XXXVIANOTHER VISIT AT CHIVRES
I THEN had a long vacation, which began the 1st of July and did not finish until the 1st of October.
I remained three months with my aunts at Chivres, to their great delight.
I took intense pleasure in the study of Latin, and made real progress in the reading and translating of the “bucolics.”
My aunts, however, sermonised me severely on the reason for my having been sent away from school. TheNationalhad inspired them with a holy horror of the plunderers, of those who had been “bought up by the foreigner,” and the twelve thousand men who had been killed in the June riots. The twenty thousand prisoners and exiles did not soften their hearts for a moment. My harangues interested them as ill-sustained paradoxes, but did not convince them in any way.
The citizen Louis Blanc, with his project of a conciliatory proclamation; the citizen Caussidière, with his extraordinary motion to have the Deputies go into the streets, to send them to the barricades and to the insurgents with a flag of truce, had exasperated them. They were merciless. Thestories of the cruelties of the National Guards in the provinces, and of the Mobile Guard firing on the insurgent prisoners through the vent-holes of cellars, did not revolt them. It was necessary to kill as many as possible of those “mad dogs,” they said. And it was gentle Frenchwomen, faithful Liberals—or believing themselves such—who spoke thus! Marguerite knew nothing of the truth concerning it. To her the insurgents were savages, devils, etc.; and I could not make any feeling of clemency, any pity, enter into the minds or hearts of Marguerite or my aunts. They had all been too frightened.
While my father was alarmed, and cried out against the abomination of seeing men who for long years had defended liberty, who had called themselves its soldiers, condemn and persecute the people to whom they had made public and solemn promises to act for their good, and who had only asked them to keep those promises within the measure of possibility, my aunts spoke of Pascal Duprat, a Democratic-Republican, as a sublime man, who, while pretending to wish to save the Republic, had been the first man to demand a Dictatorship.
The death of General Bréa, killed by two acknowledged Bonapartists, Luc and Lhar; that of Archbishop Affre, due to an accident and not toan assassination, were, to my aunts, premeditated crimes, whose expiation demanded the death of thousands of men belonging to “the most ignoble and abject populace.”
My aunt Constance still trembled as she told me of her emotion when she had read the words of the President of the Chambers, mounting the tribune to say: “All is finished!”
It would have been folly to endeavour to convert my aunts to a more enlightened feeling of humanity. I gave up trying to do it. I read theNationalin secret, Marguerite giving it to me after my aunts and great-grandmother had read it in turn, and I suffered every day with renewed sorrow at the violence of the reaction, the sentences of the Council of War, at the persecutions, the denunciations, the state of the public mind, which my father wrote to me had become so Cæsarian that it would throw us into the arms of Napoleon, who had been too delicately brought up by England to subdue us.
The night session, when the prosecution of Louis Blanc and Caussidière was voted, delighted my aunts. They would not even read Louis Blanc’s justification, much changed though it was in theNational, for I compared it later with the text of theDemocratie Pacifique, which my father sent tome. In my aunts’ opinion, and in that of all the middle class, Louis Blanc was “the founder, the responsible author of the monstrous national workshops.”
Now, Louis Blanc proved in court, what his partisans had known for a long time, that the national workshops had been established not only without his participation, but against his will, and that he had not visited them even once.
The obstinacy of holding to a preconceived opinion against absolute proof, admitting no discussion, seemed to me at that time the most extraordinary thing in the world. I endeavoured several times to read Louis Blanc’s protestation to my aunts; they would not listen to it, not wishing to hear it, or to be convinced by it, and they continued to call him the “sinister man of the national workshops.”
I confess that this obstinacy irritated me, and that my affection for my dear aunts suffered from it.
Louis Napoleon was elected in five departments at the supplementary elections. The terms he used in thanking his electors, for different reasons, provoked both my father and my grandmother, and my aunts as well, whose disgust for “Badinguet” increased daily.
“The Democratic-Republic shall be my religion,” said Louis Napoleon, “and I will be its priest.”
My grandfather would certainly have made a wry face at this speech, had he not always had the habit of saying, concerning all the manifestations of him whom he called his “beloved Pretender”:
“He is admirable, in the way he scoffs at the republican birds.”
They talked of nothing but “Badinguet” at my aunts’ all through September and October—of his oath of gratitude and devotion to the National Assembly, of the repeal of the law of 1832, which gave the Bonapartes liberty to live in France. I heard my aunts continually discussing the good faith of pretenders.
“Certain republicans are absurdly simple when they believe that an oath cannot be violated,” said aunt Sophie. “One must know one’s Roman history very little not to see that ‘Badinguet’ is playing the eternal game of the Cæsars.”
“When once they have voted to have a President of the Republic, and have chosen ‘a man of the Brumaire,’ when men of moderate opinions uphold this proceeding, what can possibly enlighten them? How can de Lamartine uphold such aberration of mind with his authority? Unless he deceiveshimself to the extent of thinking he will be named President of the Republic, his conduct is inexplicable,” said aunt Constance.
Politics still interested me a little in conversation, but when I did not talk of them, I thought no more about them.
“Men are worth nothing, nothing at all,” said aunt Anastasie one day; “I do not know a single man who has a just mind.”
“You know so many!” replied aunt Constance, with her habitual scoffing. “I never knew you to have but three masculine friends: the miller, his mill-keeper, and Roussot!”
I worked happily with aunt Sophie, who found me very desirous to learn Latin, and less occupied with explaining or contradicting everything. I no longer sought for eccentricities in ideas or opinions. I studied methodically, realising how much time I had lost.
I felt for the first time in my life, perhaps, that I had only a very youthful mind; that I had for a long while really learned but little, but, like a parrot, had remembered a good deal. I condemned myself as pretentious, insupportable, and I resolved that I would begin to be quite a different person, desirous solely to learn, and to be very studious and proper.