To Our Friends, To Our Subscribers

À nos amis, à nos abonnés

to our subscribers. — As one could already see at the foot of the first page of the cover of the two previous cahiers, an important modification had thereby just been introduced into our periodicity. Our cahiers shall henceforth appear every fortnight during the winter months, and every two fortnights during the summer months, without any interruption for vacations. We shall thereby conform to the law (of finances) of April 29, 1908, concerning the postal rates applicable to newspapers and periodical writings. Article 2 of this law is set forth as follows:

Article 2. — Are considered as periodicals, from the point of view of the application of the tax, only those publications fulfilling the conditions of the law on the press, appearing at least once a month and whose end cannot be foreseen in advance.

Our series shall henceforth begin on the first of September of each year and shall end on August 31 of the following year. It is moreover on these two dates that our budgetary exercises already began and ended. Our cahiers shall appear by fortnights roughly from mid-November to mid-March, and every two fortnights roughly from mid-March to mid-November.

to our friends. — I cannot keep silent, and we cannot hide any longer what has been known since the beginning of this series by all those of our friends who occasionally come to the office of the Cahiers: that I have been very seriously ill and that this illness has endangered the very existence of the Cahiers. I do not speak only of my own.

I had employed what one calls the vacations in preparing the tenth series, as I prepare a series every vacation, and in addition in preparing the fabrication of our Polyeucte; I had even begun to send out the first circulars for this Polyeucte when I fell almost abruptly, on September 10. I had to keep to my bed for four weeks, and not cured I had to jump out of bed and out of the house, for it was time, in order to face that fearsome wave of the rentrée. I have provisionally and for this once recovered and healed by working and by dint of work, but one must not tempt fate.

I must say further, we must add that nevertheless this illness was in no way unforeseen, that it may take me again tomorrow, that it was entirely natural, if I may so say, that by its nature and its modes, by its quality it itself denounced the fact that it was only the inevitable consequence of fifteen years of overwork and of cares (for one must count the five years of preparation and of apprenticeship, before the very launching of these cahiers, before the launching ten years ago) and, for the word must be said, of money cares.

We suffer above all, for four or five years now, from a totally false opinion that has established itself concerning the prosperity of our Cahiers. When we meet people, even friends, who have not seen us for a certain time: Well now! they say to us, the Cahiers are going very well. They mean by that confusedly together: that they are very pleased with the cahiers they receive, that they hear them spoken of very favorably everywhere, and that consequently we are evidently very comfortable in making them.

Nego consequentiam. I deny that consequence. That consequence must be broken, that confusion must be dissipated. I myself acknowledge that it is altogether natural. When our subscribers receive, fortnight after fortnight, with such punctual regularity, cahiers fabricated with such sustained attention, so tireless, with so much seriousness, with so much severity, with so much care, with so much fitness, with so much solicitude, how should they not believe, in this time of universal sabotage, that it is because we have the means for it, and that we are comfortably placed to work. Is that not the consequence? the slope?

Let them be undeceived. And let them be undeceived doubly. Let them be undeceived in fact. If in fact in this time of universal sabotage we have maintained the decency and the cleanness of fabrication, of all the fabrications, of intellectual fabrication and of industrial fabrication, of pen and of ink, of typography and of copy, of paper and of work, it is not that we have ever had the means for it, it is that for fifteen years we have been working very much above our means. We are not, in any degree nor in any sense, amateurs. We are, in the most rigorous sense of this word, the most beautiful of all, professionals. We work at a certain trade, a hard trade. The little we do, we do it not for amusement nor with our surplus, but we do it of our flesh and our blood, of our very substance, and we exercise a trade.

We live in a time so barbarous that when one sees men printing clean texts on clean paper with clean ink everyone cries out: They must have time to waste! And money! We have no time, we have no more money, we have only our life to lose. We have nearly lost it; and we are exposed to beginning over.

We live in a time so barbarous that one confuses luxury with cleanness. When a workman tries to work cleanly, one accuses him of luxury. And as in the same time and on the other side luxury and wealth always work dirtily, there is literally no longer any joint by which culture may either maintain itself, nor so much as try to reintroduce itself, nor so much as defend itself. By which it may pass. Those who have no money make dirtiness under the name of sabotage; and those who have money make dirtiness, another and contrary dirtiness, under the name of luxury. And thus culture no longer has any joint; where to pass. There is no longer that marvelous meeting of all the ancient societies, where he who produced and he who bought both loved and knew culture.

It is as though one were to conclude, from the fact that a sculptor works in marble, that he is evidently a very rich man, since he works in marble, and since marble is very expensive. This is the most odious modern reasoning, the injurious contre-sens of barbarism and of amateurism. It is the opposite. If a sculptor is poor, and if he must buy his marble, he falls irrevocably into miseries without end. He sinks down, he descends into descending miseries without end.

We have set on foot, we have sustained through dangers of every kind, through all the trials, through all the accidents, through all the miseries, the most important, the largest enterprise of literary and other publication, periodical and other, that has been attempted during these ten years, and we have made it, and we have held it without ever having a sou before us; what so many capitals around us themselves were unable to do, we have in ten years created a new firm, almost universally known, very generally esteemed, very well rated, universally respected, we have made it and we have maintained it without ever having a sou before us. Every man who has any experience of economic realities will know, will be able to measure what such an enterprise represents, and that it is a veritable wager. But he will know also, he will measure what such a wager costs, and to hold it for ten years, and where one takes that which one does not take from money, that which one does not ask of money, for it must always be taken somewhere, and that what does not cost in money, what does not cost in money, is paid by a perpetual overwork, a constant risk of death, irreparable ravages of health.

It is thus that the only persons, the few persons who know not only truly but really what the Cahiers are, are a few heads, proprietors, directors of the largest publishing houses in Paris, whose name has sometimes appeared in these cahiers in the thanks I have given them, who are our subscribers, who read us and follow us closely, who alone perhaps measure us at our measure, and can do so, who in the growing misery of this country, in the growing stagnation of business, in all these crises of business, and more than in all others in the stagnation and in the frightful crisis of the bookseller’s trade, esteem us at our just price, I mean with full knowledge of the cause, with knowledge of the difficulty, who treat me personally with an affectionate friendship, brotherly and sometimes, in view of their authority, almost paternal, and who, knowing, themselves, what they were saying, have told me twenty times: What you have done, no one could have done, and at any price.

On the other hand and secondly, no longer in fact, but in calculation, let no one be mistaken in calculation. Let no one delude himself about what awaits us. Neither about the near future of our Cahiers, nor about the near future of this country. In this barbarism, in this growing inculture, in this disarray of minds and morals, in this disaster of culture, the better our Cahiers shall be, the less access they shall have to the great public, to what we may name the public, simply.

More and more, from year to year, and for long years perhaps, the great public abandons itself and is abandoned, the public is abandoned to all the basenesses: to pornography, and not only to coarse, vulgar, low pornography, to the pornography of the gutter, to the pornography of the crowds and the masses, to popular pornography, to the pornography of the plebs, of which our professional moralists make so much noise, which would still be the least dangerous of all, and almost natural, in a certain sense, but to that pornography supposedly elegant and sociable, to society pornography, to the pornography of the drawing-room, of the chimney-corner, the most pernicious of all, by far, and which, in its turn and by a foreseen overflow, by an imitation, by a counterfeiting, by a foreseen aping invades the people themselves; to frivolity, to society fatuity, to lightness, to futility, to false society elegance, to the whole of worldliness, a barbarism infinitely worse and more dangerous than obscenity itself. And as to what political, parliamentary, electoral mores have become, of political corruption it is better not to speak.

Let us not congratulate ourselves. We are the vanquished. The world is against us. And one can no longer know today for how many years. All that we have sustained, all that we have defended, mores and laws, seriousness and severity, principles and ideas, realities and beautiful language, cleanness, probity of language, probity of thought, justice and harmony, exactness, a certain bearing, intelligence and good French, the Revolution and our old socialism, truth, right, simple agreement, good work, beautiful work, all that we have sustained, all that we have defended retreats from day to day before a barbarism, before a growing inculture, before the invasion of political and social corruption.

Let us not hide it from ourselves: we are the vanquished. For ten years, for fifteen years we have done nothing but lose ground. Today, in the decrease, in the decline of political and private mores, we are literally besieged. We are in a place in a state of siege and more than blockade, and the whole flat country is abandoned, the whole plain is in the hands of the enemy. All the fields. As our old chronicles say, the enemy had set himself in the fields.

No one today, no living man denies, no one contests, no one even dreams of hiding from himself that there is a disorder; a growing and extremely disquieting disorder; not indeed an apparent disorder, a trouble of fecundity, which covers an order to come, but a real disorder of impotence and of sterility; no one any longer denies this disorder, the disarray of minds and hearts, the distress that is coming, the menacing disaster. A débâcle.

It is perhaps this situation of disarray and distress that creates for us, more imperiously than ever, the duty not to capitulate. One must never capitulate. One must perhaps capitulate even less inasmuch as the place is more important and more isolated and as it is more menaced and as precisely the country is in the power of the enemy. This place where we hold is not a place we encountered by chance on the road of a rout; it is not, it is not a place of fortune; there has never been the shadow of a rout and of a sauve qui peut, let us do ourselves this justice; it is a place we have built with our own hands, patiently, that we have made ourselves, in the course of a difficult retreat, a central redoubt, of which we know every stone, and every facing, and every device. By ten years, by fifteen years of patient, indefatigable searching, we have constituted a body of collaboration which would not have constituted itself, which could not have constituted itself elsewhere nor otherwise nor by others, by other hands nor by another ministry; which could not be reconstituted anywhere, if today, if ever it were dispersed; and not only which could not reconstitute itself, but as one could not reconstitute another; for it required to constitute this one an unheard-of concourse of circumstances and of devotions and of such meetings and of such preparations, so numerous and so welcome, and of such patiences, that such fortunes also are not found, are not produced twice. More than that, by this same patience we have constituted a body of subscribers of which I can say not only that it is unique in the world, but that it is superior still, on the whole, to the body of our collaborators.

We have permitted ourselves sometimes to communicate the list of our subscribers, not publicly of course, but we believed we could and should communicate it, to show our cards and our mailing labels only to those of our collaborators who asked us, who wanted to know, as they had the right, and even the duty, to whom by name they were addressing themselves, to whom their work was going, who would be reached by their copy; to whom finally they were speaking; it was even of a very good economy, of a very good administration: there has never been but one cry, and one opinion on this point: that the list of our subscription, as it is presently constituted, in the first place is without contradiction what we have done best; the strongest; and the most difficult; the formula that generally then comes out, that escapes everyone, is the formula that from the beginning escaped me, the first, that it is without any doubt our best cahier; and next on this point that it is the last refuge, the only serious refuge of all the men who have kept some attachment to culture in the relaxation, in the general lowering of competences and characters.

It is literally the last meeting-place of men of good company. Asking nothing of anyone, nothing that even resembles an adhesion, imposing nothing on anyone, imposing no ligature, without having (published) any program (and this naturally was the most difficult, as is well enough known, it is what most complicated our task, what most contributed to making it difficult), (and even what almost made us suspect, so true is it that, in this invasion of electoral mores, one must everywhere have a program), (and when one has none people ask you for one all the same; it is always as at the doors of theaters; it is true that in fact all this is only theater, an immense theater and cabotinage; they have such a taste for servitude, and ignorance and misknowledge of the mores of liberty, that they beseech you, impatiently, soon arrogantly, please to bind their liberty; and also yours; and if you still refuse, first they agonize you with insults; and finally taking pity on you, as deminutus, they make it for you, your program, they discover it for you; they are not so stupid, they know it well; and out of pure charity they go and proclaim it everywhere, on your behalf: He doesn’t want to say it, he doesn’t dare to say it, but that’s it, his program. I know it.) without declaration, without proclamation, without declamation, without exterior apparatus, without pomp, without pretentious statutes, without formalities, we have obtained two important results: the first, which is perhaps the most important, is not to have become a sect, nor a school, nor a clique, nor a party, nor a cabal, nor an affair, any sort of monôme: I say perhaps the most important for it is already much, it is certainly the most, it is perhaps everything not to do harm as soon as one only wants to stir one’s little finger: it is here the first rule of action, the first law, the first principle, the very preliminary principle, the principle before the principles, the prior rule of all morality of action, that is to say of all morality: one must therefore not be astonished that so many respected masters, who have taught us so many moralities, did not first think to teach us this common principle, this first principle, this prior principle of all moralities.

Secondly we have obtained this result that without exercising anything that resembled a pressure, of any sort, without exercising or asking any sweeping along, without asking anything of anyone, without exercising or asking anything that resembled an adhesion, a solicitation, an engagement, an alienation of any kind, we have by this long patience, by a recruitment lengthily patiently pursued, by a filtering, by a purification, by a purging if I may still say so even more lengthily patiently pursued, constituted little by little, without engaging anyone, a society of an incontestably new mode, a sort of hearth, a society naturally free of all freedom, a sort of family of spirits, without having done it on purpose, precisely; in no way a group, as they say; that horror; but literally what there has ever been most beautiful in the world: a friendship; and a city.

Technically, expressly what Michelet called a friendship.

And naturally and for this reason this friendship, of our subscription, once dispersed, would be still more impossible to reconstitute than the first grouping of our collaborators. Than the grouping of the first degree.

It is for our friends to decide now whether they wish or whether they do not wish that so many efforts put into a work, into an institution, shall bear or not bear fruit, and shall have no longer anything but a historical interest. They are the masters. We here have led the boat beyond what we could. Those of our friends who assisted me in this crisis know that my secret idea, that my temptation was the temptation of an absolute silence. To enter at last into a total retreat. We are saturated, we are wearied to excess of this activity. To be able to keep silent.

And to be able to work. It was also the temptation of work. To work for oneself, as we said naively at the École. I had the temptation to work for myself. I cannot forget that I am a philosopher. I say it with a certain pride, in a time when of all the cultures, philosophy is certainly the discipline most exposed to insults, to ravages, to scornings together and to (the worst) flatteries, and, what is worst, to the counterfeits of all the demagogies.

I do not deny, I do not wish to forget all that I owe, for my work, for the little philosophy I have, to this trial, to this experience of fifteen years. I have there learned and almost taken much of what one does not learn in the schools and in the assemblies. I know today, in the only manner in which one can know it, by a real and involuntary experience (I mean which had never wished nor pretended to be an experience), by a hard and cruel trial, and a long one, what general expenses and first-establishment costs are, all that a budget is, not only the budget of a family really living from a work of production, from the work of a production, but the budget of a work, of an institution, of a house; I mean a house also of production; I have learned, I know what an exercise is, what current accounts are, a debit, a credit, a surplus, a deficit, a cost price, a balance-sheet, a sounding, an inventory, a (percent of) yield, a launching, a force of production, I know what publicity is. I know in a word what an economic, industrial and commercial organism is. I have learned also, I know what friendship is, that economic power. I have known with a knowledge, with a trial, with a unique, non-interchangeable experience, what fidelity is, and infidelity on the contrary, I have known constancy and I have known inconstancy. I have known ingratitude very much. I have known comradeship, that worst of all miseries. And as I had learned the nourishment and the yield of a work, I have also learned the nourishment of a sentiment. And the yield. I have known friendship for what it is, and for what it is not. I have known the friendships and the enmities, the loves and the hatreds, the concerted silence, the boycotting, the muffled strangulation, the hoarse strangulation, the lay index, the silent investment, the economic war, the blockade, already and from all time the siege.

I do not deny this experience, nor that it is unique, nor that these fifteen years and this work and this life have brought me a unique teaching, have brought me, have made me undergo an experience such as one would not find anywhere else. Nowhere another. But I also know, I see well that of this experience I have had enough. I am as if full of it, as if overflowing. I have had it up to here. I am saturated with it. I am satiated with it. I have almost (much) more of it than I need, if one were permitted to speak thus of experience. I know also that it is time to think of works, or at least of putting to work, of an attempt at the beginning of putting to work. It is not everything to acquire forever. Life is short. There comes an age to produce. The two theses of the doctorate of letters I have been preparing for all this time for the Faculty of Letters of the University of Paris will have reached in a few months all that I shall be able to give them of completion. In the complementary thesis I have proposed to myself to put as much as I shall be able of what I have acquired by experience in the arts and trades of typography. In the principal thesis I have proposed to myself to put a little of what I have acquired by experience in the knowledge that we can obtain through history of the very realities of public and private action; political, social, religious; economic, military and all others; notably intellectual and moral.

Life is brief and if one kills oneself in experience itself and for experience, who shall ever produce its results?

If one even tires oneself too much, how to see still and how to undergo experience and trial usefully?

In order to see one must have one’s eyes neither blurred nor worn out.

The secret desire, the temptation, the covetousness was certainly of total silence and to enter into an absolute retreat. Thou shalt not covet the retreat and the silence of thy neighbor. Thou shalt not covet the carnal solitude. It was assuredly together and within the temptation of work. Philosophy is the most beautiful of trades. One must always believe that the trade one exercises is the most beautiful of all trades. And first of all it is a trade. One must say that philosophy is the most beautiful of trades in a time when more than all the disciplines, before all the disciplines, it is exposed to the derisions, to the lacerations of the primary, my dear Halévy, of the demagogy of the primary, of the domination of the primary.

It was not only the temptation of work. It was also, it was perhaps as much, it must be confessed, a temptation, a reality of weariness. A great exhaustion of strength and of health, perhaps. But above all a great exhaustion of hope, of the first force of all, the strongest of all, perhaps the only strong one, of the force of hope. It is not with impunity that a generation like ours undergoes so many disappointments. Not even so many disappointments. Fragmentary. Discontinuous. Discriminated. Distinguished. And of which one can say one after the other that they are disappointments, such-and-such a disappointment. But a single continued, perpetuated disappointment. Almost amorphous. Gelatinous. Internally undistinguished. Spread over ten and fifteen years. A perpetual disabusing, begun ten years ago by a coup d’éclat, continued incessantly since by an acceleration, by a perpetual aggravation.

One of our subscribers, M. Salomon Reinach, said to me one day in his study: The Dreyfus Affair is the greatest swindle of the century. Doubtless he did not see there, he did not mean by that phrase, by that terrible word, he did not wish to say there all that we put into it today; otherwise he would have been a bit of a prophet, which, I believe, does not enter into his system of the history of religions; and I do not wish above all to make him say what he did not wish to say; my intention naturally is not to compromise him nor even to cite him as witness. The time of testimonies has not yet come. It was the time when Bernard-Lazare was dying. The fraudulent bankruptcy of the Dreyfus affair in politicians’ knavery put a bottomless bitterness into the heart of true Dreyfusists. One can see that many years already separate us from that. That one can even speak of true Dreyfusists. One could not foresee then, even in that flood of bitterness, even in that coup d’éclat of disillusionment, how far this decline would go, nor above all that it would go without end. Like a mad mechanism that it would not stop. I had gone to see him that day solely to give him and to ask of him news of a dear health, of a man whose health already gave us the gravest anxieties, to converse not, I shall not say, only of a common friend, but of a man who was for him a younger friend, who was for me a friend, less young, a confidant, of every confidence, of every thought, from one to the other, of the one and of the other, and one of the greatest of the prophets of Israel.

The greatest I have known, with our Marix.

I was a young man then; I was not a hundred cubits tall; a novice, although my instinct, a deep instinct, had always warned me against politics. That word struck me. I certainly did not register it for pleasure. The man who said it has perhaps forgotten it at once, has certainly forgotten it since. I shall never forget it. The master, who has many pupils, forgets. The pupil, who has not many masters, does not forget. Contrary to what one believes, it is the master who forgets the teaching. And it is the pupil who does not forget it.

The rich man, too, forgets; the poor man and the wretched do not forget.

That word moreover answered only too well to that deep instinct. And the illness and the death of Bernard-Lazare gave it not an episodic, supplementary value, but more than a symbolic value, a tragic value, an acute value, temporally tragic, a sanction, temporally, corporeally, carnally seizable.

Of the very testimonies of this great Bernard-Lazare I would be ashamed to reproduce them, to introduce them here. So gripping have they remained. The time of these testimonies is not yet come. It will come. The time of confessions is not yet come. These are terrible testimonies. This prophet, prophet of misfortune, at least of temporal misfortune, like all true prophets, had the infinite bitterness, at the very moment and in the antecedents of death, to measure with his gaze, with that gaze of an infinite goodness, of an infinite gentleness, but of a total surety; of an infinite gaiety, infinitely and bitterly amused by the scandal itself, but of a clear-sightedness in cold blood terribly infinite; that abhorrence, that abyss of barbarism and of weariness, of public and political corruption into which since then we descend untiringly, in which we roll from circle to circle.

And not only untiringly; but, as it seems, with a speed that accelerates.

These testimonies will come. They are still too terrible. One must one day arbitrarily fix a date in this decline. That is what historians generally do. One must write up to that date this History of the decomposition of Dreyfusism in France. This history must itself be only the last chapter, the most important alas, and an endless chapter, of a very brief History of the Dreyfus affair.

This decomposition commands all our life, all our fortune, all our event. One may go so far as to ask whether it will not command all our destiny. From it comes, from it dates all our misery. It is a great pity for a generation, it is a great pain, it is a great misery, an untiring decline, to have begun in life by so resounding a disappointment, by so brutal, so brute a disenchantment. A generation may not recover from it. This initial, post-initial capitulation of our General Staff has commanded all our history. It has commanded it up to now. It has perhaps taken its command forever. It will command it perhaps without return, and without possible recovery. Marshals generally betray. Even in military history. They are even made for nothing else. A few betray formally. Most betray as everyone does, no less really, in the real sense that we give, that we recognize to this word. But we have touched a General Staff, we can boast of having touched a General Staff which gave us good measure. At one stroke, at a single one, it passed the average, and even the maximum. It betrayed us, it betrayed our cause, the cause, alas, that was common to us, together with it, more than is reasonably permitted, infinitely more than is in the very office of a General Staff. Infinitely more in the end than for its rank.

We are a sacrificed generation. We are not only the vanquished, a vanquished generation. That would be nothing. That is nothing. There are glorious defeats, resounding disasters, more settled, which fix glory better, more beautiful, more accepted, more commemorated than no matter what triumph. But our defeat is the worst of all, an obscure defeat, and we shall not even be despised: we shall be ignored; at most we shall perhaps be grotesque. There are defeats, Waterloo morne plaine, which more than victories, more advantageously, fix themselves in the memories of men, in the common memory of humanity. We shall be mean, we shall be small, we shall be ordinary, we shall be middling, or rather we shall not be at all. No one shall be concerned with us. We shall pass unnoticed. A defeat without grandeur, liminal, will have condemned us to that eternal silence, temporally eternal. A silence will reign, a silence will weigh, the silence will come over us. Or rather it will not even have to come. It will come, it will have come all by itself, of itself. Before history it is never silence that has to give itself, to find itself, positive causes, efficiencies. It is the rule, and deficiencies suffice. To establish it. It is enough that deficiencies play and leave the place freely, give free place, the little place there is, to the competing efficiencies. We shall never be great; we shall never be known; we shall never be inscribed. We shall never be great. We shall not even be of the order where there is, where there can be greatness, historical. History shall have no means of measuring us. And to tell the truth she shall have no taste for it. She inscribes in truth only those who inscribe themselves. She measures, she registers only those who get themselves measured by force. It is still a kingdom that is taken only by force, that suffers force, and men of force, et violenti rapiunt illud. One may change the historical methods all one wants. There shall always be little place(s) in history, in memory, even common memory, and in the operations of memory, in all the sorts of commemorations, and the true inscriptions shall always be very rare.

In this rarity, in this tightening of the market of history it is a singular destiny; and it would be an irrevocable misfortune, an infinite ill-fortune like ours, for him who would place his hope, the fool, in the judgments and in the knowledges of temporal history. For him who would place, who would set his hope, temporal, in any sort of commemorations, temporal. We can render ourselves today this testimony, we can introduce it, bring it, give it solemnly, contribute it, today that we have the age and the experience, that we have acquired the one and the other, at the just price, which is dear and irrevocable, of knowing, of being able in our turn to measure life and action. We can speak today, we have acquired the power to speak of the young men we once were as one would speak of strangers, as we would speak of young men we had known, in the time. We can therefore in all justice, in all just measure, and I shall even add, for this once, in all impartiality, render ourselves this testimony, and it is a posthumous testimony, that we were worth men who have had the greatest historical fortunes and that we shall have no fortune at all.

We can say it today, since it is true, and since one shall not believe us. We were worth men who have had the highest fortunes. We were young men, of whom we can speak today with entire detachment, who were worth, I shall not say only men like those of the Commune, but, I say it as it is, the men of the Revolution and of the Empire. And being worth as much, we cast, as much as they, perhaps more than most of them, into action, into the public, into citizenship, into the civic, our body and our goods, the little we had of them, more still, more perhaps. Without counting. We cast into it our destiny entire. But that without any historical yield. We did, we operated in reality as much as they; perhaps at least. But the mechanism was small. And once more, once again we find again, we cut across here this capital importance of the mechanism. And one might well put greatness into it. At the entry. Nothing could come out of it; nothing has come out of it but small. At the exit, at the outlet, at the sales-house; at the warehouse. We furnished greatness to this apparatus. But historically how to know it, how to prove it? Automatically it has never yielded, it has never yielded and furnished us, it has never yielded and furnished the world and put into commerce anything but small. We were great, in reality: but we have been so only in reality. That is as nothing. We have not been so in the registering, in the apparatus of registering, in history. And when we say it we speak like imbeciles. We appear like imbeciles. We seem to be imbeciles. And we are; since we cut the figure of imbeciles. What does it matter that we were great in reality? History is not concerned with realities. She has nothing to do with reality. She is concerned with what makes a figure. She is concerned with the figures thus made, thus obtained, and with measuring them, as she can. She is concerned with what appears. A science of measurement, like every commonly accepted science, a science of measurements of the event, and of measurements commonly, generally coarse, since they must be commonly accepted, since it must get itself taught, and thus get itself transmitted, she can be concerned only, she shall be concerned only with what is measurable. She shall have no need to brand us. She shall not even have to despise us. She shall not be concerned with us. She shall forget us, shall ignore us. If she were concerned with us, all she could do for us would be to treat us negligently as imbeciles. For having put so much into such a mechanism. In which she would be mistaken, from beginning to end. But she is accustomed to it.

Against this verdict where moreover would be the temporal appeal?

We should appear with empty hands. But we shall not even appear. We shall never go so far as the audience, and to the presentation before this queen of modern times, uncontested sovereign of future times. Mistress of every judgment. Being mistress of all posterity.

Queen of all time.

Queen of time. Even. Regina temporis acti. Et praetereuntis. Earthly queen. Temporal queen. Regina terrarum et rerum praetereuntium.

Where are, she will say, where are the marks of your action, the signs, the measures of your devotion, the measures of your sacrifices? Where are your documents, your monuments, your proofs, your witnesses? Your written words? History is made with documents. Where are your sensible testimonies? You put into it, as much as the others, your heart and your bodies, you engaged in it your hearts and your goods, you put into it, you put yourselves into it body (and soul). All that you had; all that you were. More still. I know it. But I do not know it. I know nothing of it. I officially know nothing. Have you your papers? I let pass only those who have papers. Of those papers that fill the archives. The bundles of papers. Where are your barricades. It is hardly that you have overthrown a few ministries. And besides you went about it in such a way, imbeciles, with such ill grace that you have the air, that you have given yourselves the air that it is not you who overthrew them. You bring me no proof of it. Everyone could dispute it with you, and contest it, and plead it against you. Everything is pleadable. Where are your measures? You bring me only of what I cannot measure. Of what has no material measure. No common measure. You have not even overthrown a government. Where are your dying and your dead. You all die in your bed. I am not interested in persons who take fifty years to die in their bed. That also does not enter into my reckonings. That also is not matter of measure, object of my measures. You bring me never anything but the unmeasurable. Where are your civil wars and your national wars? Your wars more than civil? Where are your pitched battles? Where (are) your scaffolds, the scaffolds you have set up and those upon which you have mounted? For, you understand, for us, it amounts identically to the same: it is the scaffold, it is the barricade, it is the battle, it is the apparatus that makes the grandeur and the dimension, it is the facing and the pomp that makes historical capacity; it is the stowage: it matters little after that whether you be above or below. And the side of the barricade is what matters least to me. Provided there be barricades. But where are your street battles, where are your battles of the plain? The hot battles in the burning wheat. Wagram. That burning sun. That dust. And that burning June day when there had been a thunderstorm the day before. You remember. And then the earth was sodden, as our historians say. You understand what that means. It means that there was mud. The dirty (black and) liquid mud of the Belgian plains. Muddy. Full of mud. The earth full of earth and water. Then one could not get out of it. Then the artillery did not advance. You understand. The nags could not pull. Could not get out of it.

There is the truth. Then the battle began too late. Sloughs, in short. What in every country in the world has always been vulgarly called sloughs. Then there was mud, ordinary mud, mud as there is every day, up to the axles. Only that day it counted, the mud. You remember. Everyone remembers. There is often mud. All the time it bothers carters. Only, that day, an elect day, it bothered the carters of cannons. Where are your martyrs? Where are your heroes? Where are even your victims? You know that I told you that for me it comes to the same. The hundreds and the thousands and the hundreds of thousands of men marching at the same pace, falling of the same death, eternally imperishable for me, the hundreds and the thousands and the hundreds of thousands of men running to the same assault, bending under the same defeat, beating of the same heart, running of the same foot, breathing, singing of the same breath, carried along of the same impulse, brilliant of the same victory, marching at the same pace, charging at this same pace of charge, staggering, broken by the same débâcle, oscillating of the same distress, crushed by the same disaster, brilliant, broken by the same triumph; the formidable and irregular alignments; these hundreds and these thousands of men, and these hundreds of thousands of men leaning of the same slope, the body tense forward, leaning of the same slope, inclined forward of the same inclination, innumerable oblique bodies parallel-borne, parallel-advanced, parallel-moving and moved, innumerable mortal bodies, imperishable for me, innumerable parallel oblique bodies, parallel-led, parallel-destined toward the destiny of the assault. Where are your Marseillaises? And the innumerable clamors in the plains? The immense clamors, the risings of the clamors, the growing clamors, the deafening clamors; the haltings and the prolongings and the profilings in the meadows; the heavy steps in the ploughed lands, so light; the steps clogged in the ploughed lands; the clods of earth; and the clamors in the wheat, the fires in the ripe wheat, the murders in the warm wheat. And the flags in the charnel-houses, the flags in tatters, leaning at the front of the battalions? Those enormous frothy alignments, fine or square, linear or stocky, upon the moving ground, of men with hamstring equally tense, the forehead in front of the head, the head in front of the body. And the flags lying like them, beating like them, the torn flags, snapping like them, torn like them, torn like the seat of the trousers and like the blue tunic and like the facing and like the skin beneath. By Jove! they were not torn on purpose for the Museum of Artillery. They were torn like everything. From having served too much. For it is very funny: flags that served, like the canteen, like the cartridge-belt straps. The flags inclined of the same inclination, beaten like them, of the same tempest, cracking like them, cracking like branches, like real branches, of trees, drowned of the same flood, beaten of the same torment. The flags fringed, worn, folded against the staff like the sail to the mast, taut like them, pointing, pointed like them, overturned like them, in the face of the sky, brought to earth like them, vanquished like them, — rising again like them. Where are your battles of the open plain, and the section defending the village, and under the burning sun, and the men in the ditch, and the celebrated defense at the corner of a wood, of the celebrated wood; and the knoll, Behind a knoll; and the mill on the hill, the irrefutable mill; and the general, and the General Staff with their field-glasses; the same General Staff of course which was (so much) to betray later; but when things go badly one says it betrays, one sees it betray. When things go well, one never betrays; and the general of generals. You understand, that is what must be said to me. Then I hear you. But you, you do not enter either into military history or into economic history. You do not enter into military history, the only one that interests me at bottom. And on the other hand you do not enter any more into the statistics, you know, into the economic histories, the only one in which I am forced by the public powers, since the new curricula, to pretend to be interested uniquely; so I love it, say it well, like my only daughter. Above all do not forget to repeat it to those gentlemen the inspectors. You speak to me of illness and of death. A death that lasts so long does not interest me. It is even suspect to me, know it. And rightly. Have you at least this magnificent hecatomb, this red week, the red streets, la rue rouge, this purple week, this admirable week, this purpled week, this bloody week, red like a purple rose, those thirty thousand dead, thirty thousand shot. And for Paris the halo, the tragic halo of this double siege. No, isn’t it so. Then what are you talking about? Bring me only your dead, then. Come now, let us count them.

Where is your week. What shall be your feast? What your anniversary? What day shall be the day of your commemoration? What day shall the little arrivistes who come after celebrate, organize your glorious fiftieth, your centenary, your bi-, your five-hundredth anniversary. All that is needed for history. Where is your this tragic week, the most beautiful perhaps of all, week of May, by which May is stained for its temporal eternity, tragic week, great as the antique, greater, so powerfully, so greatly tragic, so sweet to me cruel. So much grandeur, so much baseness(es). Thirty thousand martyrs; thirty thousand dead; thirty thousand murders; thirty thousand crimes. Devotions without name. Thirty thousand sacrifices; thirty thousand follies. Terror and murder. And in all that, mingled, concierge stories. The slaking of hatreds. The luxury of murder and of blood. A mad pride. An unconcern still more admirable. The concierge(s) king(s). So much bravery as in the (most) heroic times. An exercise of treason as in the lowest times of Roman abjections; a play of delations more than imperial, more than triumviral; and an exercise, a play of fidelities more than antique, a celebration of hospitality more than antique, more than Hellenic, more than Odyssean, and more than Priam at the feet of Achilles. And as much hatred and as much charity as in the full thirteenth century. A sort of bursting again at a distance, at what a distance, a flash suddenly burst forth, at twenty centuries, at seven and four centuries, of all the antique and of all the Christian. So much infamy, so much ignominy, so much ignobility. And so much heroic mischievousness. You speak to me, my friend, of illness and of weariness. You are going to speak to me of potion. Yes, you take some euonymine Thibault, doubtless, perhaps aloin, the latest improvement. You understand how much I despise all these drugs. And how much of a churl you must indeed be to dare speak thus in public, (even in private), of all these questions of drug. You would speak to me of ipeca. That smells, my friend, of the regimental infirmary. You would speak to me of pills, of doctors and of pharmacists. Let us leave all these herbalists. Sickrooms are not my affair. And liniments. And flasks. And potions. And tisanes, which are too sugared. How can you drink that? Those flat tisanes, those drinks, that flat air. All that makes one so sick at heart. All the sick are for me imaginary invalids. I need a death well mown down. As for hospitals I need only field hospitals. And even then, eh, one must not speak of them too much. I am not on duty this week. Public and private hospitals are not my business. I make no use of illnesses, neither the prayer for the good, nor the prayer for the bad use of illnesses. I am not even demoniacal. The tragic combat of life and of death does not interest me, when it is pursued in the sheets of the bed. Then I do not say that it is not interesting. Only it concerns other persons, doesn’t it, who concern themselves with other things, with things such as salvation. With sainthood. I make a very great difference between the different liquids that may exude, or extravasate, from the human body. Blood is a noble liquid. To make blood flow, to cause blood to be shed, that is very well. An impure blood must water our furrows. I have on the contrary only contempt for more or less flatulent mucosities. Bloody debris no longer says anything to me. Humors are disgusting to me like the tisanes themselves. This Lannes even at bottom (one of my children, however, but do I really have children?) ceases to interest me as soon as by the administration of a small-caliber cannonball he has the right kneecap broken and the left ham shredded. Singular destiny. He did not belong to me before, he does not belong to me, he no longer belongs to me afterward. Before what? Before entering into my corps of volunteers. When he began, he had not yet entered into my contingents. Son of a stable-boy, dyer’s apprentice, one may say all one likes, and tell us stories about the little folk, about the little trades, about economic history, about the history of the little folk and of the little trades, about the history of labor, I do not know this Jean Lannes. You may do what you will, he did not exercise a historical trade. You may compose all the manuals you like. And create chairs. There shall always be historical trades and non-historical trades. But there is a Jean Lannes whom I know. It is the one who is from Lectoure; he began as sergeant-major in the second battalion of the volunteers of the Gers. You shall ask news of him from the Prince of Sievers. You know that I have decided that those who contracted an engagement in the battalions of the Revolution and of the Empire and the conscripts contracted ipso facto an engagement in my historical contingents; that, that engagement is equivalent to a voucher for glory. My recruiting bureaus worked much among those volunteers. They signed two engagements together, one, valid, for the fatherland; the second, valid, for me. He was long of mine. He was a hard man. But I began to feel that I was experiencing the need to disavow him when his knee and his ham found themselves in the trajectory of that small-caliber cannonball. For he was beginning thus to become suspect of wishing to become a candidate for becoming hospital material. It was on the road of that German village. He had had that business with Marshal Bessières, or rather upon Marshal Bessières. A road toward Essling, a road toward Aspern. Those days of the Danube and of Vienna which already pulled, which already showed the cord, which smelled of, which announced the difficultiosities of the ulterior difficulties, the distant and already near acrimonies, narrownesses, the imminent stranglings, the tightenings, the penuries, the parsimonies of the final, of the definitive retreats, of the disaster. Ah those were battles, victories of mature age, quarreled-over battles. Heavy victories. They were no longer the young, the beautiful battles of youth and of childhood of the campaign of Italy. The supple, the slender, the dashing battles. When one is young they had had triumphant mornings. The Archduke Charles conceived no less than (the hope) (and the project) of throwing the French army into the Danube. It was already quite a bold idea for an Austrian. Bad sign: the Austrians, (the (former) Imperials) were beginning (to dare) to have ideas; quite bold ones. That an archduke should have had the idea of throwing a French army into a Danube, that was grave. The least grave was that he came near succeeding in it. The Danube too had the idea of overflowing. And then by dint of fighting one lost people. One wore oneself out. One lost Saint-Hilaire. One lost notably Lannes, Jean Lannes. The ambulances. The destruction of the French army? One lost Pouzet. Some hundred paces in the direction of Stadt-Enzersdorf. Seated on the edge of another ditch. A few sombre reflections at the edge of a ditch, the hand over the eyes, and the legs crossed one over the other,… when a small cannonball of three, launched by the cannon of Enzersdorf, comes ricocheting.

It was then that he began to leave my domain. It was very hot for an amputation. He died in one of the best houses of Ebersdorf. There had been that flooding of the river. The marshal’s situation was as good as possible during the first four days following his wound… But the great heats that had been overwhelming us for some time redoubled in intensity, and their effect produced a very unfortunate result on the wounded man. That is what we call hospital rot. A burning fever seized him, and soon a frightful delirium came on. The marshal, always preoccupied with the critical situation in which he had left the army, believed himself still on the field of battle; he called out loud for his aides-de-camp, ordering one to make the cuirassiers charge, another to bring the artillery to such-and-such a point, etc., etc… In vain Doctor Yvan and I sought to calm him, he no longer understood us; his over-excitation kept growing; he no longer even recognized the Emperor!… This state lasted several days without the marshal sleeping a single instant, or ceasing to fight imaginarily!… At last, in the night of the 29th to the 30th, he refrained from giving battle orders; a great prostration succeeded the delirium; he recovered all his mental faculties, recognized me, pressed my hand, spoke of his wife and of his five children, of his father… and, as I was very close to his bedside, he leaned his head on my shoulder, seemed to doze, and breathed his last!… It was May 30 at daybreak.

A few moments after this fatal event, the Emperor arrived for his morning visit; I thought I should go to meet His Majesty, to announce to him the unfortunate catastrophe, and to urge him not to enter the apartment infected with putrid miasmas;…

You see that I was indeed right to tell you that for several days already this unfortunate one no longer belonged to me, that he was beyond my frontiers, that he had passed, that his body had passed the frontiers of my (narrow) domain. I am not like the Emperor Napoleon, myself: I do not enter into an apartment infected with putrid miasmas. I am like those two valets de chambre: Terrible moral and physical shocks had shaken my health; my wound, very simple at first and easy to cure, if, after receiving it, I had been able to enjoy some rest of body and of mind, had become horribly inflamed during the ten days I had just spent in terrible anguish and continual fatigues; for no one had seconded me in the cares the marshal’s frightful position required, not even his two valets de chambre. One of them, a kind of mirliflor, had abandoned his master from the very first days, on the pretext that the bad odor of the wounds turned his stomach. The second valet de chambre showed more zeal, but the putrid emanations, which a heat of 30 degrees rendered still more dangerous, forced him to keep to his bed, and I was obliged to bring in a military infirmarian, a man full of good will, but whose unknown face, and above all whose costume, seemed to displease the marshal, who would take nothing but from my hand. I therefore watched over him day and night;…

Besides, he had dragged on too long, that marshal. He had dragged on nine days. That is too much. What I need, myself, is a death with a date. Baudin, for example, there is a (fine) success. He had had nothing to do all his life long, that fellow. He made the death of Baudin. You tell me that it is often more difficult. To do something all the length of one’s life. I know it better than you. It is always more difficult. Only that enters or does not enter into my measures. Valmy was a little battle of nothing at all. A cannonade. A mill, as I was telling you. Hats on bayonets. For a difficult battle, no, it was not a difficult battle. And yet the cannon of Valmy shall thunder eternally. It was indeed the day of the invading clamors. And the descending ones. A hundred other battles, more heroic, infinitely more difficult, shall never have the same resonance. That is not my concern. The whole question is to be well placed. It is the very mystery of destiny, the destination of the event. This taking of the Bastille, what could be easier? Infinitely easier than anything you do. Is it not so; it was hot; a superb July sun; one had only to let oneself go, to take the Bastille. One had only to stoop to take it. It was not taking the Bastille that would have been difficult. Everything comes from the moment when one falls. And, what is the same, from the place where one falls. All the little laundresses of Paris were in love with all the gardes françaises. It is well known. We have all learned that in Madame Sans-Gêne. Only, there it is, it was the Bastille. There were ten centuries of monarchy behind. There was the national festival before. Five centuries according to the historians; but at least ten centuries counting like Victor Hugo. It was the threshold of a great event. And those stones, that they hurled to the ground, especially the next day, were not stones like everyone else’s. You others are badly placed.

You are not even placed at all.

Thus spoke her sad and superb voice. Trivial sometimes, for she is the master of the hour. And besides she affected the factitious brutality of military language. We shall not believe her in it. Nourished in other disciplines, nourished in cultures, nourished in other philosophies, we know for certain, we know, we have learned, we have known with full certainty that the gaze of history is not the only gaze and is not the whole gaze. It is only a gaze of emplacement, of place, it is she who says so, of relativity of places, a gaze of perspective. It is, it can be, a gaze of truth. It is not, far from it, it cannot be, in any way, far from it in everything, a gaze of reality, and above all a gaze of exhaustion of reality. It is in no degree a total gaze, a gaze of the totality. Nourished in other philosophies, other philosophies have taught us, one philosophy notably has revealed to us that reality has a wholly other price, that it has an intrinsic value infinitely other, infinitely superior, that it has infinitely other exigencies, that it requires, that it demands wholly other calculations, that it makes us make wholly other reckonings, and that we are never done with it. We know, we know with full certainty, we have learned, we have known that the temporal gaze of history is neither the total gaze, nor the definitive gaze, that the realities of consciousness are not reducible in any way, and far from it by at least an infinity, to the temporal gaze of history, to a gaze of perspective, temporal. Even were the gaze of history not what it is, even were it not, what it is, infinitely fragmentary, fragmented, infinitely precarious, infinitely incomplete, even in its own kind, infinitely broken, in its order, even were it, what it is not, what it cannot be and shall never be able to be, an entire gaze, in its kind, in its order, a total gaze, a gaze to which nothing, by an unbelievable, impossible hypothesis, would be lacking, to which nothing would be refused, to which nothing would be hidden, masked, to which nothing would escape, even then, even in this impossible, unbelievable hypothesis, even then, even were the gaze of history to comport, as such, no defectiveness, even were it by impossibility totally complete in its order, even then it would be, still, infinitely far from grasping, at bottom, from exhausting reality, it would still be there, in this sense, infinitely a stranger, it would still be lacking, infinitely lacking by an infinity, for it to grasp and exhaust, for it to be able to grasp and exhaust reality, for it is, never, and it shall never be anything but a gaze of perspective, and reality is not all in perspective, no, in no way an eternal gaze, a gaze everywhere present, everywhere contemporary, which grasps, embraces, exhausts everything in one gaze. Which is to say, which amounts to saying that it falls short by two infinities at least, multiplied so to speak one by the other, that history grasps, exhausts the reality of the event; the one in that she is infinitely incomplete in her own order; the other in that even were she by impossibility complete therein, even then she would be only a gaze as it were linear, a gaze of perspective.

Now reality is no more made for a perspective or exhausted by a perspective than a landscape is made for a perspective or exhausted by a perspective. Here as there, and precisely because the landscape itself is a reality, a fragment of reality, a sort of reality, an integral part of reality, here as there one needs at least, in the first degree, an infinity of perspectives; and one must besides come out of that, one must in the second degree come out of every perspective, come out of the very order of perspective and of perspectives, try to contemplate with a wholly other gaze.

— With what brilliance shone in the battle…

*« Who shall give us back, said this heroic man, * *On the banks of the Rhine, at Jemmape, at Fleurus, * *Those peasants, sons of the Republic, * *To the frontier at her voice come running? *

*Barefoot, breadless, deaf to cowardly alarms, * *All to glory went at the same pace. * *The Rhine alone can temper our arms anew. * God, my children, grants you a fine death!

*« With what brilliance shone in the battle * Those blue uniforms by Victory worn out.
*Liberty mingled with the grapeshot * *Broken irons and shattered scepters. *

*The nations, queens by our conquests, * *Crowned with flowers the brow of our soldiers. * *Happy is he who died in those festivals! * God, my children, grants you a fine death! »

It will even be necessary, says history, I shall have to conduct an inquiry, and a serious one, a philological and critical inquiry at last on those beautiful verses. For that Béranger died in ‘57, and Les Châtiments were composed at least since ‘51. And it is quite impossible not to recognize in those beautiful stanzas some of the most beautiful verses of my great friend. The admirable verse of L’Expiation:

Understanding that they were going to die in that festival,

is entirely there:

Happy is he who died in those festivals!

And the accentuations of the Soldiers of Year II: (on passive obedience)

They sang, they went, the soul without dread
And the feet without shoes!

*To the east, to the west, everywhere, to the south, to the poles, * With old muskets ringing on their shoulders,

*Crossing torrents and mountains, * *They went * (I no longer recall)
*Without rest, without sleep, elbows pierced, without rations, * *They went, proud, joyous, and blowing in brass horns * *Like demons! *

*Shocks, encounters, combats; and Joubert on the Adige, * *And Marceau on the Rhine! *

*The drums, the shells, the bombs, the cymbals, * *And thy laughter, O Kléber! *

*And one saw marching those superb barefoot ones * *Upon the dazzled world! *

Sadness and fear were unknown to them.

I know well that it is the same subject. But there are nevertheless some singular coincidences between all those two texts, and that still resembles parallel suppliants. I adore these problems, as you know. These are what one calls problems of history, historical problems, problems of literary history. This parallelism is a little suspect to me. That is what I like. Researches shall have to be made. It is my office, and my trade and my reason for being. I shall even have to see whether I shall not have a thesis on it made by one of my young acolytes.

At bottom I am divided (that is what I like). This Victor Hugo is my greatest friend, as you know. He had such a secret affection, such a deep affinity, such a complicity with me for the grandeurs of the order I excel in measuring. He is an old accomplice of mine. If he stole from this Béranger, so much the better. And he had a hundred times the right. It is royal. A man like him takes his own everywhere. But I also like this Béranger, because what I love above all are the mediocre. I am a kind of universal suffrage lengthwise.

Thus spoke Clio, daughter of Memory. Let us leave Clio, daughter of Memory, to speak. For we know, we too by all the texts and by the monuments, we know that there are other Muses. We know that there are other disciplines. We know that there are other daughters of Memory, daughters perhaps a little more insubordinate. I mean much more free.

Let us leave the old woman to speak. Mistress of error(s); mother of impostures. She has not made the whole reckoning.

Let us leave the old woman to speak. She who cannot; and who will not; and who does not know how to keep silent; she who does not know the price of silence. Nourished in other disciplines, we know that history is sporadic and that she gives us only ashes. But not even continuous, total ashes, a continuity and a totality, at least, of ashes. A system of ashes. No, a few discontinuous, disrupted ashes, fragments even of ashes, breakings of ashes in the hollow of the hand. Solvet saeclum in favilla. — Solvit; solvitur; solutum est. The temporal century shall not wait for the eternal reign to resolve itself into ashes. Every day of time in the present we see it resolving itself therein. As, in measure, it passes. In all the immense past, in all the present, as the real event passes, we have seen, we know, everyone has seen, before our eyes we see every day that by that very fact and automatically, becoming the historical event, automatically too and in this very fact it becomes almost instantaneously a historical event; from real event that it was, that it had just been, that it was at the instant, a historical event: less than nothing, an ash, in comparison with the real. A temporal ash. A living dog is worth more than a dead lion. The temporal century shall leave, already leaves only a handful; less than a handful; less than a pinch of ashes: a (vague) trailing of temporal ashes. And not only ashes; but disparate ashes; and the most inconsistent in the world. Traces of ashes, what we read in the (chemical) analyses of mineral waters, on the labels stuck on the bottles. Not only is the world ash and shall return into ash. But on the one hand this ash is not a complete ash. It is an infinitely incomplete ash. A dust of ashes. And on the other hand already we see that it returns there every day. And that every day of time it has returned there. Memento, let it remember: it does not even have to remember. For it is at once, it is presently, it is at every instant that there is accomplished before our eyes the falling into ash, the final and irrevocable, the definitive, the already temporally eternal incineration and cinerary deliquescence. Before our eyes the temporal judgment is accomplished every day, the centuries are accomplished at all times. Before our eyes as the whole event, on a single front, on an immense front (like an immense camp of Israel which would constantly fall on its whole immense front of standard, constantly renewed, constantly new), as the whole event encamped, on this whole universal front, falls like an immense incessant cascade, like a cataract, perpetual, regular, inexhaustible, temporally eternal, barring for this inexhaustible fall with a lateral and thus perpendicular dam the course, the immense, temporally universal river of the event, as on this front the whole event falls, descends inexhaustibly from the present into the past, from what is being done to what has been done, from the discussed to the acquired, from what is in question to what is acquired; in this measure and on all this front, by that very fact and at the same time, in this very fact and by the same adventure, of the same movement, after the same oscillation, of the same fall, of the same descent, by the same event the event falls into ash. Incessantly before our eyes. Incessantly since the beginning. Incessantly until the ends. By the same event, by the same history, by the same constant episode, by the same part of its history and of its own event the event, from present becoming past, falling past, at once and also and in this very fact, from real becomes historical, that is to say cinerary even, ash of event; falls historical, and it shall never climb up this slope again; and it does not even become historical except in the sense and to the measure in which it becomes cinerary. And reciprocally. For it is all one.

— I am, she says, la grande Mademoiselle. I need sieges and accoutrements, the faubourg Saint-Antoine and war attires. Do not speak to me of tisanes. I am neither a Sister nor a Lady of Charity, nor am I nor shall I ever be a Repentant Daughter. My kingdom is of this world. It is the accoutrement, it is the arming, it is the equipage that makes history.

I am not a Daughter of Charity, nor a Lady of the Good Shepherd, nor a Daughter of the Merci-Dieu, nor a Daughter of Peace, nor a Hospitable Lady of the Mercy of Saint Gervais, nor a Little Sister of the Poor, of the little Poor, nor a sister of Saint Vincent de Paul, nor those sisters who tend the sick in this nursing-home.

Let us leave Clio, daughter of Memory, to speak. The mother has other daughters; the old mother, the first mother, the common mother. Let us leave her to speak and to talk who makes a profession, who makes a trade of speaking and talking, but who has received this gift of not being able to speak and not being able to talk except by (some) echoes. Let us leave these echoes to resound indefinitely prolonged. Nourished in other disciplines, not only do we know the price and the value of silence, and the great knowledge obtained in silence; not only do we know the price and the value of reality; not only do we know that reality is not exhausted by a perspective, by a single perspective; but we know that perhaps, that doubtless it would not be exhausted even by an infinity of perspectives, so long as they were and as they remain perspectives, gazes of perspective, that there must be something else and another gaze, a wholly other one, being perhaps not even made at all to be, to become an object of perspective, a matter of perspective, to be in the end put in perspective. And one must assuredly not put it at all. Into anything. Neither into perspective. Nor, and notably, into a system.

Let us leave Clio, daughter of Memory, sister of the eight others, to speak. Let us leave her to call back to mind and to try to call back to mind. And since she is herself and since she cannot in the end be, and since she can do nothing but an exercise of memory, since in the last analysis history is and can be and can do nothing but an exercise and at most an accommodation of memory, memento, let her remember, let her recall to mind therefore; and let her recall herself, let her think first of herself; let her exercise her own memory first on herself, on herself; let her recall herself first, let her begin by recalling herself; let her recall that she is ash herself; and dust and powder; the first and the last of all and more than all, that she alone even of all, in a certain sense, is dust; and not even like the dust of the road, which at least makes pretense of being continuous, which at least offers, which affects an appearance, an image, gross and imperfect, a semblance of a continuity; an image of road, an itinerary image; that she is hardly even a discontinuity, a vague alignment of points of discontinuity; (and) that she does not even have to return into dust; that she is so already; that she is essentially dust, by her nature, by her function, by her matter, by her office.

Born of the same time, that all that is temporal is temporary.

Nourished in other disciplines we know that reality is as it is, not as it appears; that it is what it is, not what it appears; that it is worth what it is worth, not what it measures; that one must grasp it as it is, as much as we can, in no way only graze it forever with these circumferential gazes. With these grazings, which touch only outcroppings. That reality is what it is, not, in no way what it yields to registration, what it leaves in the hands of residual methods; that it is all that it is, not only, in no way only its own residue.

We know that reality is what it is, is worth what it is worth, in no way what it is reported, what it is recounted, what it is even seen, what it is esteemed, what it is honored, what it is considered, what it is glorified, what it is commemorated, called back to mind, what it is gazed upon with that perpetually tangential gaze. This history makes us see only setting suns. Those suns one awaits are setting suns. And she wants to make us believe at least that they are setting suns; for it to be said that they are not entirely fallen. Oblique rays, brilliant flames; suns prolonged on the summits of the tents. And the very brilliances, and the resonances of her voice, which appear eternal, are themselves only echoes prolonged on the summits of the tents.

Her voice is only a voice of echoes.

A gaze of perspective and thus of circumspection. Now what reality is least, is circumspect.

We are vanquished; and we are vanquished of the most ungrateful defeat. Firstly, in the first degree, we are the vanquished. Secondly, in the second degree, we are historically beaten of a defeat such, so small, so unpleasant to see, to the point that it is not even ugly, so mean, so insignificant, so unpleasing, so disobliging, that no one shall ever concern himself with us, if it be not perhaps to judge us, to consider us as the last of imbeciles; which shall be upon us, let us hasten to say it, the true historical point of view.

We are vanquished. We are so even so much, so completely, that I do not know whether history shall ever have registered an example like the one we furnish. I do not know whether the same history, that we have permitted ourselves already to have named, shall ever have known vanquished men like us, beaten like us, not ashamed, certainly, but shamefully beaten; not by a defeat that brings glory, to which go the supreme honors, — (of glory, for a secret instinct, a secret warning, a secret remorse warns us that there is always some impurity in success, a coarseness in victory, a certain impurity, at least metaphysical, a remnant, a residue of impurity, a residual impurity in fortune; and that thus and for the same cause and of the same movement there is nothing truly, totally pure, and thus totally great, but defeat, provided that it be valiantly, gloriously borne, valiantly, gloriously acquired so to speak; sustained; and that there is nothing, there can be nothing of true, of total purity except in misfortune; and that it is therefore rightly that the great secret honors of glory, the supreme honors, have therefore always historically gone to misfortune; to great disasters; and history here, once in her order, and her order accepted, and put in her place, which is great, has never been mistaken about it) ; — but of a defeat the most ill-come that one can imagine; the most disgraceful, and disgraced, the most petty-folk that one was ever able to make and that has ever been made and succeeded in being made. To be vanquished, is nothing. It would be nothing. It can on the contrary even be much. It can be all; the supreme. To be vanquished is nothing: (but) we have been beaten. We have even been thrashed. In a few years society, this modern society, before we have even had time to sketch the critique of it, has fallen into a state of decomposition such, into a dissolution such that I believe, that I am assured that history had never seen anything comparable. I do not believe that egoism notably and the preoccupations of interest had ever fallen to this degree of baseness. That great historical decomposition, that great dissolution, that great precedent that we name in literary fashion the rot of the Roman decadence, the dissolution of the Roman Empire, and that it suffices to name with you, dear monsieur Sorel, the ruin of the antique world, was nothing in comparison with the dissolution of the present society, in comparison with the dissolution and the decline of this society, of the present modern society. There were doubtless then many more crimes and a little more vice(s) still. But there were also infinitely more resources. That rot was full of seeds. They did not have that sort of promises of sterilities that we have today, if one may so say, if these two words can go together.

We are vanquished. I believe, I am assured that never has history registered, has had to register vanquished men like us, vanquished as much as we. In less than one hundred and twenty years the work not of the French Revolution, but the result of the abortion of the French Revolution and of the work of the French Revolution under the blows, under the weight, under the thrust of reaction, of universal barbarism is literally annihilated. Completely. And not only is there nothing left of it. Nor traces of anything. But no traces of promises even, nor of any ulterior fecundity.

We are vanquished before being born. We are born in a people of the vanquished. We are vanquished militarily. We were born, a little time after the defeat, after the disaster, after the invasion, in a militarily vanquished people. We are hereditarily and solidarily the vanquished of a disastrous war. It must be said. For a long time we believed that we should be new generations, that we should make a new work, untainted; that we were not marked, tainted with this disaster; with the trace of this disaster. A work not marked in advance. At least irrevocably. One must come back to it. One must yield to it. One must have the courage to say it. All that we do, all that we have wished to do for fifteen years is commanded by the memory, by an implacable memory, by the trace of that antecedent disaster, by that antecedent disaster itself. By the situation it made for us in the world and by the situation it made for us in ourselves. For ourselves in the world; for ourselves in ourselves. We had believed, a little naively perhaps, that we could speak as if we had not been beaten in ‘70. The event has reminded us, as always, a little harshly, a little bitterly, as always, that reality never admits the as if; that it admits only reality itself; that the as if can be a language of science, that it is even the essential articulation of the language of science, but that it cannot be only that; that in reality one is admitted to speak only the language of reality; even. And we have learned by the same teaching, contrary to all the teachings of all modern historians, and notably of the professional antimilitarists; we have learned, we have known, we have been taught, the event has reminded us, as always, harshly, bitterly, as always, that the military realities are of an importance of the first order, of a fundamental importance, as the substructure of the other realities, of the greatest number of material realities, of economic realities, of realities of power, and of a very great number of realities of (the) spirit, of intellectual and mental realities; moral even. I shall dare to say: religious.

Experience has shown us, once more, the event has reminded us, harshly, bitterly, once more, that the vanquished cannot speak like the victor, or at least like him who is, who has been neither vanquished nor victor; that he cannot speak the same language, nor hold the same tone, that he may try what he will, that he cannot, that he has not the right to the same tone; that there is not the same physical right, so to speak, that it is irrevocable; that a military defeat lasts as long as it is not repaired; that a situation of military vanquished lasts as long as it is not revoked; that there may indeed be amnesties for civil wars, amnesties which are moreover generally, especially today, parliamentary games, games of parliamentary politics; but that there is not, that there can be neither military amnesia nor amnesty, for military events, antecedent, for situations born of military events. For situations made military. In the severe reckoning of military forces, of events, of military situations. Because military force is not only a brutal force, but above all a sort of pure force, I mean a force more purely force. It is here a question of flavor. One may do what one will; one may try to make oneself believe it: the taste of defeat is not the taste of victory, as the resonance is not the same, and it is not even the taste of either one or the other. He who swallows his defeat, he who is vanquished, his saliva that he swallows has not the same taste as he who is victorious or as he who is neither one nor the other. It is an irrevocable taste, until the defeat itself has been revoked.

Not only can the vanquished irrevocably no longer speak to the world the same language as the victor or even as him who is neither one nor the other; but in himself and in his own country, in his own blood, in his own people, the vanquished, the vanquished people cannot speak to himself the same language as the victorious people. For the rest of the world is there, listening, intervening. At least as witness, dully, silently, tacitly, presently, by its mere presence, even and especially when it does not intervene. Our great-grandfathers of the French Revolution clearly perceived it, who, having wished to speak another language, a new language, simply to substitute one language for another, a new one for an old, the new-régime language for the old-régime language, soon almost all Europe intercalated itself, ended by intercalating itself; opposed itself; and there was trouble. Our less great contemporaries shall perhaps soon perceive it, if, as everything permits us to suppose, they have the intention of changing language once more, of substituting once more one language for another, a new one for an old, the syndicalist language for the parliamentary language. Our fathers were not able to speak (to themselves however) the revolutionary language, the new-régime language without war intervening, and victory or defeat. And one had to choose. Our lesser contemporaries (and when I say lesser I know nothing of it, (and) I say it by habit, for in the end those great revolutionaries were not so great before the Revolution, a few years before the great one, and even at the threshold of the great one, and even quite some time after the beginning of the great one, and we do not know in any way, no one can augur, even by habit, no one can conjecture, no one knows what tomorrow shall be, what order of greatness shall come to us tomorrow), our contemporaries shall not be able, that tomorrow, to speak to themselves (to themselves however) the revolutionary language, the syndicalist language without the same war intervening, who knows? a greater war, if possible, and again and always to be victor or vanquished. To choose. Our master M. Sorel (master being in good French here not, naturally, him who commands, but him from whom one has (much) learned, him from whom one has received essential teachings) our master M. Sorel had not only announced long ago (since it is several years already) what could be and what should be the socialist future of the syndicates, but he saw very well, and said very well, and I believe indeed that he wrote somewhere that there would truly be only one difficulty, that there was perhaps only one impediment to a triumph of a socialist and revolutionary syndicalism: (it is first the limitation of human nature, one has just seen it; but this is constant, henceforth acquired, is of full right, has no longer therefore any need even to be said) it was to know what Europe will do (one says Europe by habit and because it is the nearest) (but from near to near soon it will be the world); that is to say that it will be to know exactly, and perhaps and doubtless on a greater scale, what it was to know one hundred and twenty years ago; and that for the syndicalist Revolution that is ready, and that will be an economic and incidentally political Revolution, as for the French Revolution that has been made, and that has remained almost purely a political Revolution, there is only one residue, only one thickness, only one difficulty: the world; the rest of the world; the other world; to know only what the world will say, as one has known what it said. To know what the others will do. How Europe will react. And as the others are not us, and have never been us, and as they have no desire nor any possibility to become so, despite certain deceptive appearances, and the talk of our humanitarians, there is every chance that it will not say as we say, any more than the first time; for, being other, that it should say otherwise than we, and that it should easily come to saying and doing against us. And then all our pacifists and our antimilitarists shall know the price of war. Defending an order, or a new disorder, they shall moreover make marvelous wars. At least one must hope so. These pacifists and these antimilitarists always make, when necessary, admirable soldiers. Moreover is it not a war that they perpetually sustain against us, against the nation, a beginning of civil war; already a war; preparations, exercises, military ones, apprenticeships, great maneuvers of civil war. Which give them a certain training. What people was more pacific, more pacifist, officially and really, formally and intentionally, than the French people on the eve of that great upheaval, military. One half was so spiritually, alas, with Voltaire; one half with Rousseau was so sensibly. Never was one so much given to tears, and to the bleating of peace. A few years had not elapsed before this people inscribed the most marvelous military epic the world has ever had to register. Today we are led back to the same situation, to a very analogous situation. God grant that it have at least the same greatness, in default of the success, which temporal is never given definitive. The same situation shall reproduce itself: France on one side, the world, represented by a great part of the world, on the other. In fact there is no longer in fact anything in France between the régime and I do not say a syndicalist revolution, but the triumph of a syndicalist revolution; there is no longer a thickness, no longer a sheet of paper. But there is that external thickness, that external film: the world. At the moment of passing from one language to another, at the moment of substituting for the democratic and parliamentary language the syndicalist and statutory language, our syndicalists, to whom nothing internally is any longer opposed, shall know, our antipatriots shall experience that in the carnal system and even in a temporal mystical system, in every temporal system, there must be a body, a temporal flesh that shall be the support, material, that shall make itself the prop, the matter of an idea. It is very exactly, in the political and social order, in the historical order, the problem of the relation of body to spirit. As in the natural creation we know naturally no spirit which has not the support of some body (generally some memory which has not the support of some matter), which is not incorporated in some way, and incarnated (and it is even the only definition perhaps a little serious that one can give of the natural creation) likewise or rather of the same movement, of the same consideration, of the same definition in this same creation, natural, we know naturally no idea, no political or social spirit, — I shall dare to say, religious, — no historical spirit in the end which has realized itself, which has even been able to appear without a certain corpus, without a body of people, without a foothold, without a support, without a mechanism, without a prop of people, without a matter, without a people that should be all that, without a body-people, in a word without a fatherland. The sage needed the Hellenic city; the prophet needed the race and the people of Israel; the saint needed the Christian people. And certain peoples of the Occident, at least to begin with. And there is not even up to this sort of temporal preformation of the Roman Empire in and for the advent of Christianity, so important, which carnal, corporeal, material, does not appear to us indeed of an importance as it were excessive, very truly disquieting. Our positivists shall learn metaphysics as our pacifists shall learn war. Our positivists shall learn metaphysics by rifle-shots. Mutual. I mean that they shall give and that they shall receive. They shall even learn psychology. They shall learn the relation of the body of a people to a spirit of a people. Our antimilitarists shall learn war, and shall make it very well. Our antipatriots shall learn the price of a carnal fatherland, of a city, of a race, of a communion even carnal, and what a little earth is worth, for a Revolution to lean upon.

Sons of vanquished, born in a people of vanquished, we have been vanquished ourselves. And in person, if I may so say. Vanquished in our people and as a people, a first time, in the first degree, we have been so a second time, in the second degree, in a redoubt, interior, in an inner and concentric circle, in all our action within our people. Vanquished a first time in race so to speak, in our race and in our stock and in our people and as it were in effigy and in anticipated representation, by a kind of prior delegation, in image and more than in similitude, internally then in an inner concentric circle we have been so ourselves, without image, (this time), and without delegation. Without any deputation. Defeat begets defeat and until the revocation of the defeat it is a vicious circle of linked compromises, of progressions, of descending circular regressions. It is not only outer communication that is cut to a vanquished people, remained vanquished; it is not only outer conversation that remains forbidden to it: it is, our revolutionaries shall experience it, even the inner communication, even the conversation within oneself, even with oneself. At the corner of the fire. Fire, hearth. The first of goods: liberty; the simple, the intimate, the true, the free talk at the corner of the chimney. At this corner of this old national chimney. Marked for us with such arms. And conversation even in the secret of the heart, for defeat, the taste of defeat reaches even to the intimate voice, alters even the resonance of the most secret inner voice. We have been vanquished personally. Others, everyone, all our masters, have consoled themselves for this setback; more than for this setback, infinitely more; infinitely more than for a defeat: for that fraudulent abortion of the Dreyfus affair. By dint of consoling themselves for it, some, alas, soon rejoice in it; secretly. Almost publicly. But I shall never console myself for it. Because I insist on being ridiculous, and alone, and deplorable. And because I insist on being ridiculous I shall always speak of it. A unique occasion had been offered to regenerate this people. A fortune. A stroke of fortune. An occasion that shall never present itself again. As there are not two, in the life of a man. In the life of a people. As it does not happen twice. As there are not given two to the same person, man or people. To the same history. To the same adventure. This crime inaugurated our public life, our civic life. In reality it inaugurated all our life; and one cannot undo one’s inauguration. Irrevocably it shall command all our life of this time; not only our public and civic life; but all our intellectual and moral, mental life; and even physical. For there is a physical reach of all reaches, a carnal reach, a physical inscription of all ancient crimes. It inaugurated, too, and together, and as an ensemble, from decline to decline, from demagogy to demagogy it has commanded, it has made that decline in which we are; it has put us where we are.

I shall never keep silent about it. I shall remain, I shall stay, I shall let myself always be inconsolable about it. I have never so felt, so clearly, what a historical event is, but a single time, and that it is always a historical monument, I have never experienced it so much; but a single time; it was a young fellow of eighteen years, who had come; and to whom I came, I know not how, to speak of the Dreyfus affair. A young fellow. I recall very well that it is only a few years that a man of eighteen years was a man. I spoke, I spoke before this young fellow as before myself, as with myself; as with someone of my age, of my time; of my class. He answered me very honestly. I went on, I went, I went. I told him a little of what I have just written here, and of what I hope indeed that I shall finish writing one day or another. I went on along my great fine road. When once he answered me so politely, so honestly, so smally, so submissively; so full, so carried with respect, so carried with good will: Yes monsieur; that all of a sudden, all of a re-grasping I saw; I measured that it wasn’t getting through at all and that it would never get through; that he was not getting it at all and that they would never get it, that they all would temporally eternally never get it, those others, posterity, posteri, et posteri posterorum.

He was so docile. He had his hat in his hand. He was turning his hat in his fingers. He listened to me, listened to me. He drank in my words. He was getting information. He was learning. Alas he was learning history.

He was instructing himself. I have never so well understood as then, in a flash, so instantaneously felt what history was; and the unbridgeable abyss there is, that opens between the real event and the historical event; the total, absolute incompatibility; the total strangeness; the incommunication; the incommensurability: literally the absence of common measure even possible.

As I spoke he was listening to me entirely, he was hearing me entirely, he was drinking in all my words; and as I spoke he was not hearing me. Not a word; he was not hearing me at all. I was saying, I was pronouncing, I was enunciating, I was transmitting a certain Dreyfus affair, the real Dreyfus affair, in which I was steeped, in which I had not ceased to bathe; in which we have not ceased to be steeped, we others of this generation; it was what I call the Dreyfus affair. He was hearing, he was receiving a certain system, a certain arrangement, a certain theory, a certain arbitrariness, homothetic to the first; or rather, not homothetic to the first; nor in any way superposable upon the first, really and molecularly, histologically superposable; nor elementarily substitutable; but coarsely, practically, conveniently, finally and definitively good to be put in its place for whoever wishes, for whoever has an easy heart and contentment, for whoever is determined in advance to be content with it; as in an old French church one can always replace the abolished rose-window, in case of need, by some squares of plaster. It holds the same place; and even, for whoever wishes to be content with it, by the very substitution it has sensibly the same form.

Only it does not perform the same office.

Reality, the event of reality, the real event is that real rose-window with rose-flowers infinitely chiseled. History, the event of history are these squares of plaster which, as soon as the rose-window is abolished, we put in the same place, each of us all such as we are according to our little understanding, according to our little means and our little capacity. According to our little commerce. After the rose-window is abolished and only then and in default of the abolished rose-window when we are correct. Even before and if need be in demolishing it, ourselves, when we are in a hurry, when we are zealous, which is most frequent.

The world is the real rose-window infinitely chiseled, the rose-window of stone, the real roses of stone infinitely pushed forth, marvelously, more than marvelously, mysteriously rehollowed. History is the poor squares of plaster which in time of need, in the universal need, in poverty, we put sensibly in the same place.

I was giving him reality, he was receiving history. In what mysterious intercalary abyss was being made, was being operated, was being obtained the deperdition; the disappearance; the defection; in what abyss of memory itself; in what abyss was sinking the vessel precious among all, the vessel which makes but one voyage; in this abyss intercalated everywhere; (everywhere) between the demand and the response; between the departure and the arrival; between every demand and every response; between every departure and every arrival; in this mysterious abyss where one puts something in, something real: and without apparent rupture, under appearances of continuity, there comes out something wholly other; an imitation; a counterfeit; almost always a parody; a substitution; a substitute; a replacement; a thing wholly foreign: an intellectual operation: a history.

I was giving him reality, as to myself, as with myself, as before a friendly heart of the same age, as before someone who would have been of it, as before someone of within, (and it is exactly the sense of communion, of every communion), as with and to a contemporary. Forthwith and as it were immediately, as instantaneously in the same form, in the same words, in the same mould he was hearing this: history. In the same time he was hearing me already as a man of another time. (In the same time for me, for this time, which was the same time for me, for him on the contrary, for him strangely was analyzing itself at once, was decomposing itself into another time, into a foreign time; into another language, into a foreign language.) He was hearing me in a foreign language. That is to say, alas, that he was not hearing me at all. And even less. And what is marvelous, and what makes that one shall never come out of it, is that this language as perfectly foreign corresponds naturally even to its slightest elements. To the language of reality. It corresponds word for word. And even to its punctuations. So that as we live a discourse in the language of reality, as we go one can play it, the same one, just as well, if not better, and even better, and one plays it in the language of history. What I called the Dreyfus affair, with a certain intonation, he too called it the Dreyfus affair, by no other word, as you may well think, with the same intonation, but transported only into the register of respect.

So that what is marvelous, is that the conversation can continue all the time, without one’s ever hearing one another, and that in fact all conversations continue all the time, and one pretends to understand one another; and that death soon dismissing the real, soon there is nothing left but history that speaks; but it speaks all alone entirely substituted; element for element; piece for piece; only it is inorganic piece for organic piece, dead and calcareous element for living animal or vegetable element. It is a petrification. But we have too much interest in not noticing the substitution.

Never did I understand as much as in that grasping, in that flash, what is the gaping, the invincible inner contradictoriness of history; and that as soon as one is merely resolved to learn it, in that very fact and by that very fact one has already condemned oneself, in this mental attitude and by this single mental attitude alone, never to know it; I mean never any more to know the event of reality.

Never did I measure in such a flash, in such a grasping, that there is reality, and that there is the historical; that there is reality, the event of reality, and that there is history.

They are offset one from the other, offset of the one upon the other. Between the real event of reality and the feigned, imagined, imitated event of history an abyss is dug instantaneously everywhere, at every instant, in measure, automatically, a fissure, intercalary, an intercalation runs everywhere. A shivering, a shuddering, a shudder of secret rupture runs everywhere. A σεισμός. An irreducible shaking. — A perpetual degradation. And what is on the other side has nothing more in common with what is on this side.

Never did I see in such a flash, in such a grasping, that there is the present, and that there is the past. The present, whatever be the length of time, in which one moves. The past, wherever it reaches, already, wherever it advances, wherever it rises, wherever it has gained, whenever it begins at every instant, in which one does not move; and in which one has good reasons not to move.

For each man and for each event, for every elemental event, for every element, for every molecule of event there comes a minute, an hour, there falls an hour where it becomes historical, there strikes a certain stroke of midnight, on a certain village clock, when the event, from real, falls historical.

And as it was very clear I took advantage of that great clarity there was to see with the same gaze in the same light to see that one never has, that one never makes for oneself, that one can never make for oneself friends but of the same time and the same age, but of one’s same time, but contemporary friends; friends of the same time, of the same age, aequales, friends of the same company, of the same formation, of the same society, of the same world. Friends of the same call-up, of one and the same draft, of the one and only class. Friends of one (single) time, the only friends. And I gazed that one never begins again. Friends born, formed together, the only true friends. Friends of childhood, friends of family; friends of school, of little school, of primary school; friends of lycée; friends of regiment; friends of cahiers; together the only ones who are truly friends, literally; the only ones to whom this name befits, is exact. The only ones whom this name can ever clothe. The others do not understand. I naturally place the friendships of the Dreyfus affair, so secret, together among and within the friendships of the Cahiers. Immediately afterwards those who follow no longer understand us and shall never understand us. All the rest is highly honorable, what follows, and useful, and often beautiful; and there shall even be the pupils, alas, and there must be some. All that is not friendship. Friendship is a carnal operation that is made once in life. And which does not begin again. I mean that it is essentially an earthly operation, an operation of date, a temporal operation that is made, that is inscribed once, in a certain earth, at a certain date of the time of life. It is one of those operations which it is not given to man to begin again, to make twice, to imitate, to feign, to make up, to forge, to make as if. It is one of those operations which have in the life of man, in the career of man a unique value, an uncommutable and uninterchangeable price, a unique price, an unappreciable price, without equivalent, without possible counterpart, and so to speak a price without price. It is an operation of the order of the cradle, of the family, of the race, of the fatherland, of time, of date, of all this temporal order, of a unique, irreplaceable importance, where the operation is made but once.

For there is needed to determine it a recutting, an intersection: between the ascending, vertical line of race and the horizontal line of time.

Every friendship, for each man, is as it were a promotion. It is obtained by cutting a certain race, a certain history, which rises, each time by a certain time, by a certain date, which bars.

And when one misses it and in the measure in which one misses it (and one always misses it in some measure, like every human operation) one no more begins it again; it counts as played; one all the same has only that one time.

It is given several times to man to work out his salvation because it is neither essentially, nor above all efficiently, nor even originally doubtless of the earthly and of the carnal, of the temporal and of the earth-bound. And it is even one of the signs by which it is best seen, that it is a wholly other operation, for him who has a little the habit of the laboratory. But of all that is temporal, of all that is destined to fall into history, of all this order on the contrary, of all that falls under date and into and under place, nothing is rebeginnable or commutable, nothing is interchangeable. It is not given to man to begin or change anything of the temporal. Nothing of time and of place is displaced. Friendship is an operation of one time. All the temporal is an operation of one time. An operation not invented, not imaginary. It is not there that one can catch anything up, that a flash of genius or of grace pays for the whole length of a life. The greatest genius of the world does not replace having had such a cradle, such a fatherland, having come forth from such an earth-bound race. The greatest genius of the world also does not replace having had such a friendship, at such a date, in this place, such a cradle of friendship. Every man has, by his temporal birth, by his temporal situation, by his place, by his temporal time, by his taking of date, a certain zone of friendship, and no other, a certain zone in which he works, in which he can work, in which the event works, for or against him. A narrow zone, a sort of cut. It is not given to man to make for himself a friendship, to bind friendship except in a single generation, in a single promotion, in a single zone. The rest is otherwise. It is not given to man to make for himself another cradle, nor to remake for himself the same, in the end to make himself a second one of some sort, nor to prolong beyond measure, beyond the marked time, the use of this osier.

Charles Péguy

I also took advantage of the great clarity there was to see also and by that very fact that as I have had the honor to set forth we others of the Dreyfus affair shall never be for those who come after us anything but old fools. And those who come after us, my friends, soon that is everyone.

That is also why the clearings that death practices in the ranks of friendship have this character of irrevocable clearing and of antecedence of one’s own death. This definitive and already final character. These clearings are not like the clearings of forests, like the dark and light fellings, which shall set off again, which shall sprout again from the foot. Contrary to what happens in the other orders, in the orders of life and of vegetation and of fecundity of swarming, in friendship we have not to keep the places of those who disappear. They keep themselves quite well alone. No one comes to replace those who are missing. It is not as in military battles where behind the veterans there are the recruits, where it is enough therefore to close ranks, where behind the line regiments and the marching divisions there are the depot battalions. And it is truly here that a night of Paris repairs nothing at all.

1. Foutues was there, as one may suspect, solely for local color, and because history wished to put itself in the tone of its subject. It is well enough known what revolutionary language consists in. And also because it is a military language. — Editor’s note.