it? Destroy it? I thought of doing it.

To cast that light in the face of that moving night, which was crawling and trampling there in the torchlight, which had gone to plunge into the town and grow darker among the dungeon-cells of the bedchambers, there to hatch more forgetfulness in the gloom, more evil and misery, or to breed unavailing generations who will be abortive at the age of twenty!

The desire to do it gripped my body for a moment. I fell back, and I went away, like the others.

It seems to me that, in not doing it, I did an evil deed.

For if the men who are to come free themselves instead of sinking in the quicksands, if they consider, with lucidity and with the epic pity it deserves, this age through which I go drowning, they would perhaps have thanked me, even me! From those who will not see or know me, but in whom for this sudden moment I want to hope, I beg pardon for not doing it.

* * * * * *

In a corner where the neglected land is turning into a desert, and which lies across my way home, some children are throwing stones at a mirror which they have placed a few steps away as a target. They jostle each other, shouting noisily; each of them wants the glory of being the first to break it. I see the mirror again that I broke with a brick at Buzancy, because it seemed to stand upright like a living being! Next, when the fragment of solid light is shattered into crumbs, they pursue with stones an old dog, whose wounded foot trails like his tail. No one wants it any more; it is ready to be finished off, and the urchins are improving the occasion. Limping, his pot-hanger spine all arched, the animal hurries slowly, and tries vainly to go faster than the pebbles.

The child is only a confused handful of confused and superficial propensities. Our deep instincts—there they are.

I scatter the children, and they withdraw into the shadows unwillingly, and look at me with malice. I am distressed by this maliciousness, which is born full-grown. I am distressed also by this old dog's lot. They would not understand me if I acknowledged that distress; they would say, "And you who've seen so many wounded and dead!" All the same, there is a supreme respect for life. I am not slighting intellect; but life is common to us along with poorer living things than ourselves. He who kills an animal, however lowly it may be, unless there is necessity, is an assassin.

At the crossing I meet Louise Verte, wandering about. She has gone crazy. She continues to accost men, but they do not even know what she begs for. She rambles, in the streets, and in her hovel, and on the pallet where she is crucified by drunkards. She is surrounded by general loathing. "That a woman?" says a virtuous man who is going by, "that dirty old strumpet? A woman? A sewer, yes." She is harmless. In a feeble, peaceful voice, which seems to live in some supernatural region, very far from us, she says to me:

"I am the queen."

Immediately and strangely she adds, as though troubled by some foreboding:

"Don't take my illusion away from me."

I was on the point of answering her, but I check myself, and just say, "Yes," as one throws a copper, and she goes away happy.

* * * * * *

My respect for life is so strong that I feel pity for a fly which I have killed. Observing the tiny corpse at the gigantic height of my eyes, I cannot help thinking how well made that organized speck of dust is, whose wings are little more than two drops of space, whose eye has four thousand facets; and that fly occupies my thought for a moment, which is a long time for it.

* * * * * *



CHAPTER XXII

LIGHT

I am leaning this evening out of the open window. As in bygone nights, I am watching the dark pictures, invisible at first, taking shape—the steeple towering out of the hollow, and broadly lighted against the hill; the castle, that rich crown of masonry; and then the massive sloping black of the chimney-peopled roofs, which are sharply outlined against the paler black of space, and some milky, watching windows. The eye is lost in all directions among the desolation where the multitude of men and women are hiding, as always and as everywhere.

That is what is. Who will say, "That is what must be!"

I have searched, I have indistinctly seen, I have doubted. Now, I hope.

I do not regret my youth and its beliefs. Up to now, I have wasted my time to live. Youth is the true force, but it is too rarely lucid. Sometimes it has a triumphant liking for what is now, and the pugnacious broadside of paradox may please it. But there is a degree in innovation which they who have not lived very much cannot attain. And yet who knows if the stern greatness of present events will not have educated and aged the generation which to-day forms humanity's effective frontier? Whatever our hope may be, if we did not place it in youth, where should we place it?

Who will speak—see, and then speak? To speak is the same thing as to see, but it is more. Speech perpetuates vision. We carry no light; we are things of shadow, for night closes our eyes, and we put out our hands to find our way when the light is gone; we only shine in speech; truth is made by the mouths of men. The wind of words—what is it? It is our breath—not all words, for there are artificial and copied ones which are not part of the speaker; but the profound words, the cries. In the human cry you feel the effort of the spring. The cry comes out of us, it is as living as a child. The cry goes on, and makes the appeal of truth wherever it may be, the cry gathers cries.

There is a voice, a low and untiring voice, which helps those who do not and will not see themselves, a voice which brings them together, Books—the book we choose, the favorite, the book you open, which was waiting for you!

Formerly, I hardly knew any books. Now, I love what they do. I have brought together as many as I could. There they are, on the shelves, with their immense titles, their regular, profound contents; they are there, all around me, arranged like houses.

* * * * * *

Who will tell the truth? But it is not enough to say things in order to let them be seen.

Just now, pursued by the idea of my temptation at the War Museum, I imagined that I had acted on it, and that I was appearing before the judges. I should have told them a fine lot of truths, I should have proved to them that I had done right. I should have made myself, the accused, into the prosecutor.

No! I should not have spoken thus, for I should not have known! I should have stood stammering, full of a truth throbbing within me, choking, unconfessable truth. It is not enough to speak; you must know words. When you have said, "I am in pain," or when you have said, "I am right," you have said nothing in reality, you have only spoken to yourself. The real presence of truth is not in every word of truth, because of the wear and tear of words, and the fleeting multiplicity of arguments. One must have the gift of persuasion, of leaving to truth its speaking simplicity, its solemn unfoldings. It is not I who will be able to speak from the depths of myself. The attention of men dazzles me when it rises before me. The very nakedness of paper frightens me and drowns my looks. Not I shall embellish that whiteness with writing like light. I understand of what a great tribune's sorrow is made; and I can only dream of him who, visibly summarizing the immense crisis of human necessity in a work which forgets nothing, which seems to forget nothing, without the blot even of a misplaced comma, will proclaim our Charter to the epochs of the times in which we are, and will let us see it. Blessed be that simplifier, from whatever country he may come,—but all the same, I should prefer him, at the bottom of my heart, to speak French.

Once more, he intervenes within me who first showed himself to me as the specter of evil, he who guided me through hell. When the death-agony was choking him and his head had darkened like an eagle's, he hurled a curse which I did not understand, which I understand now, on the masterpieces of art. He was afraid of their eternity, of that terrible might they have—when once they are imprinted on the eyes of an epoch—the strength which you can neither kill nor drive in front of you. He said that Velasquez, who was only a chamberlain, had succeeded Philip IV, that he would succeed the Escurial, that he would succeed even Spain and Europe. He likened that artistic power, which the Kings have tamed in all respects save in its greatness, to that of a poet-reformer who throws a saying of freedom and justice abroad, a book which scatters sparks among humanity somber as coal. The voice of the expiring prince crawled on the ground and throbbed with secret blows: "Begone, all you voices of light!"

* * * * * *

But what shall we say? Let us spell out the Magna Charta of which we humbly catch sight. Let us say to the people of whom all peoples are made: "Wake up and understand, look and see; and having begun again the consciousness which was mown down by slavery, decide that everything must be begun again!"

Begin again, entirely. Yes, that first. If the human charter does not re-create everything, it will create nothing.

Unless they are universal, the reforms to be carried out are utopian and mortal. National reforms are only fragments of reforms. There must be no half measures. Half measures are laughter-provoking in their unbounded littleness when it is a question for the last time of arresting the world's roll down the hill of horror. There must be no half measures because there are no half truths. Do all, or you will do nothing.

Above all, do not let the reforms be undertaken by the Kings. That is the gravest thing to be taught you. The overtures of liberality made by the masters who have made the world what it is are only comedies. They are only ways of blockading completely the progress to come, of building up the past again behind new patchwork of plaster.

Never listen, either, to the fine words they offer you, the letters of which you see like dry bones on hoardings and the fronts of buildings. There are official proclamations, full of the notion of liberty and rights, which would be beautiful if they said truly what they say. But they who compose them do not attach their full meaning to the words. What they recite they are not capable of wanting, nor even of understanding. The one indisputable sign of progress in ideas to-day is that there are things which they dare no longer leave publicly unsaid, and that's all. There are not all the political parties that there seem to be. They swarm, certainly, as numerous as the cases of short sight; but there are only two—the democrats and the conservatives. Every political deed ends fatally either in one or the other, and all their leaders have always a tendency to act in the direction of reaction. Beware, and never forget that if certain assertions are made by certain lips, that is a sufficient reason why you should at once mistrust them. When the bleached old republicans[1] take your cause in their hands, be quite sure that it is not yours. Be wary as lions.

[Footnote 1: The word is used here much in the sense of our word "Tories."—Tr.]

Do not let the simplicity of the new world out of your sight. The social trust is simple. The complications are in what is overhead—the accumulation of delusions and prejudice heaped up by ages of tyrants, parasites, and lawyers. That conviction sheds a real glimmer of light on your duty and points out the way to accomplish it. He who would dig right down to the truth must simplify; his faith must be brutally simple, or he is lost. Laugh at the subtle shades and distinctions of the rhetoricians and the specialist physicians. Say aloud: "This is what is," and then, "That is what must be."

You will never have that simplicity, you people of the world, if you do not seize it. If you want it, do it yourself with your own hands. And I give you now the talisman, the wonderful magic word—you can!

That you may be a judge of existing things, go back to their origins, and get at the endings of all. The noblest and most fruitful work of the human intelligence is to make a clean sweep of every enforced idea—of advantages or meanings—and to go right through appearances in search of the eternal bases. Thus you will clearly see the moral law at the beginning of all things, and the conception of justice and equality will appear to you beautiful as daylight.

Strong in that supreme simplicity, you shall say: I am the people of the peoples; therefore I am the King of Kings, and I will that sovereignty flows everywhere from me, since I am might and right. I want no more despots, confessed or otherwise, great or little; I know, and I want no more. The incomplete liberation of 1789 was attacked by the Kings. Complete liberation will attack the Kings.

But Kings are not exclusively the uniformed ones among the trumpery wares of the courts. Assuredly, the nations who have a King have more tradition and subjection than the others. But there are countries where no man can get up and say, "My people, my army," nations which only experience the continuation of the kingly tradition in more peaceful intensity. There are others with the great figures of democratic leaders; but as long as the entirety of things is not overthrown—always the entirety, the sacred entirety—these men cannot achieve the impossible, and sooner or later their too-beautiful inclinations will be isolated and misunderstood. In the formidable urgency of progress, what do the proportions matter to you of the elements which make up the old order of things in the world? All the governors cling fatally together among themselves, and more solidly than you think, through the old machine of chancelleries, ministries, diplomacy, and the ceremonials with gilded swords; and when they are bent on making war for themselves there is an unquenchable likeness between them all, of which you want no more. Break the chain; suppress all privileges, and say at last, "Let, there be equality."

One man is as good as another. That means that no man carries within himself any privilege which puts him above the universal law. It means an equality in principle, and that does not invalidate the legitimacy of the differences due to work, to talent, and to moral sense. The leveling only affects the rights of the citizen; and not the man as a whole. You do not create the living being; you do not fashion the living clay, as God did in the Bible; you make regulations. Individual worth, on which some pretend to rely, is relative and unstable, and no one is a judge of it. In a well-organized entirety, it cultivates and improves itself automatically. But that magnificent anarchy cannot, at the inception of the human Charter, take the place of the obviousness of equality.

The poor man, the proletarian, is nobler than another, but not more sacred. In truth, all workers and all honest men are as good as each other. But the poor, the exploited, are fifteen hundred millions here on earth. They are the Law because they are the Number. The moral law is only the imperative preparation of the common good. It always involves, in different forms, the necessary limitations of some individual interests by the rest; that is to say, the sacrifice of one to the many, of the many to the whole. The republican conception is the civic translation of the moral law; what is anti-republican is immoral.

Socially, women are the equals of men, without restrictions. The beings who shine and who bring forth are not made solely to lend or to give the heat of their bodies. It is right that the sum total of work should be shared, reduced and harmonized by their hands. It is just that the fate of humanity should be grounded also in the strength of women. Whatever the danger which their instinctive love of shining things may occasion, in spite of the facility with which they color all things with their own feelings and the totality of their slightest impulses—the legend of their incapacity is a fog that you will dissipate with a gesture of your hands. Their advent is in the order of things; and it is also in order to await with hopeful heart the day when the social and political chains of women will fall off, when human liberty will suddenly become twice as great.

People of the world, establish equality right up to the limits of your great life. Lay the foundations of the republic of republics over all the area where you breathe; that is to say, the common control in broad daylight of all external affairs, of community in the laws of labor, of production and of commerce. The subdivision of these high social and moral arrangements by nations or by limited unions of nations (enlargements which are reductions) is artificial, arbitrary, and malignant. The so-called inseparable cohesions of national interests vanish away as soon as you draw near to examine them. There are individual interests and a general interest, those two only. When you say "I," it means "I"; when you say "We," it means Man. So long as a single and identical Republic does not cover the world, all national liberations can only be beginnings and signals!

Thus you will disarm the "fatherlands" and "motherlands," and you will reduce the notion of Motherland to the little bit of social importance that it must have. You will do away with the military frontiers, and those economic and commercial barriers which are still worse. Protection introduces violence into the expansion of labor; like militarism, it brings in a fatal absence of balance. You will suppress that which justifies among nations the things which among individuals we call murder, robbery, and unfair competition. You will suppress battles—not nearly so much by the direct measure of supervision and order that you will take as because you will suppress the causes of battle. You will suppress them chiefly because it is you who will do it, by yourself, everywhere, with your invincible strength and the lucid conscience that is free from selfish motives. You will not make war on yourself.

You will not be afraid of magic formulas and the churches. Your giant reason will destroy the idol which suffocates its true believers. You will salute the flags for the last time; to that ancient enthusiasm which flattered the puerility of your ancestors, you will say a peaceful and final farewell. In some corners of the calamities of the past, there were times of tender emotion; but truth is greater, and there are not more boundaries on the earth than on the sea!

Each country will be a moral force, and no longer a brutal force; while all brutal forces clash with themselves, all moral forces make mighty harmony together.

The universal republic is the inevitable consequence of equal rights in life for all. Start from the principle of equality, and you arrive at the people's international. If you do not arrive there it is because you have not reasoned aright. They who start from the opposite point of view—God, and the divine rights of popes and Kings and nobles, and authority and tradition—will come, by fabulous paths but quite logically, to opposite conclusions. You must not cease to hold that there are only two teachings face to face. All things are amenable to reason, the supreme Reason which mutilated humanity, wounded in the eyes, has deified among the clouds.

* * * * * *

You will do away with the rights of the dead, and with heredity of power, whatever it may be, that inheritance which is unjust in all its gradations, for tradition takes root there, and it is an outrage on equality, against the order of labor. Labor is a great civic deed which all men and all women without exception must share or go down. Such divisions will reduce it for each one to dignified proportions and prevent it from devouring human lives.

You will not permit colonial ownership by States, which makes stains on the map of the world and is not justified by confessable reasons; and you will organize the abolition of that collective slavery. You will allow the individual property of the living to stand. It is equitable because its necessity is inherent in the circumstances of the living, and because there are cases where you cannot tear away the right of ownership without tearing right itself. Besides, the love of things is a passion, like the love of beings. The object of social organization is not to destroy sentiment and pleasure, but on the contrary to allow them to flourish, within the limit of not wronging others. It is right to enjoy what you have clearly earned by your work. That focused wisdom alone bursts among the old order of things like a curse.

Chase away forever, everywhere, everywhere, the bad masters of the sacred school. Knowledge incessantly remakes the whole of civilization. The child's intelligence is too precious not to be under the protection of all. The heads of families are not free to deal according to their caprices with the ignorance which each child brings into the daylight; they have not that liberty contrary to liberty. A child does not belong body and soul to its parents; it is a person, and our ears are wounded by the blasphemy—a residue of despotic Roman tradition—of those who speak of their sons killed in the war and say, "I have given my son." You do not give living beings—and all intelligence belongs primarily to reason.

There must no longer be a single school where they teach idolatry, where the wills of to-morrow grow bigger under the terror of a God who does not exist, and on whom so many bad arguments are thrown away or justified. Nowhere must there be any more school-books where they dress up in some finery of prestige what is most contemptible and debasing in the past of the nations. Let there be nothing but universal histories, nothing but the great lines and peaks, the lights and shadows of that chaos which for six thousand years has been the fortune of two hundred thousand millions of men.

You will suppress everywhere the advertising of the cults, you will wipe away the inky uniform of the parsons. Let every believer keep his religion for himself, and let the priests stay between walls. Toleration in face of error is a graver error. One might have dreamed of a wise and universal church, for Jesus Christ will be justified in His human teaching as long as there are hearts. But they who have taken His morality in hand and fabricated their religion have poisoned the truth; more, they have shown for two thousand years that they place the interests of their caste before those of the sacred law of what is right. No words, no figures can ever give an idea of the evil which the Church has done to mankind. When she is not the oppressor herself, upholding the right of force, she lends her authority to the oppressors and sanctifies their pretenses; and still to-day she is closely united everywhere with those who do not want the reign of the poor. Just as the Jingoes invoke the charm of the domestic cradle that they may give an impulse to war, so does the Church invoke the poetry of the Gospels; but she has become an aristocratic party like the rest, in which every gesture of the sign of the Cross is a slap in the Face of Jesus Christ. Out of the love of one's native soil, they have made Nationalists; out of Jesus they have made Jesuits.

Only international greatness will at last permit the rooting up of the stubborn abuses which the partition walls of nationality multiply, entangle and solidify. The future Charter—of which we confusedly glimpse some signs and which has for its premises the great moral principles restored to their place, and the multitude at last restored to theirs—will force the newspapers to confess all their resources. By means of a young language, simple and modest, it will unite all foreigners—those prisoners of themselves. It will mow down the hateful complexity of judicial procedure, with its booty for the somebodies, and its lawyers as well, who intrude the tricks of diplomacy and the melodramatic usages of eloquence into the plain and simple machinery of justice. The righteous man must go so far as to say that clemency has not its place in justice; the logical majesty of the sentence which condemns the guilty one in order to frighten possible evil-doers (and never for another reason) is itself beyond forgiveness. International dignity will close the taverns, forbid the sale of poisons, and will reduce to impotence the vendors who want to render abortive, in men and young people, the future's beauty and the reign of intelligence. And here is a mandate which appears before my eyes—the tenacious law which must pounce without respite on all public robbers, on all those, little and big, cynics and hypocrites, who, when their trade or their functions bring the opportunity, exploit misery and speculate on necessity. There is a new hierarchy to make mistakes, to commit offenses and crimes—the true one.

You can form no idea of the beauty that is possible! You cannot imagine what all the squandered treasure can provide, what can be brought on by the resurrection of misguided human intelligence, successively smothered and slain hitherto by infamous slavery, by the despicable infectious necessity of armed attack and defense, and by the privileges which debase human worth. You can have no notion what human intelligence may one day find of new adoration. The people's absolute reign will give to literature and the arts—whose harmonious shape is still but roughly sketched—a splendor boundless as the rest. National cliques cultivate narrowness and ignorance, they cause originality to waste away; and the national academies, to which a residue of superstition lends respect, are only pompous ways of upholding ruins. The domes of those Institutes which look so grand when they tower above you are as ridiculous as extinguishers. You must widen and internationalize, without pause or limit, all which permits of it. With its barriers collapsed, you must fill society with broad daylight and magnificent spaces; with patience and heroism must you clear the ways which lead from the individual to humanity, the ways which were stopped up with corpses of ideas and with stone images all along their great curving horizons. Let everything be remade on simple lines. There is only one people, there is only one people!

If you do that, you will be able to say that, at the moment when you planned your effort and took your decision, you saved the human species as far as it is possible on earth to do it. You will not have brought happiness about. The fallacy-mongers do not frighten us when they preach resignation and paralysis on the plea that no social change can bring happiness, thus trifling with these profound things. Happiness is part of the inner life, it is an intimate and personal paradise; it is a flash of chance or genius which comes sweetly to life among those who elbow each other, and it is also the sense of glory. No, it is not in your hands, and so it is in nobody's hands. But a balanced and heedful life is necessary to man, that he may build the isolated home of happiness; and death is the fearful connection of the happenings which pass away along with our profundities. External things and those which are hidden are essentially different, but they are held together by peace and by death.

To accomplish the majestically practical work, to shape the whole architecture like a statue, base nothing on impossible modifications of human nature; await nothing from pity.

Charity is a privilege, and must disappear. For the rest, you cannot love unknown people any more than you can have pity on them. The human intelligence is made for infinity; the heart is not. The being who really suffers in his heart, and not merely in his mind or in words, by the suffering of others whom he neither sees nor touches, is a nervous abnormality, and he cannot be argued from as an example. The repulse of reason, the stain of absurdity, torture the intelligence in a more abundant way. Simple as it may be, social science is geometry. Do not accept the sentimental meaning they give to the word "humanitarianism," and say that the preaching of fraternity and love is vain; these words lose their meaning amid the great numbers of man. It is in this disordered confusion of feelings and ideas that one feels the presence of Utopia. Mutual solidarity is of the intellect—common-sense, logic, methodical precision, order without faltering, the ruthless inevitable perfection of light!

In my fervor, in my hunger, and from the depths of my abyss, I uttered these words aloud amid the silence. My great reverie was blended with song, like the Ninth Symphony.

* * * * * *

I am resting on my elbows at the window. I am looking at the night, which is everywhere, which touches me, me, although I am only I, and it is infinite night. It seems to me that there is nothing else left me to think about. Things cling together; they will save each other, and will do their setting in order.

But again I am seized by the sharpest of my agonies—I am afraid that the multitude may rest content with the partial gratifications to be granted them everywhere by those who will use all their clinging, cunning power to prevent the people from understanding, and then from wishing. On the day of victory, they will pour intoxication and dazzling deceptions into you, and put almost superhuman cries into your mouths, "We have delivered humanity; we are the soldiers of the Right!" without telling you all that such a statement includes of gravity, of immense pledges and constructive genius, what it involves in respect for great peoples, whoever they are, and of gratitude to those who are trying to deliver themselves. They will again take up their eternal mission of stupefying the great conscious forces, and turning them aside from their ends. They will appeal for union and peace and patience, to the opportunism of changes, to the danger of going too quickly, or of meddling in your neighbor's affairs, and all the other fallacies of the sort. They will try again to ridicule and strike down those whom the newspapers (the ones in their pay) call dreamers, sectarians, and traitors; once again they will flourish all their old talismans. Doubtless they will propose, in the fashionable words of the moment, some official parodies of international justice, which they will break up one day like theatrical scenery; they will enunciate some popular right, curtailed by childish restrictions and monstrous definitions, resembling a brigand's code of honor. The wrong torn from confessed autocracies will hatch out elsewhere—in the sham republics, and the self-styled liberal countries who have played a hidden game. The concessions they will make will clothe the old rotten autocracy again, and perpetuate it. One imperialism will replace the other, and the generations to come will be marked for the sword. Soldier, wherever you are, they will try to efface your memory, or to exploit it, by leading it astray, and forgetfulness of the truth is the first form of your adversity! May neither defeat nor victory be against you. You are above both of them, for you are all the people.

The skies are peopled with stars, a harmony which clasps reason close, and applies the mind to the adorable idea of universal unity. Must that harmony give us hope or misgiving?

We are in a great night of the world. The thing is to know if we shall wake up to-morrow. We have only one succor—we know of what the night is made. But shall we be able to impart our lucid faith, seeing that the heralds of warning are everywhere few, and that the greatest victims hate the only ideal which is not one, and call it utopian? Public opinion floats over the surface of the peoples, wavering and submissive to the wind; it lends but fleeting conscience and conviction to the majority; it cries "Down with the reformers!" It cries "Sacrilege!" because it is made to see in its vague thoughts what it could not itself see there. It cries that they are distorting it, whereas they are enlarging it.

I am not afraid, as many are, and as I once was myself, of being reviled and slandered. I do not cling to respect and gratitude for myself. But if I succeed in reaching men, I should like them not to curse me. Why should they, since it is not for myself? It is only because I am sure I am right. I am sure of the principles I see at the source of all—justice, logic, equality; all those divinely human truths whose contrast with the realized truth of to-day is so heart-breaking. And I want to appeal to you all; and that confidence which fills me with a tragic joy, I want to give it to you, at once as a command and as a prayer. There are not several ways of attaining it athwart everything, and of fastening life and the truth together again; there is only one—right-doing. Let rule begin again with the sublime control of the intellect. I am a man like the rest, a man like you. You who shake your head or shrug your shoulders as you listen to me—why are we, we two, we all, so foreign to each other, when we are not foreign?

I believe, in spite of all, in truth's victory. I believe in the momentous value, hereafter inviolable, of those few truly fraternal men in all the countries of the world, who, in the oscillation of national egoisms let loose, stand up and stand out, steadfast as the glorious statues of Right and Duty. To-night I believe—nay, I am certain—that the new order will be built upon that archipelago of men. Even if we have still to suffer as far as we can see ahead, the idea can no more cease to throb and grow stronger than the human heart can; and the will which is already rising here and there they can no longer destroy.

I proclaim the inevitable advent of the universal republic. Not the transient backslidings, nor the darkness and the dread, nor the tragic difficulty of uplifting the world everywhere at once will prevent the fulfillment of international truth. But if the great powers of darkness persist in holding their positions, if they whose clear cries of warning should be voices crying in the wilderness—O you people of the world, you the unwearying vanquished of History, I appeal to your justice and I appeal to your anger. Over the vague quarrels which drench the strands with blood, over the plunderers of shipwrecks, over the jetsam and the reefs, and the palaces and monuments built upon the sand, I see the high tide coming. Truth is only revolutionary by reason of error's disorder. Revolution is Order.

* * * * * *



CHAPTER XXIII

FACE TO FACE

Through the panes I see the town—I often take refuge at the windows. Then I go into Marie's bedroom, which gives a view of the country. It is such a narrow room that to get to the window I must touch her tidy little bed, and I think of her as I pass it. A bed is something which never seems either so cold or so lifeless as other things; it lives by an absence.

Marie is working in the house, downstairs. I hear sounds of moved furniture, of a broom, and the recurring knock of the shovel on the bucket into which she empties the dust she has collected. That society is badly arranged which forces nearly all women to be servants. Marie, who is as good as I am, will have spent her life in cleaning, in stooping amid dust and hot fumes, over head and ears in the great artificial darkness of the house. I used to find it all natural. Now I think it is all anti-natural.

I hear no more sounds. Marie has finished. She comes up beside me. We have sought each other and come together as often as possible since the day when we saw so clearly that we no longer loved each other!

We sit closely side by side, and watch the end of the day. We can see the last houses of the town, in the beginning of the valley, low houses within enclosures, and yards, and gardens stocked with sheds. Autumn is making the gardens quite transparent, and reducing them to nothing through their trees and hedges; yet here and there foliage still magnificently flourishes. It is not the wide landscape in its entirety which attracts me. It is more worth while to pick out each of the houses and look at it closely.

These houses, which form the finish of the suburb, are not big, and are not prosperous; but we see one adorning itself with smoke, and we think of the dead wood coming to life again on the hearth, and of the seated workman, whose hands are rewarded with rest. And that one, although motionless, is alive with children—the breeze is scattering the laughter of their games and seems to play with it, and on the sandy ground are the crumbs of childish footsteps. Our eyes follow the postman entering his home, his work ended; he has heroically overcome his long journeyings. After carrying letters all day to those who were waiting for them, he is carrying himself to his own people, who also await him—it is the family which knows the value of the father. He pushes the gate open, he enters the garden path, his hands are at last empty!

Along by the old gray wall, old Eudo is making his way, the incurable widower whose bad news still stubbornly persists, so that he bears it along around him, and it slackens his steps, and can be seen, and he takes up more space than he seems to take. A woman meets him, and her youth is disclosed in the twilight; it expands in her hurrying steps. It is Mina, going to some trysting-place. She crosses and presses her little fichu on her heart; we can see that distance dwindles affectionately in front of her. As she passes away, bent forward and smiling with her ripe lips, we can see the strength of her heart.

Mist is gradually falling. Now we can only see white things clearly—the new parts of houses, the walls, the high road, joined to the other one by footpaths which straggle through the dark fields, the big white stones, tranquil as sheep, and the horse-pond, whose gleam amid the far obscurity imitates whiteness in unexpected fashion. Then we can only see light things—the stains of faces and hands, those faces which see each other in the gloom longer than is logical and exceed themselves.

Pervaded by a sort of serious musing, we turn back into the room and sit down, I on the edge of the bed, she on a chair in front of the open window, in the center of the pearly sky.

Her thoughts are the same as mine, for she turns her face to me and says:

"And ourselves."

* * * * * *

She sighs for the thought she has. She would like to be silent, but she must speak.

"We don't love each other any more," she says, embarrassed by the greatness of the things she utters; "but we did once, and I want to see our love again."

She gets up, opens the wardrobe, and sits down again in the same place with a box in her hands. She says:

"There it is. Those are our letters."

"Our letters, our beautiful letters!" she goes on. "I could really say they're more beautiful than all others. We know them by heart—but would you like us to read them again? You read them—there's still light enough—and let me see how happy we've been."

She hands the casket to me. The letters we wrote each other during our engagement are arranged in it.

"That one," she says, "is the first from you. Is it? Yes—no, it isn't; do you think it is?"

I take the letter, murmur it, and then read it aloud. It spoke of the future, and said, "In a little while, how happy we shall be!"

She comes near, lowers her head, reads the date and whispers:

"Nineteen-two; it's been dead for thirteen years—it's a long time. No, it isn't a long time—I don't know what it ought to be. Here's another—read it."

I go on denuding the letters. We quickly find out what a mistake it was to say we know them by heart. This one has no date—simply the name of a day—Monday, and we believed that would be enough! Now, it is entirely lost and become barren, this anonymous letter in the middle of the rest.

"We don't know them by heart any more," Marie confesses. "Remember ourselves? How could we remember all that?"

* * * * * *

This reading was like that of a book once already read in bygone days. It could not revive again the diligent and fervent hours when our pens were moving—and our lips, too, a little. Indistinctly it brought back, with unfathomable gaps, the adventure lived in three days by others, the people that we were. When I read a letter from her which spoke of caresses to come, Marie stammered, "And she dared to write that!" but she did not blush and was not confused.

Then she shook her head a little, and said dolefully:

"What a lot of things we have hidden away, little by little, in spite of ourselves! How strong people must be to forget so much!"

She was beginning to catch a glimpse of a bottomless abyss, and to despair. Suddenly she broke in:

"That's enough! We can't read them again. We can't understand what's written. That's enough—don't take my illusion away."

She spoke like the poor madwoman of the streets, and added in a whisper:

"This morning, when I opened that box where the letters were shut up, some little flies flew out."

We stop reading the letters a moment, and look at them. The ashes of life! All that we can remember is almost nothing. Memory is greater than we are, but memory is living and mortal as well. These letters, these unintelligible flowers, these bits of lace and of paper, what are they? Around these flimsy things what is there left? We are handling the casket together. Thus we are completely attached in the hollow of our hands.

* * * * * *

And yet we went on reading.

But something strange is growing gradually greater; it grasps us, it surprises us hopelessly—every letter speaks of the future.

In vain Marie said to me:

"What about afterwards? Try another—later on."

Every letter said, "In a little while, how we shall love each other when our time is spent together! How beautiful you will be when you are always there. Later on we'll make that trip again; after a while we'll carry that scheme out, later on . . ."

"That's all we could say!"

A little before the wedding we wrote that we were wasting our time so far from each other, and that we were unhappy.

"Ah!" said Marie, in a sort of terror, "we wrote that! And afterwards . . ."

After, the letter from which we expected all, said:

"Soon we shan't leave each other any more. At last we shall live!" And it spoke of a paradise, of the life that was coming. . . .

"And afterwards?"

"After that, there's nothing more . . . it's the last letter."

* * * * * *

There is nothing more. It is like a stage-trick, suddenly revealing the truth. There is nothing between the paradise dreamed of and the paradise lost. There is nothing, since we always want what we have not got. We hope, and then we regret. We hope for the future, and then we turn to the past, and then we begin slowly and desperately to hope for the past! The two most violent and abiding feelings, hope and regret, both lean upon nothing. To ask, to ask, to have not! Humanity is exactly the same thing as poverty. Happiness has not the time to live; we have not really the time to profit by what we are. Happiness, that thing which never is—and which yet, for one day, is no longer!

I see her drawing breath, quivering, mortally wounded, sinking upon the chair.

I take her hand, as I did before. I speak to her, rather timidly and at random: "Carnal love isn't the whole of love."

"It's love!" Marie answers.

I do not reply.

"Ah!" she says, "we try to juggle with words, but we can't conceal the truth."

"The truth! I'm going to tell you what I have been truly, I. . . ."

* * * * * *

I could not prevent myself from saying it, from crying it in a loud and trembling voice, leaning over her. For some moments there had been outlined within me the tragic shape of the cry which at last came forth. It was a sort of madness of sincerity and simplicity which seized me.

And I, unveiling my life to her, though it slid away by the side of hers, all my life, with its failings and its coarseness. I let her see me in my desires, in my hungers, in my entrails.

Never has a confession so complete been thrown off. Yes, among the fates which men and women bear together, one must be almost mad not to lie. I tick off my past, the succession of love-affairs multiplied by each other, and come to naught. I have been an ordinary man, no better, no worse, than another; well, here I am, here is the man, here is the lover.

I can see that she has half-risen, in the little bedroom which has lost its color. She is afraid of the truth! She watches my words as you look at a blasphemer. But the truth has seized me and cannot let me go. And I recall what was—both this woman and that, and all those whom I loved and never deigned to know what they brought me when they brought their bodies; I recall the fierce selfishness which nothing exhausted, and all the savagery of my life beside her. I say it all—unable even to avoid the blows of brutal details—like a harsh duty accomplished to the end.

Sometimes she murmured, like a sigh, "I knew it." At others, she would say, almost like a sob, "That's true!" And once, too, she began a confused protest, a sort of reproach. Then, soon, she listens nigher. She might almost be left behind by the greatness of my confession; and, gradually, I see her falling into silence, the twice-illumined woman on that adorable side of the room, she still receives on her hair and neck and hands, some morsels of heaven.

And what I am most ashamed of in those bygone days when I was mad after the treasure of unknown women is this: that I spoke to them of eternal fidelity, of superhuman enticements, of divine exaltation, of sacred affinities which must be joined together at all costs, of beings who have always been waiting for each other, and are made for each other, and all that one can say—sometimes almost sincerely, alas!—just to gain my ends. I confess all that, I cast it from me as if I was at last ridding myself of the lies acted upon her, and upon the others, and upon myself. Instinct is instinct; let it rule like a force of nature. But the Lie is a ravisher.

I feel a sort of curse rising from me upon that blind religion with which we clothe the things of the flesh because they are strong, those of which I was the plaything, like everybody, always and everywhere. No, two sensuous lovers are not two friends. Much rather are they two enemies, closely attached to each other. I know it, I know it! There are perfect couples, no doubt—perfection always exists somewhere—but I mean us others, all of us, the ordinary people! I know!—the human being's real quality, the delicate lights and shadows of human dreams, the sweet and complicated mystery of personalities, sensuous lovers deride them, both of them! They are two egoists, falling fiercely on each other. Together they sacrifice themselves, utterly in a flash of pleasure. There are moments when one would lay hold forcibly on joy, if only a crime stood in the way. I know it; I know it through all those for whom I have successively hungered, and whom I have scorned with shut eyes—even those who were not better than I.

And this hunger for novelty—which makes sensuous love equally changeful and rapacious, which makes us seek the same emotion in other bodies which we cast off as fast as they fall—turns life into an infernal succession of disenchantments, spites and scorn; and it is chiefly that hunger for novelty which leaves us a prey to unrealizable hope and irrevocable regret. Those lovers who persist in remaining together execute themselves; the name of their common death, which at first was Absence, becomes Presence. The real outcast is not he who returns all alone, like Olympio; they who remain together are more apart.

By what right does carnal love say, "I am your hearts and minds as well, and we are indissoluble, and I sweep all along with my strokes of glory and defeat; I am Love!"? It is not true, it is not true. Only by violence does it seize the whole of thought; and the poets and lovers, equally ignorant and dazzled, dress it up in a grandeur and profundity which it has not. The heart is strong and beautiful, but it is mad and it is a liar. Moist lips in transfigured faces murmur, "It's grand to be mad!" No, you do not elevate aberration into an ideal, and illusion is always a stain, whatever the name you lend it.

By the curtain in the angle of the wall, upright and motionless I am speaking in a low voice, but it seems to me that I am shouting and struggling.

When I have spoken thus, we are no longer the same, for there are no more lies.

After a silence, Marie lifts to me the face of a shipwrecked woman with lifeless eyes, and asks me:

"But if this love is an illusion, what is there left?"

I come near and look at her, to answer her. Against the window's still pallid sky I see her hair, silvered with a moonlike sheen, and her night-veiled face. Closely I look at the share of sublimity which she bears on it, and I reflect that I am infinitely attached to this woman, that it is not true to say she is of less moment to me because desire no longer throws me on her as it used to do. Is it habit? No, not only that. Everywhere habit exerts its gentle strength, perhaps between us two also. But there is more. There is not only the narrowness of rooms to bring us together. There is more, there is more! So I say to her:

"There's you."

"Me?" she says. "I'm nothing."

"Yes, you are everything, you're everything to me."

She has stood up, stammering. She puts her arms around my neck, but falls fainting, clinging to me, and I carry her like a child to the old armchair at the end of the room.

All my strength has come back to me. I am no longer wounded or ill. I carry her in my arms. It is difficult work to carry in your arms a being equal to yourself. Strong as you may be, you hardly suffice for it. And what I say as I look at her and see her, I say because I am strong and not because I am weak:

"You're everything for me because you are you, and I love all of you."

And we think together, as if she were listening to me:

You are a living creature, you are a human being, you are the infinity that man is, and all that you are unites me to you. Your suffering of just now, your regret for the ruins of youth and the ghosts of caresses, all of it unites me to you, for I feel them, I share them. Such as you are and such as I am. I can say to you at last, "I love you."

I love you, you who now appearing truly to me, you who truly duplicate my life. We have nothing to turn aside from us to be together. All your thoughts, all your likes, your ideas and your preferences have a place which I feel within me, and I see that they are right even if my own are not like them (for each one's freedom is part of his value), and I have a feeling that I am telling you a lie whenever I do not speak to you.

I am only going on with my thought when I say aloud:

"I would give my life for you, and I forgive you beforehand for everything you might ever do to make yourself happy."

She presses me softly in her arms, and I feel her murmuring tears and crooning words; they are like my own.

It seems to me that truth has taken its place again in our little room, and become incarnate; that the greatest bond which can bind two beings together is being confessed, the great bond we did not know of, though it is the whole of salvation:

"Before, I loved you for my own sake; to-day, I love you for yours."

When you look straight on, you end by seeing the immense event—death. There is only one thing which really gives the meaning of our whole life, and that is our death. In that terrible light may they judge their hearts who will one day die. Well I know that Marie's death would be the same thing in my heart as my own, and it seems to me also that only within her of all the world does my own likeness wholly live. We are not afraid of the too great sincerity which goes the length of these things; and we talk about them, beside the bed which awaits the inevitable hour when we shall not awake in it again. We say:—

"There'll be a day when I shall begin something that I shan't finish—a walk, or a letter, or a sentence, or a dream."

I stoop over her blue eyes. Just then I recalled the black, open window in front of me—far away—that night when I nearly died. I look at length into those clear eyes, and see that I am sinking into the only grave I shall have had. It is neither an illusion nor an act of charity to admire the almost incredible beauty of those eyes.

What is there within us to-night? What is this sound of wings? Are our eyes opening as fast as night falls? Formerly, we had the sensual lovers' animal dread of nothingness; but to-day, the simplest and richest proof of our love is that the supreme meaning of death to us is—leaving each other.

And the bond of the flesh—neither are we afraid to think and speak of that, saying that we were so joined together that we knew each other completely, that our bodies have searched each other. This memory, this brand in the flesh, has its profound value; and the preference which reciprocally graces two beings like ourselves is made of all that they have and all that they had.

I stand up in front of Marie—already almost a convert—and I tremble and totter, so much is my heart my master:—

"Truth is more beautiful than dreams, you see."

It is simply the truth which has come to our aid. It is truth which has given us life. Affection is the greatest of human feelings because it is made of respect, of lucidity, and light. To understand the truth and make one's self equal to it is everything; and to love is the same thing as to know and to understand. Affection, which I call also compassion, because I see no difference between them, dominates everything by reason of its clear sight. It is a sentiment as immense as if it were mad, and yet it is wise, and of human things it is the only perfect one. There is no great sentiment which is not completely held on the arms of compassion.

To understand life, and love it to its depths in a living being, that is the being's task, and that his masterpiece; and each of us can hardly occupy his time so greatly as with one other; we have only one true neighbor down here.

To live is to be happy to live. The usefulness of life—ah! its expansion has not the mystic shapes we vainly dreamed of when we were paralyzed by youth. Rather has it a shape of anxiety, of shuddering, of pain and glory. Our heart is not made for the abstract formula of happiness, since the truth of things is not made for it either. It beats for emotion and not for peace. Such is the gravity of the truth.

"You've done well to say all that! Yes, it is always easy to lie for a moment. You might have lied, but it would have been worse when we woke up from the lies. It's a reward to talk. Perhaps it's the only reward there is."

She said that profoundly, right to the bottom of my heart. Now she is helping me, and together we make the great searchings of those who are too much in the right. Marie's assent is so complete that it is unexpected and tragic.

"I was like a statue, because of the forgetting and the grief. You have given me life, you have changed me into a woman."

"I was turning towards the church," she goes on; "you hardly believe in God so much when you've no need of Him. When you're without anything, you can easily believe in Him. But now, I don't want any longer."

Thus speaks Marie. Only the idolatrous and the weak have need of illusion as of a remedy. The rest only need see and speak.

She smiles, vague as an angel, hovering in the purity of the evening between light and darkness. I am so near to her that I must kneel to be nearer still. I kiss her wet face and soft lips, holding her hand in both of mine.

Yes, there is a Divinity, one from which we must never turn aside for the guidance of our huge inward life and of the share we have as well in the life of all men. It is called the truth.

THE END