XXIXTALKS ABOUT NATURE
I WAS very fond of play, but, as I took my rôle of socialist-republican disciple so much in earnest, I seized every opportunity, like my father, of preaching its doctrines.
In the evenings, after dinner, which we took rather early, the children of the neighbourhood used to gather under the lime trees, in the large square, which was situated near our house. Our elders sat and chatted with one another, while the boys and girls, myself at the head, played at revolution. The sons and daughters of the parents whom my father had “converted” were all on my side, while the lukewarm, or ignorant, usually received chastisement, or finally came over to our party.
While my father crammed my mind with politics, he did not forget to foster my passion for nature, the smallest manifestations of which he deified. He delighted in proving to me that it was useless for man to seek beyond nature for unattainable chimeras, for the infinite which ourfinite conception was unable to understand, and for the immaterial, which our materiality can never satisfactorily explain. He laid particular stress on this point; he unveiled to me all the great and small laws of life and movement, both those which rule the motion of the universe so splendidly, and those which govern the world of ants, whose ways and manners he had already taught me. But the great demonstrations furnished by ants, however much they impressed my mind, always made me laugh, for this reason: An old neighbour of ours, Madame Viet, seemed to have but one occupation in life, that of destroying ants, and but one subject of conversation, the “frumions” (as she called them, inpatois) which she had scalded during the day, and whose dead bodies she kept, whenever she could, to count them at night, either in imagination or in reality. As soon as she would appear outside her door, after a very curt “good-morning” to her neighbours, she would start a long conversation about the ants. In all the neighbourhood and at home we all joked about Madame Viet and the quantity of ants she destroyed.
Her granddaughter, whose father was a large farmer in the adjacent country, was one of my schoolmates at Chauny; she spent a few days ofeach week during the holidays with her grandmother, and was the first to laugh about the ants. Whenever I went to see Saint-Just’s sister, Madame Decaisne and the Chevalier, I was always asked for news of our friend and her “frumions.” The more she killed the more they reappeared in greater numbers; it really seemed as if they were brought by some one during the night into her courtyard.
We had some beehives, and I delighted in watching their daily, never-varying work, about which my old Homer had sung thousands of years before. My father, desiring to convince me that men and animals are what we make them by kindness and education, taught me, little by little, how to tame my bees. I used to take them sugar and flowers, and they never stung me.
“It is because you love them,” said my father, “and they know it well.”
I was as fond of my Blérancourt bees as of my Chauny pigeons, and came to know their ways, their work, their tastes, and their organisation. I used to talk to them, and they understood me as well as did my pigeons.
“You see,” said my father, “nature amply suffices for the need of observation, of sociability and love which exists in man. He is, himself, the consciousreflection of the whole life of the universe. If you wish to worship something, worship the sun, the God that gives you life, that surrounds you with heat, that illuminates all things, and, under whose rays, everything grows, everything comes to life and palpitates.”
Under the powerful and incessant pressure of my father’s mind, I gradually came to see everything from his point of view. Anyone mentioning the words “apostleship” or “holiness,” would at once have made me think of my father, whose charity and kindness were without bounds.
I was unwilling to return to Chauny and to the school, now occupying the place of my beloved lost garden. I begged my father to delay my departure from Blérancourt, under pretext of my studying with him. He had begun with me a course of Greek history which he desired to finish. He was perfecting me as a “poetess,” and the verses I sent to grandmother, who was very fond of poetry, were considered much superior to my first attempts, both by Blondeau and my friend Charles. In this way I reached Christmas, and the impress of both republicanism and paganism became more and more developed in my mind. My father’s ideas fell into ground already prepared for them by heredity. And then, who could haveresisted so much warmth of heart, such a passionate love of the beautiful and the good?
Winter set in very severely at the end of October, and we met so many poorly clad people on the roads that my father and I felt ashamed of our warm clothing, and it often happened that we returned home without wraps or shoes. My mother, who was also charitable, but in a sensible way, gave away only warm clothing; and she would abuse my father and scold me for being as foolish as he was.
Liénard had given back to me my large travelling-purse, and begged to be allowed to offer me the little things we had bought together at Boulogne-sur-Mer. This money was of the greatest use to us for our poor, but it was soon exhausted.
My father would have spent millions had he possessed them. He could not be trusted with money, for he gave it instantly away.
My mother, who had carefully saved up the money for the tilbury, sent it to Liénard, knowing well that if she confided it to my father he would without fail give it to the poor, and not replace his worn-out carriage. He was, however, most desirous of having a new one, the old carriage being much too heavy when the wheels were covered with mud, which was the case eight monthsout of the year, on the badly kept roads around Blérancourt at that time.
My mother never allowed my father any loose money; but if his patients’ bills were small at Decaisne’s, the chemist, a nephew of Saint-Just, when the end of each month came, there were painful surprises for my mother’s slender purse, when the butcher, the baker, and grocer had to be paid. Added to this, my father often found that people were too poor to pay for his visits. If he did not grow rich, he at least grew in influence, and his republican proselytes numbered hundreds. Blérancourt was now becoming a centre of violent agitation. The most revolutionary pamphlets were read there; a large fair was held in the town every month, and my father’s ideas reached all the surrounding villages; the propaganda became more and more active. Nothing was talked of but reforms, progress, the lowering of the census, the accession to political life, not only of the educated class, but also of the lower classes.
In my letters to grandmother I told her, of course, as cleverly as I could, of my new opinions, but only of those of republican tendency and touching upon nature. Without discussing them, she answered that she was anxious about me, that, becoming republican first, I would surely become asocialist, and, from being a worshipper of nature, turn pagan and atheist, like my father; that it was the logical outcome of such an education, and that there was no escaping it. She added that my father was disloyal to her in destroying in my mind what she had implanted there.