La lumière
Jérôme et Jean Tharaud
Jérôme and Jean Tharaud
To our Master Villiers de l’Isle-Adam
Light: He who loses his eyes loses the beauty of the Universe and remains like a man who would be enclosed alive in a sepulchre where there would be movement and life.
— Leonardo da Vinci
Reims had Zachée sit down while they filled his satchel. The old man inquired about Clément:
— He is not here?
Reims expressed his worry to him:
— Zachée, this child is becoming a pagan. Majorel has inspired in him the pride of his reason: he no longer believes in miracles! God had made him blind, he had closed upon him the doors of nature — Majorel has pushed them open and he has shown Clément all the delights of life.
— As Satan on the mountain showed Jesus the kingdoms of the Earth.
— We were asking him to await the realization of a Promise.
— And what a Promise!
— He wanted to enjoy at once. He let himself be tempted by sounds, by touches — by scents.
— For nineteen centuries his ancestors have lived in the faith — he has revolted against the will of Christ.
— Perhaps one day he will abandon our friendship, as he has abandoned our beliefs.
Zachée left when his satchel was full, irritated that all beings did not have in their memory the same vision as he: Jesus on a donkey in the streets of Jerusalem.
Reims heard his clarinet in the distance.
It had snowed. The ebbing sea left between itself and the dune a wet margin of hard sand. Majorel and Clément followed this road.
— Master, what is the night like?
— It is serene like your eyes. Clouds pass over the moon so light that they melt into its brightness. The sky is deep and the stars seem distant, distant like the magi of the East.
— And the horizon, before us?
— A forest.
— To our right, that is the sea?
— The sea — at the place where it merges with the sky, a luminous trace.
— Enough, master, enough: I cannot understand you. Your words irritate my sorrow. I am blind — blind — blind. — Can I find my joy in the contemplation of nature?
— I shall have words as brilliant as the plumage of birds of the islands, as drowsy as autumn skies, as undulating as lines. I shall find for all spectacles evocative phrases. If you listen to me, you will multiply your life. Your senses will become more subtle — you will be an indefatigable walker — a prestigious musician. You will distinguish in a haystack the mingled scent of clovers and alfalfas. You will understand landscapes without seeing them. When Perseus set out to conquer Andromeda, he found three old women on his path. They alone knew the road that led to the captive. They refused the hero the single eye they possessed and which they hid at night in the hollow of a rock. But Perseus found the eye and stole it. He did not return it to them except in exchange for their secret. The Graeae made him promise that on his return he would come back to their country and that he would submit to a trial. Perseus returned with Andromeda. The old women asked for his eyes. The blind hero continued to roam Greece, drunk with his strength and his joy. — He killed hydras — he fought against giants — he cut off the head of the Gorgon.
— The son of a very powerful and very rich king — and himself of a perfect beauty, perceived one day that the world was hiding God from him. — He put out his own eyes. After a life of misery, when he judged his face sufficiently withered and unrecognizable, he returned to the king his father, who received him like a beggar. A bed was made for him under the staircase and he spent there the end of his life. At the moment of his death his head was haloed and his face recovered the beauty of his youth.
— It is the abbé who told you these stories. — My hero is better than yours — the interior life kills the simple happiness of living. — Clément — Clément — friendship breaks between beings who have neither the same sentiments nor the same thoughts. I fear I shall no longer love you.
— You could not cease to love me.
They walked mute so long that they went around the bay and arrived near La Cale, a little fishing village sheltered by the projection of a granite promontory.
Majorel knocked at the door of Braine, the sailor who looked after his boat. The old man was sleeping. The noise of the door woke him. He recognized Majorel by the moon. When he was outside he took the wind, looked at the sky and declared that it was imprudent to set sail, that heavy weather was brewing, and that, if “Monsieur” wished, they would postpone the outing to another night.
— Braine, you are mad — or you are afraid.
Braine said nothing, jumped into the boat, planted the mast and they departed. The boat cut for racing attacked the waves head on. Its speed was that of a galloping horse. Lifted by the great swells it glided supplely over their backs. Braine held the tiller with one hand, with the other the end of the sheet wound several times around a steel mooring.
Clément was at the bow. The spray streamed over his tarred jacket. Sheltered by the mast and leaning over the nose of the boat, he held his head out to the wind. His breathing was cut short and his eyes wept. His lips were burned by the salt. His ear pressed against the planking perceived the furious voices of the water against the keel. He had the feeling of life risked uselessly for the joy of a fine effort — of the confused immensity of the sea — of the resistance of the joined planks — and above all of the power of the wind, which he did not see, but which the others too, neither Majorel nor Braine could see — which no living being had ever seen, would ever see.
Lying at the bottom of the boat Majorel spoke of the universal life:
— Think of the rivers that have been rolling for centuries without their source being dried up — of the summits of the Himalayas — of the depths of the Kuriles — of the mysterious force of the poles — of the continents disappeared beneath the sea — of the slow procession of the glaciers — of the herds of avalanches rushed at the call of an invisible shepherd.
But the memory of those words — friendship breaks between beings who do not have the same thoughts — abolished Clément’s joy. The sad astonishment he had had in his childhood at sensing Reims and Majorel to be enemies was now explained. He asked himself with sadness:
— If these two beings have become enemies over ideas, whose enemy am I?
They were driven by the bad weather and the currents very far from the coast. When a lull came Braine and Majorel set to rowing. Toward morning they saw cliffs. Reims was waiting at the semaphore.
— You tempt God.
Standing in the boat Majorel held out Clément to him at arm’s length. They came back together. Before knocking at Majorel’s door, the priest embraced the blind man — Clément divined by the trembling of his lips that he was sad to the point of tears.
— So you no longer love me that you hide a worry from me.
— It is because I love you that my heart is in sorrow. I feel dying in you things that I would have wished eternal.
— I do not know what is dying in me, but I keep my whole heart for you.
— Ah! I do not doubt your heart.
Abbé Reims fell silent. He would have liked to speak of his faith. But he hesitated; for he feared not being understood. He finally decided:
— Why do you no longer love anything but beauty? Why have you moved away from God? My faith would seem desirable to you if it had been dead for a thousand years. Would you love the pagan gods if you knew them to be alive somewhere? You think you love life and you love only death. Majorel has seen in the world only music, paintings, statues, landscapes: the living reality of his soul and of neighboring souls has always been unknown to him. He has never had remorse and has never wished to have pity. He is the true, the only blind man. Clément, I beg you, do not be that blind man.
— I cannot believe in the divine promises.
— Christianity is a life. If your thoughts and your acts are Christian your Hope will become Christian.
Clément looked at the abbé with his dead eyes. He was not convinced and he found nothing to reply. The abbé made on the child’s forehead the sign of the cross with his thumb — saying with sadness:
— Lord! Why are my words vain?
One day, Majorel said to Clément:
— Let us leave this town. I want to take you to a country where there remain marvelous vestiges of past beauty.
The abbé opposed this journey.
— This child is not yours — his mother entrusted him to me as to you.
— Clément is blind, but he has ears to hear, legs to walk — a solid chest to breathe the air of the great expanses — an intelligence to think. Life and dream open their double roads before him: they pass through fields flowered by all the passions of men. He will bend down to cut the stems of lilies and pluck the roses of desire.
Reims interrupted him.
— To awaken temptations in a child’s soul is the most unpardonable of sins.
— I do not know what you call sin.
Clément listened sadly to this dispute. Majorel forced his silence.
— You must choose between the abbé’s thoughts and mine.
— You are pitiless and jealous. How could I choose between your two friendships? Can I divide my heart? How could I choose between your thoughts? They form in me a confused harmony. When I isolate them, yours tempt and frighten me — the abbé’s reassure me — they are in accord with my most distant memories.
Majorel imagined that Clément was seeking evasions:
— Go on, do not think to deceive me — I see now to whom your mind and your heart are bound. Stay with the abbé — let him deform your brain as he pleases. I shall disturb him no longer. I would only have wished that you had refused more frankly to follow me.
He went out. Clément heard his steps on the sidewalk.
— But I am not a hypocrite.
Through the open window Majorel heard these words. He replied:
— If you are not, take care not to become one.
Reims:
— Forgive a man whom passion carries away. I was afraid you would abandon me. I believed you very far from me.
— And it is true: I am very far from you.
— In my house you will become Christian again.
— I am going to follow him.
— Then, why did you let him leave?
— You are strong upon my heart. He is strong upon my heart and upon my mind.
— You had pity on me for a minute, and now…
— A vain pity. Goodbye.
Majorel:
— I was waiting for you.
Clément kept his head at the carriage window all day. The fine droplets of a tenacious rain burned his face. He recognized the rivers by the stridency of iron bridges, by the grave flowing of locks, the cuttings by the tearing of the air, the tunnels by the muffled din, by the gusts of damp smoke, the plains by the regularity of the wind. The fall of evening was glorified by a harmony of running waters.
— Where are we?
— In the mountains. The train follows the bottom of a narrow valley. Do you hear the torrent below us? On the other bank, factories follow one another pressed against each other.
— Stopped no doubt? One cannot hear the noise of machines?
— In full operation. The modern industry of men does not trouble the silence of the mountains.
The cold became very sharp. They no longer perceived scattered streamings.
— The mountain rises more than a thousand meters into the night. The snow that covers it is still hard. And that is why the waters have fallen silent.
THE MAGICIAN
Clément, overwhelmed by the fatigue of the journey, was still sleeping. Majorel woke him by opening the windows of his room. The sound of the Mediterranean waves entered joyfully.
— Listen to the sea beating the coast. The sea of Circe, the sea of the Sirens, the sea of Glaucus, the most legendary of all seas — the sea of Dido, the sea of Alcibiades, the sea of Hamilcar, the sea of Adventures, the sea of Tyre, the sea of Athens, the sea of the Baals and of Astarte, the sea of Minerva, of Apollo and of Venus, the most religious of seas. On its cerulean waters once departed barks laminated with gold with sails of purple and crews of Gods. One after another they vanished and no one knows in what mysterious Thules the divine sailors made landfall. Alone, one bark is still visible, the one that weighed anchor last. Virgins and children sing at the prow. Knights keep watch over a chalice, sword and lance in hand. How much longer will the people of this land see fleeing on the horizon the black sails of the Christian galley?
Clément was no longer listening to Majorel — he murmured:
— The sea of Ulysses and of Saint Paul!
— We shall go toward those hills that are to the north. The rains that furrow them have sculpted for them singular crests: some have the shape of fingers — others resemble crowns — breasts — towers — crescents. The most distant is like a helmet with a crest of oaks.
They went down onto the beach. Those philosophers of Ionia had a sublime confidence in Reason. — They did not believe in miracles, but in natural forces, and their conceptions of the world were intelligently childish. We know almost nothing of the history of these old Sages: we know only that they went in search of mysterious nature. Thales, dazzled by the expanse of the sea, imagined that water was the principle of things. — Anaximander believed in the evolution of a formless matter. Anaximenes composed beings with the breaths of the air. — Then, far from Ionia, at the other extremity of the Greek Universe, near Taranto, Pythagoras taught his disciples that phenomena were governed by immutable laws.
— Pythagoras! the most singular of these Sages, in truth: did he not believe that Number was the supreme reality of the Universe — 7 was sacred — the octave was the perfect chord.
— The stars, in turning, gave a note. But if no one hears the harmony of the Spheres, it is that their music is continuous.
— It was he who created, under an austere discipline, that college of scholars that an ignorant brutality dispersed.
— Socrates came to turn philosophers from the study of natural phenomena to interest them in miserable cases of conscience. — He was the imbecile initiator of scruple…
They often conversed thus about forgotten men: moved to hear still resounding in their ears the echo of words spoken so long ago.
THE LIGHT
After climbing a whole day, they arrived, in the evening, at the summit of the Apennines, at that point on the road from which one sees Tuscany. The meadows of the Arno were divided by the ribbon of the river. Florence was placed, in the middle, like a seal. Majorel saw Fiesole, lower down San Domenico, the convent of the Angelico, the Villa Alberti where the tellers of tales of Boccaccio took refuge when the plague was ravaging the city. To the right, the ravine of the Mugnone, and Prato. To the East, enveloped by mists, the Verna, from which one sees the two seas. Opposite, the hill of San Miniato, the David of Michelangelo, the walls of the Charterhouse of Ema.
— Master, what are you looking at?
— The road that descends among orange trees, myrtles, pines, arbors, cypresses, plane trees.
— From where we are, can you not see Florence?
— That is impossible.
They followed the crest of the mountains and did not cross the city of museums. Majorel wanted to spare the blind man regrets. Clément blessed the delicacy of his guide. He enjoyed the suppleness of his body, the morning walks, the afternoon siestas, the arrivals at the stopping place when night falls, the good wine they drank in the inns, the sonorous words spoken by the people they passed on the roads. Often he stopped to hear, in the villages, peasant musicians. In the solitude of cloisters he followed with his fingers, on tombstones, many a relief effigy of deceased abbots or else he enveloped with his hands, on some wall of an unknown church, the face of a virgin or a saint; or else he discovered in the grasses of an ancient theater, a column trunk, a fallen cippus, the head of a mutilated goddess, the torso, the arms, the scattered legs of an athlete. This beauty that he understood through caress made him dream of the mysteries, the colors and the lines.
In the chapel of a Camaldolese convent, he wanted to divine the enigma of a fresco by Giotto. On the walls was represented that legend so popular in the Middle Ages: A king, a queen followed by all their court, arrived on horseback at a square where aldermen were having a man hanged. The king and the queen interceded for the wretch. The aldermen answered brutally: — This man deserved to be hanged; he will be hanged unless you redeem his life for a hundred ducats. The king and the queen searched in their purses, they had only seventy-three ducats. The court gave the money it had: three ducats were lacking from the sum demanded by the judges. They said:
— This man will be hanged.
And they were in the process of hoisting him by the armpits when a page cried out:
— Search this man; he may have the money on him.
They searched him; he had just the three ducats in his pocket.
The sun had disappeared behind a band of cypresses: Majorel pushed open the door of the chapel. He saw the blind man who was passing delicately his palms and the tips of his fingers over the wall. Clément felt, behind him, a presence. He remained motionless.
— Master, is that you?
— It is I.
Clément threw himself into Majorel’s arms and said to him with tears of rage:
— Painters will therefore always be, for me, impenetrable artists!
— Console yourself. I know at least one misfortune greater than yours.
Majorel led Clément into a room of the monastery; he sat down before an old harmonium, tried the notes and began to play. — Low notes held very long expressed a sorrow sure of itself, so profound that it disdained despair. Brilliant notes were lost in the wave of dark sonorities that pushed toward tragic shores their ever more muffled floods: imperceptibly the tide of bitterness withdrew; rays, through the torn clouds, made sands gleam. An immense bay, where scales, shells, seaweeds scintillated, appeared glazed with silver and shimmering beneath the sun. Clément listened, his soul abandoned to the music, his sadness transmuted into serenity, his serenity into joy. Standing near Majorel, his hands on his shoulders, he brought his head against his.
— Master, you had never played me this symphony. How beautiful it is!
— And its story is equally beautiful. Listen to it. Beethoven had become completely deaf, deaf to the point of not hearing a truck passing over paving stones, a roll of thunder, the cry of a pig being slaughtered, deaf as you are blind. He had one evening the desire to conduct himself the orchestra of Fidelio. From the first measures the orchestra was in accord neither with the words, nor with the gestures of the actors. The public was stamping. Beethoven neither saw nor heard anything. And no one dared make him understand that he was mad to want to conduct his work. Finally his best friend warned him. Beethoven left the hall without hat, without coat. He came home, threw himself on his bed biting his sheets and howling. When the violence of his passion had subsided, he began the redoubtable opening that you have heard, and that he did not hear, that he never heard. As he created, peace had returned to him, and joy. You heard, at the end, that triumph of happiness.
— You are right, master, it is vain to complain. But Beethoven imagined the sounds: he remembered! I have the memory of no color. And then, he had genius…
Reims hesitated: Zachée accused him of cowardice: “Will you not inform his mother?”
— I am afraid of losing his friendship.
Clément wrote to him: “Rejoice, if you love me. I am like a man who would emerge from a sepulchre where he had been enclosed alive. I had never heard a sound, smelled a flower, touched a happy form. — All my senses are opening to life: it seems to me that I see.”
Zachée: “You see indeed. Nature is enveloping him with her spells.”
Reims wrote to Madame Saint-Adjutory: “Come back quickly. Clément’s faith is tottering like a church where mass has not been said for centuries.”
Majorel and Clément had to return. — Clément, your mother arrives this evening by the packet from the Indies.
Majorel and Clément met the abbé on the quay.
— Why have you betrayed me?
— I did not want you to harden yourself in sin.
— You know if I love this land? By your fault I shall have to leave far from it. A dazzling light will wound my eyes, a violent nature will crush my weakness, spectacles that I shall sense to be prodigious will inspire in me continual regrets at not having eyes to see them. You know if deep down I love you and you are driving me far from you. Majorel was helping me to understand the world of forms, colors and sounds. What will become of me when I no longer have anyone to interpret for me the invisible Beauty?
The transatlantic steamer smoked on the horizon. The three men ceased speaking and watched the boat approach. In the crowd of passengers Reims and Majorel distinguished at the bow a long dry woman who held her lorgnette obstinately trained on them.
— Clément, your mother is looking at you.
In the blind man’s memory surged the distant memory of his family’s departure and his despair when he had sent his farewell kiss to the emigrants. Could he have thought then that his mother’s return would be so indifferent to him, so hostile? He tried to train himself to tenderness, by recalling stories from his childhood. — A fall in a yard full of rabbits and hens, the sinister evening when his father and his mother had decided on exile. He repeated several times to himself:
— Your mother, your mother is arriving. — You are going to hear your mother — your mother whom you have not heard for fifteen years. In a few minutes you will embrace your mother. Think of it well — your mother — your mother.
His eyes remained dry. He did not feel his heartbeat accelerate. The pilot’s boat had come alongside the ship which was advancing very slowly. Clément heard a gangway being secured and in the crowd of travelers descending, he felt around his neck the strong embrace of two arms. Tears sprung from a deep source issued from his eyes. He returned to his mother all her kisses.
— Show me your eyes. They are still beautiful. If you knew how I longed to see them again, often they appeared to me in their true serenity, but sometimes they looked at me with melancholy, and there are days when they looked at me with hatred. Did you often reproach me, within yourself, for having abandoned you?
— Mother, do not evoke old memories.
— Let us evoke them, on the contrary, to link by them the present and the past. Only a moment ago, in the boat, you would have wept if you had known my distress. I was afraid of finding in you only a stranger. I could not chase away this thought that beat upon my mind, regular and irresistible like the blows of the tide, and which became more painful with each turn of the propeller. Do you understand, Clément? If you had not wept in embracing me! if you had been sparing of your kisses.
— Mother, you are reassured now.
— So reassured that it seems to me we have never been separated. You are the child I left, my true child, is that not so, abbé?
Reims answered after a second’s hesitation:
— Yes, madame.
— Is that not so, Majorel?
Majorel did not answer. Clément cried out:
— Why lie! You, abbé, by words and you, master, by silence! You both know well that I am no longer a Christian.
— The abbé had written it to me; but I could not, I could not think it. You are my son!
Bells rang in the distance.
— Listen to the bells that baptized you ringing.
— The bells that cradled me no longer ring for me.
— They will ring again for you some day. You will say with your father, with your brothers, with me the morning and evening prayers. Leave us alone, both of you, you, who did not know how to defend the soul I entrusted to you, and you, who stole it from me. You have both deceived me.
— Mother, do not be unjust to these two men. They love me with all their heart. Perhaps they loved me too much.
Reims and Majorel moved away together, and for the first time since the distant time when they lived at the University, they felt for one another fraternal sentiments.
He opened his eyes to try to see by miracle his masters, but he saw nothing. He perceived only the sounds of the land that were diminishing. Laborers were unloading coal. He no longer heard the strokes of the shovel, nor the grinding of the chain on the pulley of the crane. He still distinguished the tumbling of the released bucket and the streaming of the masses onto the pyramid. And now even that became imperceptible; then, in the silence, rose the sharp sounds of a clarinet, Zachée’s clarinet, which was sending from the mole the definitive farewell. The clarinet hollowed from a boxwood branch had the sonority of bronze.
— Mother, cry to Zachée to be silent, he awakens in my heart too many memories and too many oblivions.
— Zachée is already too far from us, my voice would not reach him. And he cannot see the gesture of my arm.
The trills of the clarinet were lost little by little in the whistling of the gulls and the terns swirling around the boat.
— Can the land still be seen?
— It can still be seen.
The sun set while the land had not yet disappeared.
— I would never have believed the land was so slow to disappear.
— It has quite disappeared now. — Let us go down to the cabins — it is getting late.
— The night must be full of stars?
The Manager: Charles PÉGUY.
This cahier was composed by unionized workers in Suresnes. — Imprimerie G.-A. Richard & Compagnie, 9, rue du Pont.
By subscribing; by subscribing their friends and all persons to whom these cahiers would be suitable; by giving us subscriptions to serve to persons indicated to us besides by our correspondents or by the “Newspapers for All”; by giving us the names and addresses of persons to whom we would usefully serve possible subscriptions or free subscriptions paid for besides; by sending us documents and information.
Every time our two correspondents desire it and authorize us, we put them in communication, that is to say that we give to each of the two the name and address of the person — who receives the subscription paid for, — who pays the subscription received.
In order to be able to send to our future subscribers complete collections, we have rigorously renounced sale by the cahier. Administration and editorial offices Monday and Thursday, from 2 o’clock to 5:30. Address all correspondence to M. Charles Péguy, 19, rue des Fossés-Saint-Jacques, Paris.
We publish truly our statement of situation: we printed the seventh cahier at 800 copies; besides 189 copies of free annual subscriptions and 29 copies of free annual subscriptions paid for besides, we sent it to 201 firm subscribers, to 17 possible subscribers; and we made 5 services, of which to the printers.
We publish on the 15th of each month the state of our financial situation at the end of the preceding month:
At February 28 the regular monthly subscriptions, the extraordinary subscriptions, the firm subscriptions and the free subscriptions paid for besides had given us: 2,105 fr. 75
At the same date the initial establishment and the establishment of the first four cahiers had cost us: 3,224 fr. 55
We therefore had at February 28 a deficit of: 1,118 fr. 80
From March 1 to 31, the subscriptions and subscriptions gave us: 970 fr. 65
The establishment of the fifth and sixth cahiers cost us: 1,292 fr. 40
Our receipts therefore amounted to about 75% of our expenses.
We therefore had in March a deficit of: 321 fr. 75
equal to about 25% of our expenses.
At March 31 the subscriptions and subscriptions had therefore given us: 3,076 fr. 40
At the same date the initial establishment and the establishment of the first six cahiers had cost us: 4,516 fr. 95
Our receipts therefore amounted to about 68% of our expenses.
We therefore had at that date a deficit of: 1,440 fr. 55
equal to about 32% of our expenses.
At the same date twenty-eight students and former students had decided to attribute to the cahiers the sums they had contributed since May 1, 1897 and with which they had constituted a common fund for morally socialist action. These sums amounted to 2,405 fr. This subscription will bear in our accounts the name of retrospective subscription. We draw the attention of our ordinary subscribers to what it has necessarily of the abnormal and which will not recur.
— Th. MOCQUET.
DEUXIÈME ANNONCE
Charles Péguy
My friend,
If you were in Paris, you would have gone to the great gala organized for Friday April 13th, two days before Easter, by the Petite République.
From the issue dated Saturday the 7th, the newspaper had announced this gala. On Monday 9th, Tuesday 10th, Wednesday 11th, the northeast, almost to the middle in height, of the first page.
The announcement of Thursday bore moreover the following notice:
The citizens whose names follow are invited to collect, today or tomorrow, from 5:30 in the evening to 7 o’clock, at LA PETITE RÉPUBLIQUE, their steward’s cards for the evening of Friday, at the Porte-Saint-Martin:
Beauvais, F. Bigot, Boivin, Borjon, Briaux, Émile Buré, Eugène Caste…, F. Château, Cherchilliez, F. Dumas, Dunan, Dutheil, E. Givort, Gourdeau, L. Jousseaume, Lecoint, Edgard Longuet, Jean Longuet, Massieu, Mauclair, L. Mode, Ollivier, Paul-Martin, J. Rausch, Rougerie, Roulon, A. Surier, Docteur Thiroux, Ph. Walter.
The usual announcement was arranged approximately thus:
Performance of Friday April 13, 1900
At 8:30 in the evening
LECTURE by JEAN JAURÈS
Poems of Victor Hugo
Mademoiselle LOUISE GRANDJEAN (of the Opera)
Air from Fidelio (Beethoven)
M. RENAUD (of the Opera)
The Romance of the Star (Richard Wagner), accompanied by M. Léon Moreau;
The Only Tears (Camille Erlanger), accompanied by the composer.
Madame SECONDO-WEBER
Poems of Alfred de Vigny
Mesdemoiselles RIOTTON and MARIÉ DE L’ISLE (of the Opéra-Comique)
M. ISNARDON (of the Opéra-Comique)
Mademoiselle YAHNE
Poems of Alfred de Musset
Young Soldiers (Lamennais)
Mademoiselle BLANCHE DUFRÊNE
Poems of Pottier
An Apologue by Anatole France (with chorus) by GUSTAVE CHARPENTIER, conducted by the composer
Seats are now available at the offices of the Petite République, 111, rue Réaumur.
For stage boxes, ground-floor boxes, first-tier boxes, arrangements by mutual agreement. Apply to the newspaper’s management.
Orchestra seats, balcony seats, 5 francs; second balcony, 3 francs; third balcony, 2 francs; amphitheater stalls, 1 fr. 50; amphitheater, 1 franc.
On the last day, Saturday 14th, the recapitulation of artists presents some modifications.
You know these galas much less than you know the lectures given at the Hôtel des Sociétés savantes by the Group of Collectivist Students. They are much more recent. The first, to my knowledge, goes back approximately to the time when socialism was neighboring with Dreyfusism and when Dreyfusism was yielding much. I would have been happy to go to this one on your behalf. But I could not, for the reason stated above. Fortunately comrade Émile Boivin, ever a friend of grandeurs, had gotten himself named steward. I thus had some information. No one is unaware that stewards are citizens who organize the order service and reserve for themselves several orchestra seats.
There would be much to say and doubtless enough to criticize about and in these new ceremonies. We shall do so as soon as I shall have been able to attend one. In the meantime I want and I must contribute to your keeping an entire memory of this one.
Know then, friend, that the hall was full and overfull: below, gentlemen, with our stewards, above, citizens, in the middle all the indispensable gradations. Arrangement not willed and of election, but automatic distribution according to the gradations of seat prices. Precious contribution to the theory or, as they say, to the materialist conception, while awaiting the mathematical theory, of the history of theatrical performances.
At the moment when the public, before all performances, begins to grow impatient, at the moment when the spectators of the sublime galleries rigorously beat time with voice and feet, sometimes with cane, to the known air and rhythm of: the lanterns, the lanterns, this technical expression: curtain, curtain, at that moment the citizens from above intoned in chorus the Internationale.
One would at first have imagined some national or international congress. But far from the revolutionary socialist hymn being sung in chorus, at least at the refrain, by the entire enthusiastic hall, far from it — less dense couplets and dense and broad refrain descended from the heights upon the silence of the plains. The Internationale is known much more and much better now than at the time when you left Paris. The secret agents whom these cahiers pay very dearly — see on the cover our statement of situation — to know exactly what is happening behind appearances have reported to me that, seen through the hole in the curtain, the majestic, heavy and slow and grave descent of the Internationale constituted an admirable spectacle. Beneath the broad waves the foreign plain, voluntarily sympathetic, kept a good countenance. Finally the hymn ceased. But the people growing bold and growing vulgar began the inevitable Carmagnole. Amusement of a somewhat dubious taste, and which will not be long in beginning to grow old, like everything in this world, hardly dignified, barely acceptable on a great day of sincere republican demonstration, a little too ironic, that is to say unhealthy, and disagreeably underscoring the moral incoherence of the gala, dubious amusement to pour from above upon the inferior skulls the refrain that history unfortunately forbids us not to take seriously:
Ah! ça ira, ça ira, ça ira
All the bourgeois to the lamppost!
Ah! ça ira, ça ira, ça ira
All the bourgeois we’ll hang them!
The curtain raised, Anatole France read an address that I reread in the Petite République of Sunday the 15th, titled the Unity of Art and presented thus:
Here is the text of the address delivered by Anatole France at the performance of the Civic Theater, which took place last evening at the Porte-Saint-Martin:
Citizennesses, citizens,
If I take the floor, it is to give it to Jaurès. I am no less impatient than you to hear him. He is going to speak to us of the destinies of art in the progress of democracy, and it is a subject that had to attract the attention of a mind like his, strongly occupied with the just and the beautiful. A bond, sometimes almost imperceptible, but never broken, subtle and strong, leads from the idea of justice to the idea of beauty; and it is from the intimate constitution of a society that result the expansions of art, as the sap that nourishes the trunk and branches of the tree makes the freshness of the foliage and the brilliance of the flowers. But before listening to that great voice, expression of a powerful thought, which will reveal to us the profound harmonies that link from the summit to the roots of the social tree, I would like, if you permit, to prepare you in a few words to conceive the idea of art in its unity and in its plenitude.
It is perhaps not useless in fact to show you at a stroke art in its entirety and to gather together for your thought all its parts, after such a long time of giving a mutilated image of it, after wanting to cut it in two stumps, incapable of living in isolation; after having imagined superior arts and inferior arts, and having named some fine arts, others industrial arts, doubtless giving to understand that the latter, too engaged in matter, did not rise to pure beauty; as if beauty were not necessarily constituted by relations and fitnesses and did not draw from matter its unique means of expression! Distinction inspired by a bad metaphysics of caste, inequality that was neither more just nor more fortunate than so many other inequalities systematically introduced among men and which do not come from nature! This separation was no less harmful, in practice, to the arts it placed on high than to those it placed below. For if the industrial arts were thereby impoverished and debased, if they fell from the august elegances of art to the gross caprices of luxury, and even lost for a time the taste and the sentiment of embellishing the things necessary for life, the fine arts, meanwhile isolated and privileged, were exposed to the dangers of isolation and threatened with the fate of all the privileged, which is to drag out an irksome and vain existence. And there was a threat of those two monsters: the artist who is not an artisan, the artisan who is not an artist.
Let us erase, citizens, these unintelligent distinctions, let us overturn this wicked barrier, and let us consider the indivisible unity of art in its infinite manifestations.
No! There are not two kinds of arts, the industrial and the fine; there is only one art which is altogether industry and beauty, and which is employed in charming life by multiplying around us beautiful forms, expressing beautiful thoughts. The artist and the artisan work at the same magnificent work; they concur in rendering agreeable and dear to us the human habitation, in communicating an air of grace and nobility to the house, to the city, to the garden.
They are similar to one another by function. They are collaborators. The work of the goldsmith, the potter, the enameler, the pewter-founder, the cabinetmaker and the gardener belongs to the fine arts just as well as the work of the painter, the sculptor, the architect, unless one thinks that the goldsmith Benvenuto Cellini, the potter Bernard Palissy, the enameler Pénicaud, the pewter-founder Briot, the cabinetmaker Boulle, the gardener Le Nôtre, to speak only of the ancients, did not accomplish works of an art fine enough. But you esteem on the contrary, citizens, that the artisan who has found the curve of a cup or obtained the transparency of an enamel is the colleague of the artist who has conceived the lines of a statue or chosen the tones of a painting.
Come then, you by whom useful objects are clothed with beauty, come in harmonious throng, come engravers and lithographers, molders of metal, of clay and of plaster, type-founders and typographers, printers on fabric and on paper, scene-painters, jewelers, goldsmiths, potters, glassmakers, toymakers, embroiderers, upholsterers, case-makers, bookbinders, artisans, artists, consolers, who give us the joy of happy forms and charming colors, benefactors of mankind, come with the painters, the sculptors and the architects. With them, hand in hand, make your way toward the future city.
It announces to us a little more justice and joy. You will work in it and for it. From a society more equitable and happier than ours will perhaps emerge an art more lovable and more beautiful; artists, artisans, unite, associate; study, meditate together. Put in common your ideas and your experiences. Be, all of you together, a thousand and a thousand manual thoughts and a thousand and a thousand thinking hands, and work in peace and harmony.
The floor is to Jean Jaurès.
Citizen Anatole France, a spy who had never seen him tells me, has somewhat the dry and white, dignified and proud aspect of a former cavalry officer in retirement, but of an officer altogether very fine, as there are, when there are any. He reads his address in a full voice, like people who read instead of speaking. One regrets that he does not speak.
Jaurès was very fine. His words will not be lost to you, since the Petite République of Monday announced that “our comrades of the Mouvement Socialiste had Jaurès’s superb speech on Art and Socialism stenographed. They will publish it in the issue that will appear on May first. Address requests to the Mouvement Socialiste, 17, rue Cujas.” When Jaurès had spoken, gentlemen from below were admiring, saying: The theories are false; but how beautiful it is!
The eminent artists were keenly admired.