XXVIIIWE TALK ABOUT POLITICS
HAVING reached my eleventh year, I was quite convinced that I had become a young lady. Many persons thought me older than I really was on account of my height and my serious demeanour. My ideas at this time were very pronounced, but not always matured; my imagination ran wild; I was as simple as a child and I reasoned like a young woman. Nearly all of those who heretofore had treated me like a child, now called me “Mademoiselle,” and grandmother, desirous to justify the name, lengthened my skirts considerably, and I wore them almost quite long.
I stayed with grandmother nearly a week between my return from Chivres and my sojourn with my father, and my head was full of the literature of the day, and I now had my own opinions on Mme. de Staël, Mme. George Sand, Victor Hugo, de Balzac, and Eugène Suë. I had a book full of interrogative notes for my father, who had talked to me only of the ancient or “democratic and social authors,” as he called them. While I was at Chauny I put all these notes in order, and theywere interesting from the fact that the greater part of them had been gathered from my aunts’ conversation.
I wondered whether my father would consent to discuss the literature of the day with me. My knowledge would assuredly surprise him, but did he even know the authors about whom I wished to talk with him? But as aunt Sophie, in spite of her love for Virgil and the Latin writers, was still much interested in the celebrities of the day, I thought that my father, too, might perhaps unite a taste for literature with his love of politics.
As soon as I arrived at Blérancourt I bombarded him with questions. What did he think of Mme. de Staël, of Mme. George Sand, of Victor Hugo, of de Lamartine, of de Balzac? My mother thought it scandalous that I should be allowed to read and criticise authors of whom she knew scarcely anything. Really, our family was quite crazy; even my aunts, whom she had always heard spoken of as sensible women, were more old-fashioned than modernised. My mother used to say that if she had brought me up she would have made a simple housewife of me, educated to live in her circle and to think like other people, and not a pedantic, unbearable child, already thrown out of her sphere by the training of her mind, and with her intelligenceoverheated at an age when it should have been set on calm foundations.
My father quite looked down on the literature of his own day. He answered my questions with commonplaces. Lamartine alone excited him, in the way of blame, not in his character of poet, but as a historian, and he declared thatLes Girondinswas the work of a “malefactor.” His admiration of Eugène Suë was so exaggerated that it would have made aunt Sophie repeat one of her favourite sayings: “There are some opinions which are crimes.”
“Eugène Suë,” said my father, “is a genius; he will deliver France from all the Rodins; a new epoch will begin from his influence, an epoch when our country will at last be delivered from the church; Eugène Suë has moulded the soft clay of which the people are still made; some other man will obtain hard marble from this same people on which to sculpture his ideas. Events in our day move rapidly forward. The great renovators have prepared all which they intend to renovate, definite freedom.” He added solemnly: “We are at last at liberty to speak of things of which you are as yet ignorant, and which I can now disclose to you. No one now can hinder me from forming your understanding on the same patternas my own. You have been instructed concerning the religion of your grandmother and your mother; I can now talk to you of mine without hindrance; teach you and show you from whence comes light to the minds and hearts of men. It comes from nature; it is real because we can see it; it is ideal from the vast expanse it illuminates.”
The next day my father began to teach me what he called my new catechism, and gave me in dictation the principal articles. Here are a few of the pages which I have kept:
“The worship of nature, which we have received from the Greeks, the only people who ever penetrated the depths of its mystery—a worship transmitted to us through uninterrupted centuries, which Jean Jacques Rousseau has taught us in his admirable language to understand, and of which Bernardin de Saint-Pierre has given us the sentimentality—is the only true worship.
“Nature, Science, Humanity, are the three terms of initiation. First comes nature, which rules everything; then the revelations of nature, revelations which mean science—that is to say, phenomena made clear in themselves and observed by man; and lastly, the appropriation of phenomena for useful social purposes.
“The times are moving fast, the dawn is becominglight. Nature reveals herself more and more to us; the future is bright. A general spirit of fraternity prevails. Nature, which Christianity calls our enemy, gives herself wholly to man to aid him in his efforts to traverse the world by steam, to question the stars, and to discover intact the vestiges of by-gone times, which she has preserved for him.
“If Christianity has endeavoured to break the bonds between man and nature, Jesus, the immortal Christ, has drawn men together. He said to them: ‘You are brethren; there is no caste, no race, no religion, no history, no art, no morals, that are not the universal patrimony of humanity.’
“It seems to me,” said my father, “when I think of the beauty of things, of the harmony one can discover, where blinded persons see only antagonism, that my enjoyment of life is increased five-fold. One single epoch can alone be compared to our time,—that of the birth of Christianity. Christ, who brought with Him the republican formulas of equality and fraternity, preached the ‘good word’ to the people as we preach it. Soon we too shall become apostles. Jesus freed what He called souls; we shall free the social person by adding liberty to equality and fraternity.
“A Ledru-Rollin, a Louis Blanc, are the continuators of Christianity. The poor man who has won his rights by the great revolution, must be the one to impose duty on the higher classes; the worker must have a right to his work, and the rich man must be bound to furnish him with work.
“The right to work is the most absolute of all rights, but by no means the only one. The most miserable creature, because he is a man, has a right to education and to his share of government. There is no error in nature, no perversity in man; evil comes only from society, which piles up errors and wicked sophisms. The renovating forces of the future will therefore attack society and the middle class, which governs society for its own exclusive benefit. Juliette! Juliette! I intend to make you an ardent advocate for the general good and happiness of humanity. I cannot tell why, but I fancy that your heart, like my own, will be able to desire passionately the elevation of the masses; for even now you speak to a workman, to a peasant, or to a poor man, as if he were your equal.
“I, you see, love the humble, those who are on the lower steps of life, more than I do myself; the sight of those who suffer, those who struggle, and are overcome by everything, simply tortures myheart. We must give all of ourselves to those who have nothing. If many people felt in this way, there would be far fewer ills to comfort and less misery to be helped. The poor have only the vice of their poverty, the inferiority of their social standing.
“A rich and superior man who has defects is culpable, and those who are vicious are monsters; whereas the destitute who are faulty and vicious, have every excuse and every right to be absolved.
“Real piety consists in giving one’s indulgences, one’s help, and one’s love to the wretched, not in limited charity, circumscribed to material relief, but with a broad humanity.”
My heart melted at these words, and, as my father’s acts were always in accordance with what he said, he moved every fibre of sensibility I possessed.
“A republic alone can give to men the greatest of all precious things: the liberty of their rights and their duties,” said my father, “allowing them the free expansion of their faculties for human benefaction. It alone can distribute instruction unreservedly and impose education by example.
“Socialist-republican principles endow every man, every citizen, with a dogma of pride which assures his moral value. If a man be a socialist-republican,he finds within himself the exact level of his scope of faculties, which in no wise oppress the scope of other person’s faculties.”
And then came endless preaching. My father’s conviction, sincere faith, and absolute certainty of the truth of his ideas, gave him such persuasive eloquence that no child of eleven could resist, especially one whom he treated as a beloved disciple.
One evening my father solemnly gave me a small guide entitled, “Twenty-one short precepts on the duties of a sincere Socialist-republican,” which Saint Paul would not have disavowed. He had composed it for me and for his peasant and workingmen proselytes.