The Milliets. II. Farewells

The Milliets. II. Farewells

The Milliet Family

I

1852 — 1853

FIRST STAY IN GENEVA

Homesickness. — A schoolboys’ battle. — A prize for good marks. — A pretty debut for a future philosopher. — New songs. — A new exile.

1

Scarcely had he arrived in Switzerland when F. Milliet received from the freemasons the most cordial welcome. Colonel Humbert, in particular, soon became one of his most devoted friends.

The French exiles were numerous in Geneva, and my parents had the pleasure of finding there several of their friends from Le Mans. These fierce republicans, these so-called drinkers of blood, whom the Bonapartists portrayed as eating little children raw, were, I assure you, the gentlest men in the world, most of them learned, and as distinguished by heart as by intellect.

M. Silly, for example, was a true scholar. In the history lessons he gave my sister, he was already trying to put into practice the method that has given so high a value to the works of my friend Doctor Letourneau: he studied the evolution of every great moral, religious, or political idea, in every age and in every country. A program too vast, certainly, but preferable to dry enumerations of dates, battles, and treaties.

M. Silly had married a young and charming little peasant girl, whose all too summary instruction he tried to complete. Daughter of a miller, she had never left her village.

Condemned at first to internment in some little town I no longer remember, and obliged to present himself every morning at the town hall, M. Silly had been unable to resign himself to living in this sort of prison: even his walks were not to exceed a certain zone. He preferred exile with freedom. He had the idea of disguising himself as a priest, and thus managed to reach the frontier. His ascetic-looking face and the natural gravity of his manner did not belie his costume. He traveled for some time with a gendarmerie officer who, seeing him reading his breviary devoutly, would gladly have asked his blessing.

In Geneva, M. Silly had great trouble finding a few lessons to give, and yet he would have been quite capable of teaching with honor in a university chair.

His young wife soon joined him, bringing her twin sons, still at the breast. She could not acclimatize herself to this country where everything was new to her. For hours she would sit motionless, dreaming of her mother, her family, her friends, the willow-bordered brook and the pretty mill where she had spent her happy childhood. These memories became an obsession with her. Homesickness is a grave illness, which medicine is powerless to combat.

Madame Silly was wasting away. Her husband having decided to send her to spend some time with her parents, she took her sons with her; and this poor scholar, so little expert in the practical affairs of life, found himself alone again.

Arrived in France, Madame Silly did not stop weeping. She loved her husband with a kind of religious adoration, which his high moral worth well deserved. She reproached herself for having abandoned this good man who had so great a need of her. Thinking herself cured, she returned to Geneva, but after a short time the homesickness came over her worse than ever, and the doctor ordered her to leave again. Heavy expense and still greater sorrow!

Those who have never known exile will have difficulty understanding these unreasonable feelings, whose obsession certain tender souls cannot push away.

Who shall say how many unspoken sufferings, how many broken existences must weigh upon the memory of the criminal authors of the coup d’État!

2

For neighbors we had other exiles: M. Plissonnier, a tall, dry, lean figure, a sort of loyal and frank Don Quixote. A clumsy comrade had, while hunting, sent a buckshot into his eye, and he had remained one-eyed, which did not prevent him from being an excellent watchmaker. His young wife, charming of face, with her brown eyes and her wavy chestnut hair, had the most pleasing countenance. Gentle and firm, of a cheerful and ever-even humor, she brought up her two sons very well. The elder, Julien, a great friend of Fernand’s, had profited from the drawing lessons my father gave us; he became a talented sculptor and an excellent professor. Time has had no hold on him; he has kept that good infectious gaiety which is the spontaneous and irresistible expression of a natural spirit. At that time the amiable gavroche had an inexhaustible verve; he invented a thousand unforeseen drolleries, such as fishing with hooks, from the top of the Saint-Antoine promenade, for the hats of the peasants come to market.

There were then at La Servette vast construction yards. Large planks, stacked in enormous piles, formed tall square towers with an empty space in the middle. No one watched us; we climbed like cats and descended into the depths of the tower. For Fernand and Julien it was a matter of smoking a bit of cigar in secret, at the risk of setting fire to the whole neighborhood. For the other children, this refuge had something mysterious about it. Obviously no one would have had the idea of looking for us there; it was our cavern of the Arabian Nights. Our mothers, soon worried, called us from all sides, but we were careful not to answer; motionless, crouched on the ground, speaking low, we looked at one another with marveling eyes. What charmed us was the danger of being surprised. It was there that one day Julien showed Fernand a few passages from a book whose reading had been forbidden him: Daphnis and Chloe. The harm was not great, but had the work been more licentious, it would have had the same attraction: that of forbidden fruit.

What inconsistency in young minds! Trust me, says the father, you know I want only your good. The child lets himself be guided. Don’t eat this, it is indigestible and would make you ill. The child obeys. Watch out for that stick, it is poorly polished, you’ll prick your hands! The child obeys still. Do not read that book, do not look at that picture, they would soil your imagination, they would corrupt your judgment. The child obeys no longer. He watches impatiently for the first chance to read in secret the forbidden book, to glance furtively at the harmful picture. What inconceivable attraction drives him to seek unwholesome nourishment for his mind? Is the cleanliness of the soul, then, less important than that of one’s clothes?

A few Genevan families, or of French origin — the Bauds, the Dariers, the Reynauds — welcomed our parents with a cordiality of which I keep a grateful memory.

3

Geneva was still a very small town, enclosed in its old fortifications, which were only beginning to be demolished, and the manners of Calvin’s city also kept all their puritan rigidity. We lived outside the town, at La Servette, and four times a day my brother and I had to make a rather long trip to go to the Collège.

In the fourth form Fernand was an undisciplined schoolboy. He trusted in the liveliness of his intelligence and his happy memory to dispense himself from long study. More than once, in the company of his friend Julien, he played truant. With twenty-five or thirty sous in his pocket, the German lesson was agreeably replaced by a boat-ride. The lake was so blue, the air so pure! Our classes, however, were not very long, always interrupted by a quarter-hour of recreation. The bell rings, the doors fly open with a crash all around the great courtyard, and from each of them, with savage cries, a flock of frantic urchins comes pouring out.

On the right are the lapins, on the left the francs-chiens — that is, those who studied only the French language — and epic battles would begin: a lapin would seize the iron handle of a classroom door, and there, bent double, head lowered, he would not let go of this post of honor. Victory belonged to the party that remained master of the door. Proudly grouped around their champion, the young lapins defied the opposing camp, barking in a martial rhythm: Down with the francs-chiens! down with the francs-chiens! These answered on the same tune: Down with the lapins! The chiefs gathered their soldiers, stirred up their courage, the clamor rose ever fuller, in a rhythm ever more precipitate, and a compact troop hurled itself to the assault.

It was then an indescribable scuffle; you would have said an enormous packet of serpents, a swarming of arms and legs intertwined. The boys climbed upon this monstrous mass, hitting, pulling, pushing, howling.

I have always had little taste for brutal games, and ordinarily, with the little ones, we attended as mere spectators these heroic struggles, in which our elder brothers distinguished themselves by admirable feats. One day, however, I had the honor of being chosen to hold the doorknob. I was a lapin in my soul. Why? I should have been hard pressed to say, but I would have let myself be hacked to pieces rather than let go. Besides, my brother was there, making a rampart of his body for me. Victory was uncertain; we were about to be crushed by numbers when suddenly, coming out of his lodge, the porter, little father Leuba, advanced, solemn in his long frock coat which came down to his heels. He tried to pronounce the Quos ego! But at once, sudden change of front! The two armies turned about and united against the common enemy: hisses, jeers, and taunts were drowned by a formidable chorus in unison: Pipelet, Pipelet, Pipelet pon pon fill! (ter). The worthy agent of authority could not make his paternal remonstrances heard. Fortunately the bell recalled all the combatants to class.

We come back very heated, panting, and still all atremble from the emotions of the struggle. Soon there were so many bruises, sprains, and black eyes that the police had to intervene. They put an end to these savage games, survival of epic puerilities and apprenticeship in life. Atavism alone can explain the evil feelings that animated these schoolboys — feelings that were, after all, no more absurd than the hatreds between two neighboring nations or between sister races. Some studied Latin, often unwillingly; the others did not study it. Fine motive for hatred! Thus the nationalists detest all those who do not speak French. Must we despair of seeing manners soften, and enemy brothers extend their hands to one another? Shall we always be as foolish and more cruel than schoolboys? Under the First Empire, in ten years, one million seven hundred thousand Frenchmen died on the battlefield. And there are people who put their hopes in the return of so glorious a regime!

The games of schoolboys are sometimes an apprenticeship for life: the noble game of prisoner’s base, for instance, gives the child very wholesome emotions. Later, in business, in politics, in religion, everywhere, he will find again this division into two camps, this emulation, this ardent desire to carry off the victory. But here at least the struggle is neither brutal nor hateful, and it remains subject to rules. The child can already learn there to know men a little: he will observe that some submit loyally to the conventions accepted by common accord, while others seek to evade them. Certain schoolboys, against all evidence, will deny having been caught, and this native bad faith is one of those traits of character which are hard to correct. The joy of taking prisoners, the nobler joy of delivering one’s comrades, the shame of defeat, the hope of success — all these feelings are taken seriously by young minds. They find in this little drama an exercise as useful to the culture of the moral sense as gymnastics can be to the development of the muscles and the circulation of the blood.

Study has never bored me. Moreover, the bump of approbativeness continued to grow and to give me wise counsel. To obtain the prize for good marks — such was the goal my ambition set itself. But this high reward was granted only to him whose conduct, during the whole year, had not earned a single bad mark. Now, one of my neighbors in class having committed some impropriety or other, none of us was willing to denounce him; the whole bench was punished with a bad mark. Farewell to my dreams of glory!

With a very heavy heart I told Fernand this sad news. At once he was indignant. For himself he scorned good marks and prizes, but he took to heart his little brother’s reputation for good behavior. He does not hesitate, wipes my eyes, takes me by the hand, and bravely leads me straight to the Principal, M. Bétant, the illustrious Hellenist.

We are received very paternally; Fernand, very dignified, recounts with ardor; he tells of my long existence of assiduous work, my gentleness, my innocence; he lets it be glimpsed at the glorious prize to which my just ambition aspires; he is indignant that one should have dared to ask of me an act of informing: we are French, we are exiles, but not Jesuits, we have never denounced anyone, is it just to be punished for that? I listened astonished, ravished in admiration, moved with gratitude for my excellent brother. For his part, good M. Bétant smiled, himself touched by the persuasive ardor my eloquent advocate brought to the defense of so fine a cause. He promised that the bad mark should be erased. And it is thus that, thanks to my brother, I still possess a superb red book in which all the games of schoolboys are explained.

4

Of all the friends remaining in France, the one who missed us most was assuredly Madame de Tucé. She had a tender affection — well shared, moreover — for my mother, in whom there seemed to live again that Louis de Tucé she had lost too young, and whom she had never ceased to weep for. It was indeed her charming face, her keen intelligence, her rare kindness. Very active and very thrifty, Madame de Tucé had found in her daughter a devoted collaborator, but she now had to suffice alone for the management of her properties, and the burden was beginning to seem heavy to her. Old age was approaching; help would become necessary, and yet she was too jealous of her authority to consent easily to share it. When her younger daughter should be married, she would find herself in absolute isolation, at the age when one needs to feel surrounded by care and affection. My grandmother’s greatest desire would have been to keep her grandchildren near her. She would gladly have taken a tutor to let us continue our studies at her home. When my mother took us to Fleurigny, she spared nothing to make the stay agreeable to us. To Fernand she gave a little carriage with a donkey; to Alix, a pretty black heifer; to Paul, a kid goat and a pigeon. Not wishing to let herself be forgotten, she wrote to us often; here is one of her letters:

Madame de Tucé to Alix

Fleurigny, 13 August 1852.

I like to think that all the beautiful things you have seen do not make you forget this poor grandmother who, last year at this time, was waiting for you, counting the days that remained before seeing you arrive. Fleurigny was very pretty, very gay, when you were all together.

Noémi has arrived from Blois; she enjoyed herself and learned to make artificial flowers.

I also want, dear Lilie, to tell you about Jeanne. She is a chubby little dodon who somewhat resembles you, she is in dresses, holds herself straight like her dear grandmother; she has bold eyes, a tight beak, holds herself a little stiff; when she wants she has a very gracious air, but she reserves that for the people of Les Goutils whom she knows better than us. I am making her a beautiful white dress in muslin wool to take her to Montoire, where they are vaccinating.

The following year Madame Milliet made a new trip to Fleurigny, in order to see her mother again and to take little Jeanne back from her nurse.

Madame de Tucé received us with her accustomed tenderness, but with a shade of sadness. She would have wished to keep all four of us, and railed against politics. Her irritation against M. Milliet was extreme. Fernand wrote to his father:

I am very well at Fleurigny. Decidedly, I am only fit to be a peasant; today is the hiring fair, and I am going to hire myself out to my grandmother, who asks for me. I shall have no more themes to do and I shall always be good for loading manure, going to fetch grass, and driving the horses. They say it is better to be the first in a village than the second in Rome, and I hope to be of the first rank in these manual and little spiritual labors. I would much like to have something spiritual to tell you, but I am not strong on the spiritual. That does not prevent that I shall be very happy when I see you again and can embrace you.

Meanwhile, I am still your respectful son.

Fernand-Félix MILLIET

Every year, Madame Milliet helped her mother in the making of a few bottles of orange, blackcurrant, and walnut-husk liqueur, gifts destined for her friends and her farmers. She also gave each of her grandchildren a tiny flask, on which our name was inscribed and which, carefully deposited on the highest shelf of a cupboard, was reserved for next year’s little dinner-parties.

Fernand and I had found these liqueurs of an exquisite taste. One day when we were not being watched, he climbed up on a chair, I myself climbed onto his back, and I seized the precious flasks. Were they not our personal property? Off we went to the neighboring hamlet, with the abominable idea of letting our little sister taste this delicious beverage. Along the way we each drank a tiny sip, then we exchanged flasks; it was sweet as honey, and it warmed one inside! Another sip! Fernand sang at the top of his voice, but I was no longer laughing. In one draught I had emptied the whole flask. The effect was instantaneous. I rolled dead-drunk into the ditch. — Horrified, Fernand ran to the house: Come quickly! Paul is dead! — What a stir! I was carried to my bed, where I remained for a long time gravely ill.

I was too well punished for them to scold me. I had seen the despair of my family. All my life I have kept an invincible repugnance for alcoholic drinks.

5

The songwriter’s trade is rarely profitable. My father had had exile for sole reward, but that did not prevent him from continuing. — At Geneva, the hearts of the refugees were still bleeding from the misfortunes and shames of the Fatherland; my father made himself their interpreter in a little collection of songs that he published without the author’s name. These songs had a real success; they were sung in the streets of Geneva. Their violent style was well in accord with the feelings that then animated all the exiles. History throws over events a veil that softens their horror, but force reigned alone: Hugo was at Jersey, Quinet at Brussels, Michelet driven from his chair at the Collège de France, the press gagged; the country seemed beheaded. It is easy to imagine the egoistical calm of those who looked on with resignation at such shames. My father was not of those.

Our friends remaining in France did not forget us; their letters brought us the precious testimony of their faithful affection. — It is in verse that my father answered the young Muse who had sent him some of her new poems.

To Madame Clémentine Giedroyck

O my sister, your voice is sweet, To our ear, to our heart; When one hears it, of sorrow The sharpened sting is blunted.

Sing on, charm our days! To your fraternal lyre, Like a simple and faithful echo Mine will always answer.

With your pure hand You have wiped the exile’s brow And, turning the affront away from him, Covered the perjurer with shame.

Thank you for your touching strains!… But these divine songs of the soul France in mourning claims from you: For her your tears and your songs!

To help me bear my pains, Heaven has set upon my way A companion with a divine heart All filled with serene virtues.

Beside her I find always Joy at the bottom of sadness, And, with a glance, the enchantress Can gild my darkest days.

From homesickness on the pale brow Her smile effaces the lines, She transforms into a paradise The very land of exile.

But with tears of blood, Weep, weep upon the fatherland, This noble mother withered, Whose flank a bandit tears.

Let pity grave and serene Spread, like a white mantle, Over the martyr in the tomb, Over the captive bearing his chain.

Of the scourging iamb Arm yourself, wrathful muse, And let the lightning of thought Make our oppressor pale.

It must be, you see, that without respite Every song which is not gagged, Every arm which is not chained Should slap him and call him coward.

Then at last, weary of punishing, Sing in your prophetic voice The return of the Republic, That dawn of the future.

August 1852.

THE EMPIRE

The Empire! it is murderous, barren war, Beneath the hooves of horses crushing the ears of grain; It is the impetuous torrent leaving only wreckage; Lately it overflowed, sterilizing the world.

The Empire! it is the horrible with the ridiculous, It is Mandrin’s band plundering the treasury; Generals, magistrates, and prelates, gorged with gold, Wallow in blood, wine, and debauchery.

The Empire! it is France in the power of a scoundrel, It is the scaffold, exile, prison, and tears. Our soldiers turned into jailers, into gendarmes, The lame stick that serves as helper to the ignoble cudgel!

O bandit! the future does not stab itself! Immortal, it advances; upon its magnificent brow One sees these words shining: Liberty! Republic! And the peoples stretch toward it their thousand arms.

TO NEMESIS

Come, Nemesis, avenging goddess, You who punish all perverse beings, Let your bloody scourge rise once more; To work, to work, O daughter of hell! Do you not see those haughty phalanxes Of criminals who must be terrified? Come, knot anew the cords of your lash, There are still wicked ones to whip.

Was there ever seen, overflowing on France, More infamy and corruption, Ever prelates showing such arrogance, Ever rascals of prouder ambition? Ever, in short, coming forth from the jesuit-warrens, So many owls braving the sun? Come, knot anew the cords of your lash, There are still scoundrels to whip.

Frightful contrast, worthy of our sorrows, Iniquity, shame of the human race! See those palaces overflowing with wealth Beside the hovels where men die of hunger. For the small the laws are barriers, But over them the great can leap. Come, knot anew the cords of your lash, There are still masters to whip.

But in vain shall traitors and despots League themselves against liberty; Yes, we shall see their soldiers and their fleets Melt in the sun of Fraternity.

No more tyrants! The peoples shall be brothers, Then, then they shall be able to repeat: Go, Nemesis, throw your lash far from you, For there are no more wicked ones to whip.

6

How did the city of Geneva, which glories in a long and generous tradition of hospitality, have the sad courage to renounce the right of asylum, and to drive away this family of republicans who lived among them so peacefully? Songs! What a great crime! The freemasons of Geneva had given Félix Milliet a fraternal welcome; the Jesuits of Le Mans denounced him to the imperial government, which demanded a new exile; and the Genevan authorities, too weak to resist the Emperor of the French, thought they had to obey him. — Early in the morning, police agents entered our home, seized the papers found in the secretary, and led my father off to prison. The Journal de Genève published a perfidious article in which F. Milliet was represented as both a dangerous conspirator and an agent provocateur, “allied with the French nobility.” They sought to render him suspect to his friends.

Colonel Humbert was indignant. He threatened to free the exile and to raise a riot. They smuggled my father away in secret.

My mother did not hesitate: she entrusted her children to friends, and provided with a few letters of recommendation, went to Bern to plead her husband’s cause with the federal authorities. The delegate for foreign affairs sent her back to the President of the Federal Council, who in turn sent her to other high officials. One of them gave his audiences in a brasserie, where my mother found him smoking his pipe and absorbing a prodigious number of tankards. He listened to her petition with much benevolence, excused himself on the necessities of politics, stronger than the duties of hospitality. The Swiss government could not, for a mere songwriter, fall out with its powerful neighbor.

Under the guard of a single police agent, F. Milliet was dispatched to Antwerp and embarked for England.

The poet, who had just expressed his indignation so energetically and who felt so keenly the misfortunes of his country, accepted his own misfortune with saddened resignation. It is to his devoted friend, Colonel Alexandre Humbert, that he dedicated the following verses, of so noble and so moved an inspiration:

THE FAREWELLS

When, banished from the sweet land of France, Under other skies I wandered as a fugitive, Switzerland, I came, my heart full of hope, To set my furtive foot upon your beautiful soil. I cried out: Hail, and be blessed, Land of Tell, I feel myself sheltered. And yet, driven out of Helvetia, I go far away to seek liberty.

For a year, in a modest asylum, Seeking calm and forgetfulness of our ills, I was breathing… In this town of exile For the exile there is no rest.

I wished only, to be born again to life, A little shade and security, And yet, driven out of Helvetia, I go far away to seek liberty.

What then have I done?… Thinking of France, My lyre, one day, was the echo of my heart; It vibrated the hymn of vengeance, It cursed the Empire and the Emperor. But, weeping over France enslaved, Have I transgressed against hospitality? And yet, driven out of Helvetia, I go far away to seek liberty.

Since it must be so, farewell, fair Geneva, With regret I leave your pure sky. Farewell, Léman… I dreamed many a fair dream, My eyes fixed upon your limpid azure. I glimpsed the divine Harmony Pouring her benefits upon humanity. And yet, driven out of Helvetia, I go far away to seek liberty.

And you, friends, who from a fatal destiny Would have wished to ward off the power, In leaving you, hope remains with me; Instead of farewell, I say to you: Until we meet again! For the hour is near when democracy Will shine for all, sun of truth; Then I shall come into fair Helvetia, To sing once more the hymn of liberty.

(From Mainz to Cologne, aboard the Gutenberg, 16 May 1853)

II

1853 — 1854

STAY AT SAMOËNS

LE BÉROUZE. — DOCTOR POLLET. — AMUSING MAGIC. — MASKED BALL. — CHILDREN’S LETTERS. — FIRST COMMUNION.

1

My mother had returned to Geneva in great haste, but she had no desire to take us to England. She dreaded homesickness; the Englishman had remained for her the hereditary enemy. From her childhood she had been made to read, in a street of Le Mans, the inscription engraved on the stone of Tucé; the province of Maine had once been delivered from the foreign yoke by one of her ancestors.

Doctor Pollet, exiled like us, had settled at Samoëns, a large village lost in one of the high valleys of the Alps. Savoy then belonged to the King of Piedmont. It was through the doctor that my mother obtained permission to come with her family to this new refuge. The syndic of Samoëns, M. Orsat, a notary, was a man very distinguished by his intelligence and his learning; he received us with great kindness. M. Pollet was supposed to have bought our furniture, which was sent to him at the Bérouze, where he prepared our apartment.

The description M. Pollet had given us of his residence, as of an old mysterious château, had keenly excited our curiosity, and the journey seemed very long to our impatience. Eight mortal hours by carriage! The road was then rather badly maintained. We had on one side a wall of abrupt rocks, on the other an abyss, with the Giffre roaring at the bottom. Numerous streams cascaded down across the road, and a thunderstorm’s rain had been enough to turn them into torrents.

In bad weather, nothing is more lugubrious than these wild gorges, these gray rocks where the rain streams down in inky trails, these forests of firs, here half drowned in the clouds, there detaching their somber green against a leaden sky. The noise of the cascades, the dull rumbling of the stones rolled by the swollen torrents — all this produces an impression at once sad and grandiose. Nature no longer appears as a beneficent mother, but as an enemy full of menace.

At Taninges, the coachman seemed anxious and undecided. At last he tossed down a great glass of wine: Onward! Several difficult passages were crossed without too much trouble. But here was a torrent rolling enormous stones across the road; the coachman whips the horses and the carriage imprudently plunges into the water. Arrived in the middle of the current, it stops; a rock bars the way; we could go neither forward nor back. Anxious, we consulted the coachman’s face, as the passengers of a vessel in distress observe the captain’s eyes. Then, with a great oath, he climbed down into the torrent, which came up to his waist, and taking a tree branch as a lever, he managed at last to displace the obstacle. Night had come when we arrived at the Bérouze, where M. and Madame Pollet were waiting for us, not without anxiety.

A bright fire burned in the high seigneurial chimney, illuminating with fantastic gleams the vast room with its exposed beams. The next day we visited the whole house; I admired the circular library set up in a tower. Unfortunately the dusty folios were for the most part works of theology or jurisprudence. The garden was still in flower; farther on, a large orchard stretched away in meadows to the river.

In the kitchen, where whole tree-trunks were burning, we made the acquaintance of the Liandaine (Claudine), an old fairy who seemed to be the same age as the château. But the pleasure of seeing new things and new people could not make us forget the void left by our father’s absence.

He did not make a very long stay in London. The freemasons furnished him with a passport, and under the name of Félix he began again, in the opposite direction, the trip he had just made across Germany.

Everywhere, even in Switzerland, at the risk of being recognized and arrested, he had the imprudence to put up at the hotels where he had stayed before. Not trusting the secrecy of letters, he had been unable to send news of himself. My mother awaited him in anguish.

One night we were sleeping deeply, when my mother awoke us with a joyous cry: Get up, my children, and come quickly! — We leap from our beds in our nightshirts and throw ourselves into the arms of our dear father, who covers us with kisses. It was a moment of unspeakable joy.

Then began for my parents a period of calm which seemed to them very sweet. We lived, it is true, in the midst of the mountains, far from any intellectual resource, but among brave people, full of benevolence, who lived among themselves in patriarchal peace.

M. Pollet was not a scholar. A modest country doctor, he devoted himself entirely to the healing of his patients, and very quickly made himself loved by all. His long red hair was beginning to thin and to gray; he had a good and shrewd smile, gold-rimmed spectacles behind which sparkled eyes lively with wit, and he by no means felt obliged to the solemn gravity of renowned doctors.

His gaiety was, I believe, one of the secrets of his marvelous cures, along with that sympathy which comforts and rekindles courage.

More than one, among the poor inhabitants of these arid mountains, was sick only from exhaustion, overwork, and insufficient food. For these, a good broth, a piece of meat, a bottle of old wine, graciously offered, did more good than the costly drugs of the apothecaries.

It was a treat for my sister and me sometimes to accompany the doctor on his visits. His kindness, the care he gave impartially to poor and rich alike, taught us the equality of men before pain. On the way back, his conversation was a rolling fire of droll anecdotes, comical stories, which he improvised with an inexhaustible imagination and delivered with a burlesque verve.

Despite the sadnesses and cares of exile, my parents too underwent the influence of this gaiety. My father, endowed with a lively sensibility, almost put himself in unison with the amiable doctor. It is at this time that he composed a joyous song entitled:

LIFE IN PINK

Enemy of our repose, More than one tiresome moralist Wastes his time drawing up the list Of our failings and our ills. Away with the morose thinker Who paints us everything in black! For myself, I’d rather see Life in pink.

An old bachelor on the wane, Set by Venus to penance, Says: Trust my experience, Spare the fires of love! Folly of the morose old man! Let us love morning and evening! Woman makes us see Life in pink.

I enter the salon and notice A portrait, ugly as nature.¹

One goes into excessive ecstasies Over the bourgeois’s real nose. Morose realism, To the devil with your mirror! The ideal makes us see Life in pink.

A physician, learned doctor, In the name of famed Aesculapius, Forbids us the juice of the grape, Which, in secret, he often drinks. Away with the morose doctor, What matter his knowledge! Let us drink, wine makes us see Life in pink.

If you want a paradise, Says a priest, to lift up your soul, Flee science and woman Who long ago undid man! Away with the morose hypocrite! Let us leave him his snuffer, Which keeps him from seeing Life in pink.

2

Winter had come; the appearance of the valley in this season is of a strange and striking character. One might think oneself transported into the neighborhood of the pole. The mantle of snow that covers the earth is often more than two meters thick, and on this immaculate whiteness the sun shines without managing to melt it, because of the night’s frosts.

It was by a narrow path of packed snow that Alix and I went each morning to school: she to the sisters, I to the young vicar who tried to inculcate some notions of grammar into a dozen rather dull little peasants. We had had to part with my brother Fernand, sent as a boarder to the Royal Collège of Bonneville.

A brave mason, who played at Samoëns the role of architect, gave me a few lessons in linear drawing. The inhabitants of the Giffre valley are almost all stonecutters. Each year in spring they set out for Switzerland, Piedmont, or France, and return in winter to their country, which they love passionately. Honest and sober workers, they often amass some savings, buy a field, and build themselves a chalet on it.

M. Pollet did not manufacture oxygen like Jules Verne’s Doctor Ox, but his good humor was contagious. The dreamy shepherds, the silent chamois-hunters, the notary, the judge, the clerk, all seemed to wake from a long sleep. It was no longer a question of lawsuits or of contradictory rulings, but of balls and festivals. M. Pasquier organized a fanfare, a choral society. At the Bérouze, people danced and acted charades.

Turning tables were then in fashion, and the doctor made them say a thousand drolleries. He skillfully performed some tricks of prestidigitation and amusing magic. Thanks to his magnetizer’s power, a little harlequin, cut out of cardboard and suspended by a black silk thread invisible to the profane, danced at his command. Then it was the turn of the tax collector’s hat — a simple man who hardly knew what to believe of these curious experiments. Little by little lifted by the fluid, the hat, at a great gesture from the magnetizer, suddenly flew out the window. Only a few incorrigible skeptics observed that Alix was at that moment playing in the garden. From then on, whenever the naive tax collector caught sight of M. Pollet from afar, he fastened the enchanted hat firmly on his head.

Trained by so skilled a master, I became a medium of astonishing lucidity. I divined the card chosen by some person of the amiable company, then we proceeded to the scientific study of the marvelous phenomena of second sight, so important as a demonstration of spiritualist doctrines.

I was seated, my eyes bandaged, and beforehand plunged into a hypnotic sleep. The doctor would then lead the tax collector into the library and have him choose, “at random,” any book — this one, for example, or perhaps that one. “It is a book of theology, will he be able to read these old characters? Too bad! let us try!”

The book was presented wide open behind the medium’s back and behind the back of the large armchair. But the soul has no need of eyes to see. Painfully at first, I spelled out a few lines; then they brought the lamp closer, and I, a naive nine-year-old child, was reading fluently a difficult text, bristling with forbidding words. I had learned them by heart, and these exploits of my early years have made me somewhat skeptical.

At carnival time M. Pollet organized a great masked ball. The vast rooms of the Bérouze, brilliantly lit, filled with a joyous and motley crowd. The dances were interrupted by many comic interludes. I will recount only one: A great bell rings and chimes. At this signal, the music stops, the dancers form a circle; a sheet of tin makes heard offstage the rolling of distant thunder. Dressed in a scarlet tights, a great devil makes his entrance: his eyes flame beneath enormous black eyebrows, he stretches out his claws and brandishes a trident, with which he threatens the frightened little girls.

But here the orchestra begins a mysterious march. A magician with a great white beard advances solemnly. It is the doctor, robed in a long black gown, sown with cabalistic signs in gilt paper. The devil and the magician are rivals and begin by quarreling. But at the height of the quarrel the music becomes lugubrious; a monk brutally brings forward a poor old woman laden with chains, hooded in a great cloak. The magician explains to the devil that this good woman has been bewitched by the wicked monk; he proposes to deliver her. Seized with pity, the good devil is reconciled with the sorcerer; the two of them together shall break the chains of the unfortunate captive. Scenes of magnetism, exorcisms by the monk, etc… At last, while the devil battles the monk, the magician lays his wand upon the old woman’s head. The cloak falls with the chains, and fresh Madame Pollet appears in a sprightly Liberty costume of red satin. The music takes on a joyful and triumphal rhythm, Liberty dances with the sorcerer, the good devil with the dazed monk, whom he whirls in a mad waltz and drags down the cellar stair into hell.

3

Sturdier than we no doubt, our fathers had not yet recognized the sad consequences of alcoholism. After the example of Béranger and Désaugiers, who celebrated the sweet juice of the vine and enchanting drunkenness, my father had composed some drinking songs, on the occasion of patriotic banquets. That poetry seems to us today very old-fashioned. A little mercy, however, for some couplets written in honor of Doctor Pollet:

TO DOCTOR POLLET

Let us sing the sublime science Of a joyous and lively doctor; By the virtue of his regimen One can be cured of every ill. With him, no insipid drink: Wine, rum, liqueur! Ah, how good it is to be sick When one has Pollet for one’s doctor!

Without fear break your head, Your loins, legs, and arms: Sancho bequeathed him the recipe For his Fierabras balm. Were you in pieces, With a single breath he gives you back your vigor. Ah, how good it is to be sick When one has Pollet for one’s doctor!

Since he cured of rabies A devout woman of the neighborhood, The pious souls of the village Whisper that he is a sorcerer.

But I say: The fellow Is only a scholar of good humor, Ah, how good it is to be sick, When one has Pollet for one’s doctor.

4

The joyous festivities of the Bérouze did not make us forget our dear Fernand, the poor boarder, who would have been so happy to share in our pleasures. His mother wrote to him:

I think, my dear child, that you will have received the little parcel I sent you, which consisted of a pair of slippers, four-finger mittens, two pairs of drawers, and a flask of camphorated brandy.

I had learned of the Collège fire before your letter, and I was glad to know that you had behaved as one ought to behave in such a circumstance;² for it is very much to be feared that those who lack heart when young will lack it all their lives. Those who avoid occasions to make themselves useful remain egoists, a burden to society and to themselves… Your father has begun some daguerreotype trials, but they are still rather imperfect. The portrait of Paul is barely visible.

Samoëns, Tuesday (13 November 53).

… I am sending you Lhomond’s Grammar and Fénelon’s Fables, accompanied by apples (which you eagerly desired, it seems), nuts, and a pot of butter. I should have liked your father to see you in your beautiful uniform, to know whether it became you.

Your father has seen all the professors, who were very amiable and well-disposed toward you. Then control, my dear child, your inclination to thoughtlessness. The pleasure that mischief gives is soon past and does not compensate for the unpleasantness of a punishment! Besides, one makes a bad reputation, and the master is then tempted to attribute to you every foolery committed. It is up to you to make a good one from the beginning of the year. Then that is how one learns to become a man, by getting used to governing one’s character by one’s will.

The snow already covers the Grise and descends as far as Verclan…

Farewell, my dear child, I embrace you a million times; your father embraces you also very tenderly.

Your mother who loves you.

L.

Alix to Fernand

… I go to the sisters; they are not too strict. M. l’abbé Bétrix, who teaches us the catechism, is dumb as an ox. The other day he was asking what bird sings, and the reds were priests and a heap of other foolishness. He takes snuff every five minutes. To blow his nose, he puts a corner of his handkerchief in his mouth, and each time he blows his nose, he says: Ma conette!… Farewell, your very sanctimonious sister,

ALIX

My first literary attempt had for title: When I am twenty. Children are little monkeys, they imitate everything they see their parents do, and dream of surpassing them. I had therefore invented color photography and was asking in marriage a beautiful young girl whose portrait I had made. I told this to my brother and signed: Paul, scholar-in-the-making. — I was no good prophet, I have invented nothing at all, and, more regrettable still, I have not married.

We had nicknamed my mother La Bonti; her favorite flower was the periwinkle, and, already a symbolist, I sought the cause of this taste in a certain concordance between the sweet perfume, the tender color, the modesty of the flower, and the virtues of my mother.

My first verses were a sort of mystical prayer in which my child’s soul united, in a single personification, the flower I admired and the mother I loved more than anything in the world.

TO BONTI-PERIWINKLE

Periwinkle of gentleness, To your flowering stem To abandon my life Is happiness for me.

The very next day I was eager to share my new talent with Fernand. I wrote him:

… I have very often thought of you, and I grow impatient hunting my Latin words; it is so long. You must have great difficulty translating Virgil. You said you were going to become a Latin poet; I, I am already a French poet, as is Alix; you will see that my verses equal those of Victor Hugo, and besides, here is the proof.

And I quoted the famous quatrain.

In class, I am the most learned, but the others are rather ignorant; there is one who understands nothing. Alix had the cross for her good behavior. We all cried “Miracle!” The curate gave her a beautiful holy picture; she has nevertheless led several little girls astray…

Indeed, the abbé having asked her: “What are the three theological virtues?” she took on a naive little air to answer: “Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity.” The next day the curate held forth against anger, that ugly sin. Alix, seated beside the mason’s daughter, whispered to her this question: Why did God grow angry against the people of Israel? — The curate, a little disconcerted at first, had recourse to my sister: “Alix,” he said (he pronounced it Ali), “answer!” — “It was not anger,” said the sly girl adroitly, “it was indignation.” This subtle distinction, so much in the Jesuit taste, had earned her a beautiful holy picture.

Fernand to his father

Bonneville, 17 December 1853.

… The parcel mamma sent me gave me great pleasure. I rubbed my chilblains with the camphorated brandy and they are disappearing. We are less well fed than at the beginning; the bread is badly made. I was a little ill and stayed in bed 4 days! We are now building a snow fort; we have made ourselves cardboard shields to defend ourselves from the snowballs.

I want now to answer Paul:

I thought your verses very pretty. The Bonti-Periwinkle is very tender. The Vengeance of Alix is sublime. I am not so good a poet as you; I still only scan the verses of Ovid. I am very glad to learn that you are the oracle of the class; try to vanquish Teresa, he is not invincible, despite his fine name. I believe that by your muse and your slight tenacity you already surpass him. As for Alix, I was as astonished as could be to learn that she had had the cross for her good behavior. As for having led several little girls astray, that does not surprise me at all, for she is quite capable of leading astray all the little girls and the good sisters as well.

M. Félix Milliet to Fernand

29 December 1853.

… I have learned that you have at last got your uniform; I shall have the pleasure of seeing you in costume. Your mother imagines it must suit you very well; Paul and Alix are of her opinion.

We were full of admiration for our elder brother.

In your next letter tell us whether you have resumed your German studies; you know that we attach great importance to your continuing to learn that language…

As much as time allows, I am occupied with painting; I have done Madame Pollet’s portrait and have begun that of M. Hippolyte Deplane, the chamois-hunter. I have represented him full-length, seated on a rock, with his carbine and all his hunter’s gear; I shall paint a dead chamois at his feet… whenever someone has brought me one. I worked yesterday and today on Madame Orsat’s portrait; she has agreed to be godmother to André… or to Louise, with M. Pollet as godfather.

Alix to Fernand

1st January 1854.

… I went to midnight mass on Christmas Eve. Paul slept a good nap there; it was the bass singers who put him to sleep; I was… We went the other day to a ball given by the masons. M. Pollet made a most beautiful speech. As I had a slight cold, mamma did not want me to stay long at the ball, but I did not miss a single dance. Madame Pollet danced too, with suppleness and elasticity; she enjoyed mulled wine and came back with her “doux-doux” at three in the morning. — The curate asked Paul why I was not coming to class. Paul answered that I had a cold. — “Ah! it was no doubt at the ball that she caught it. It is very wrong of a child of her age to go dancing.” I did penance for it by taking herb-tea and licorice.

Paul to Fernand

I wish you a good year, perfect health, and paradise at the end of your days: one must conform to the customs of Savoy! You ask me for new verses, but I have given myself over to the sciences of the Epitome. I am going to begin the De Viris. I hope to do you honor, and I do not mean that they should say you have a little ass for a brother. I have had to abandon my poetic verve to try to vanquish Teresa; we are both going to compete in his version; I think he will be vanquished, for my courage is heroic. I gave the curate a little chisel I had drawn. He told me that he did not want to attend the magnetism sessions, because there was deviltry in them; he charged me to tell M. Pollet to ask his puppet what it was, because all the tables were the spirit of the demon…

You must send us the program of the books they translate in the sixth form; are the students of that class very strong? for I should like to be able to enter it at Easter. You will tell us your places, I should very much like to know them, for we take a great interest in them.

Madame Milliet to Fernand

Samoëns, 24 March 54.

I have received your letter, my dear child; it gave us pleasure, without however satisfying us entirely. We were very glad to know you had been received for the examinations; but you should have been the first and not the second in narration and in version; M. Fleury told you so in our presence. If you are negligent, you will see the others pass you, and you will miss the prizes. As for us, you know well we shall not fail of our word. Besides what we have promised, a little of the happiness you will have in making us happy, your father and me. You know, dear child, nothing costs us when it is a question of your advantage or even of your pleasure; we put all our happiness in you, we ask of you only two things: to love us and to work at becoming men. I think the first is easy for you; as to the second, you know what we mean by being men, that is, beings who have developed all their faculties and can be useful to themselves and to their fellows. To reach this goal, one must first instruct oneself, and then one comes to the application of one’s instruction and faculties. We shall talk of all this when we meet, which will be soon, I think. We have engaged an apartment at Bonneville, but the conditions are not yet settled; we must go there for that.

Paul and Alix are received for their first communion; they will make it a week from this Sunday, on 2 April.

If I find an occasion, I will send you some honey, but send me back the two empty pots.

Farewell, dear child, work and keep well. You know what I promised you if your German master is content with you.³ I warn you that I will pay no bad excuses; one good turn deserves another…

5

I was ten years old when my sister Louise was born (1854). At that time, in Savoy, there were no special registers for civil status; declarations of birth were combined with acts of baptism. The child therefore had to be baptized. The organ was played in masterly fashion by M. Pasquier. Louise made her entrance into the church to the sounds of the Marseillaise. When the priest poured the holy water on her forehead, she gave piercing cries, as if to declare in advance her violently anticlerical opinions.

The religious ideas of my parents were those of Victor Hugo, Michelet, George Sand, Victor Considérant. For them, God was identified with the Ideal. In a notebook written by my mother, I find this quotation from Lamartine: “A conscience without God is a tribunal without a judge. The light of conscience is nothing other than the reverberation of the idea of God in the soul of the human race. Take away God, and night falls within man.”

All this is very well said, but does not replace a demonstration. My parents had not too much trouble conforming to the usages of the country, and, to avoid a scandal, they decided that we should make, my sister and I, our first and last communion. I therefore studied the catechism.

In the strange doctrines summarized there, I today distinguish three parts of unequal value: the first, mystical, which a sensible man can scarcely admit any longer; the second, philosophical, very debatable; the third, finally, relative also, like all human things, but yet much more solid. This last formulates rather well the general principles of a morality which will certainly progress, but which has been for long centuries that of the Egyptians, the Hindus, the Persians, and the Greeks, and will probably last a long time yet.

Our parents explained to us the high meaning of communion, symbol of fraternity among men. They also made us understand the beautiful sentiments that animated the first Christians, when they came to confess their faults publicly. Most of those who have remained attached to religion confound in one and the same veneration historical errors, cosmological hypotheses, and the very wholesome culture of the moral sense.

Brought up in the Catholic religion, my mother had ceased to practice it shortly after her marriage.

For myself, when I knelt before the vicar who was also my teacher, I felt a sincere repentance for my childish peccadilloes. I admired Christ as an ideal of moral purity, and my confessor appeared to me as his representative on earth. He spoke so well, with such gravity and conviction, with so true a desire to make us better, that I felt for him a respect mingled with gratitude.

My astonishment was great when, for all reprimand, I saw him burst into tears and cry out as if in spite of himself: “Lord, would that I had nothing more grave to reproach myself with!” By an unforeseen reversal of roles, it was he who seemed to be confessing to my innocence. Little by little, however, he recovered himself and gave me absolution.

I had honor enough not to tell anyone, not even my mother, of this strange exclamation, which had however made a vivid impression on me. I have learned since that the unhappy young man had seduced a little peasant girl, or rather had let himself be seduced by her, and that she was going to have a child.

The abbé was sent far away in disgrace; his career was broken. Misled by the false precepts of an immoral religion, he believed himself obliged to abandon the mother of his child.

If only some honest man had been there to say to him: Do not weep, friend, your fault is excusable, you have obeyed the eternal laws of nature, stronger than social conventions. Marry the woman you have chosen. Bring up your children in the love of justice, and live in peace.

6

My parents would have gladly prolonged their stay at Samoëns, but this village did not present sufficient resources for our instruction. The Collège of Bonneville had just been reorganized, and the municipal Council had summoned there a whole pleiade of young French professors who became our masters and our friends.

On 4 November 1853 M. Milliet received the following letter:

Monsieur, according to what has been said to me by persons very capable of judging, and according to what I have seen for myself of your talents in painting, I would be happy to attach you to the Collège as professor of drawing, with the authorization of the Royal Provost.

I pray you, Monsieur, to accept my eager salutations and the assurance of my perfect consideration.

HÉGUIN DE GUERLE, Rector of the Collège.

My father accepted these new functions with great pleasure; but it was not without regret that we left the Bérouze and our excellent friends who knew how to exercise hospitality so cordially.

III

1853 — 1857

STAY AT BONNEVILLE

M. MAZON. — BUSINESS TRIPS. — DEATH OF JEANNE. — A PHALANSTERIAN ATTEMPT IN TEXAS. — THE CHILDREN; THEIR CHARACTERS; THEIR STUDIES.

1

The direction of the Collège of Bonneville had been entrusted to M. Héguin de Guerle, a man of letters who had translated for the Nisard collection some Latin authors.⁴ He was a man of the world, a man of taste, a witty conversationalist, but he does not seem to have had the qualities of order necessary to an administrator.

The professors of mathematics, rhetoric, and philosophy were young French licenciés, amiable and intelligent.

Our life flowed peacefully. Our parents had the wisdom never to mix in the petty quarrels which divide the inhabitants of small towns. On Sundays we took long walks in this beautiful country, in the company of the Collège professors. From time to time some friends from Geneva, the Reynauds, the Plissonniers, came to visit us and to soften our exile.

Bonneville, situated near the French frontier, had also given asylum to some political refugees.

I remember a singular original, Doctor Mazon, who no longer practiced medicine, but, a convinced transformist, conducted experiments on rabbits. He subjected them to a painful gymnastics, having placed their feed-troughs at such a height that the poor beasts had to make great efforts to reach their food. M. Mazon hoped thus, in the long run, to create a giant species. To succeed, all he lacked was a few centuries of existence.

When his wife died, the doctor had the courage to open the corpse to extract the heart. This relic was enthroned in a jar of spirits of wine, on the salon’s mantelpiece.

M. Mazon, who scoffed at the devil and joked about the idolatrous worship of the Virgin and the Saints, believed in telepathy and the occult sciences. I am not sure he did not attempt the practices of bewitchment to rid the world of Napoleon III. Sometimes he climbed the Môle, an enormous mountain that dominates the whole valley, then at midnight, alone, standing on the highest summit and turned toward France, he called to his aid all the spirits of heaven and earth. After the manner of the ancient prophets of Israel, he pronounced solemn imprecations, crushing beneath his anathemas the Empire and the Emperor, who were none the worse for it.

If he lacked a little common sense, M. Mazon nevertheless did much good around him. He was as inoffensive as his rabbits, and one wondered why he had been proscribed.

As much as M. Mazon was exalted and eccentric, so much did M. Morizot display calm wisdom and methodical reason. The beauties of art escaped his positive mind, but his way of teaching the sciences was full of interest and life.

To extract a square root or even to do a simple division became a kind of drama, whose vicissitudes, alternations of doubt and hope, we followed with emotion. Truth must always defend itself against multiple errors; one must pass adroitly between the too great and the too small, like a ship between Charybdis and Scylla. It was with joy that we attended the triumph of light over darkness, when the root or the quotient shone at last like the sun of certainty.

2

What seemed very hard to us was the obligation our mother was under to go alternately to Madame de Tucé’s, or to Valence on her business. In these many trips she was accompanied, sometimes by a single one of her children, sometimes by the three eldest.

Wholly taken up with art and poetry, F. Milliet understood nothing of money affairs, which bored him profoundly, and he had been happy to give my mother a general power of attorney.

Madame de Tucé had kept her daughter’s dowry and paid her the income from it irregularly. The sharecropper at Saint-Flour, my father’s property, paid his rent only rarely and incompletely. My parents decided to sell their lands, and placed part of their fortune with M. Reynaud, who paid them handsome interest on it.⁵

Madame de Tucé’s character did not much resemble that of a hen. Working her lands was for her a pleasure, and it was with an indefatigable activity, as with a true competence, that she supervised and directed the labors of her tenants.

Madame de Tucé to her daughter

Le Mans, 7 August 1854.

… Tomorrow I shall go and spend two or three hours at La Monnerie, where I am having a stable built. I shall be back here for dinner, and I shall return quickly to Fleurigny, where I have ten reapers. I should much need Fernand to help me manage all these troubles, which will not be finished before the first of September.

On a trip we made to Le Mans, a phrenologist, friend of young Chassevant, had felt my bumps, described my aptitudes, and cast my horoscope. He liberally granted me “the reflective faculties, all the faculties that serve to form a sound judgment.” He even gratified me with verbal memory, of which I had such great need. — “More depth than brilliance; combativeness little developed. Secretiveness, acquisitiveness almost nil. Approbativeness and curiosity developed, etc…” Such, then, was the deep ground of my character! What a marvelous science! Thus the simple examination of the outer forms of the skull was going to reveal to us the natural dispositions of a child, his vocation, lay bare the inclinations, instincts, and passions of a man, his virtues and his most hidden vices! I was enthusiastic!

From Le Mans to Paris and from Paris to Valence, I plunged with ardor into the reading of a manual of Phrenology, and I was astonished after that to know men still no better. Nevertheless this effort was not entirely useless to me; the classification of the “faculties of the soul” was an introduction to the study of psychology.

Paul to his sister

Dear Alix. — I am very isolated at Valence; Laure Montal has gone to join her brother at Cette… I am studying phrenology with rage. The book mamma bought me is very pretty; it is done from a phalansterian point of view.⁶ Doctor Marquet gave me a skull on which I study; it is a brigand’s skull, it seems to me. — At Vienne, the Huguenot family gave us a very fine welcome; they all have something sympathetic about them, it seems to me I have known them in the animal world.

In the midst of the gravest sorrows and the cares of business, Madame Milliet did not forget her poor forsaken ones; she thought of everything and gave a thousand recommendations to her daughter.

Madame Milliet to Alix

Fleurigny, 22 September.

… If it is cold, my child, you must see about getting some very dry wood; take two cords of beech, one of large pieces, one of small, and you will have it sawed to the size of the fireplace, in three. There were beans in the garden, they must be ripe, they must be stored. I charge you with this together with Paul. I think, my dear child, that you are taking good care of that dear little papa and his Paulo, that you are seeing that he doesn’t get his feet wet, and that you are playing little mother with your Lili. I see I shall find a true Valle.

Your father has not spoken to me of the famous white horse (a signboard which an innkeeper had asked of him).

Farewell, my good little girl, embrace the two children well for me. Your little mother who loves you.

The following year, Madame Milliet brought her three eldest to Fleurigny and brought back little Jeanne.

Madame Milliet to her husband

Saint-Flour, 15 April 1856.

Decidedly, my poor friend, you are annoying with your letters addressed to Crest. You no doubt think we are there lounging about, paying visits to all the Montloviers, to all the Monstiers, and taking carriage drives. Disabuse yourself: we are installed at Saint-Flour, where we have a dog of a time from morning to night. I have taken Jeannette to wait on me; your godson and Louison have worked all day with Clavière to transport into the courtyard all the furniture, and tomorrow, if it is fine, the sale will be held out of doors. The bailiff is a republican, which has reconciled me a little with him, for he looks sovereignly unpleasant.

I did not send you, my little man, your amiable letter; when I answered you I was very surly; that is why I am writing to you today on pink paper, so as to give our ideas a little of that color; I wish it would rub off on you too. What absorbs me is the Dauphisais and beadle race, who are the most cunning, most baneful, most full-drunk breed there is in the world. Saint-Flour is shunned by all the big landed-property dealers of the region. Fortunately they detest one another and an alliance is hardly to be feared. They come offering me derisory prices.

Monday:

The sale has gone fairly well.

Madame Milliet had to make the same year a second trip to Valence.

… We arrived at Lyon at eight in the morning; on leaving the carriage one gets into an omnibus that takes one to the steamboat, and we reached Valence at three. The Montals were waiting for us on the bridge. Jeanne was very good on the train; she calls them beautiful coaches, she enjoys herself very much there and asks to go back, but the trip tired her… fortunately I have Alix, whom she will no longer leave.

M. and Madame Canot, our buyers, dined yesterday at the Montals’, and we are to dine Sunday at their place at Saint-Hour. The house, it seems, is admirably kept; M. Canot has made 800 francs’ worth of repairs in it, he works at everything, even at your paintings. — Celle arrived yesterday with Jenny (her daughter).

Madame Milliet had to make the same year a second trip to Valence.

… The children are well. Paul and Fernand are making a great tour with Doctor Marquet. Although enjoying themselves, they think nearly as much as I do of the day that will reunite us. And I, my dear, I am like a body without a soul. I should much like to find that soul again; it is at Bonneville, isn’t it? Until soon.

The exile did not neglect an occasion to offer Madame Milliet new verses. In 1853 he had written for their wedding anniversary:

To Louise

Angel who hast followed me upon the foreign earth, Who in evil times showest thyself by turns Firm as Faith, tender as a mother, To thee my fervent vows, to thee all my love.

Another year he composed this rondeau:

The month of April is the month of loves, The old Romans devoted it to Cythera, And, of all those which time in its course Comes to tear from the book of our days, It is still the one I aloud prefer. To the nudities of austere nature Who comes to throw a velvet mantle, And adorn her with verdant attire? The month of April.

But is it in itself all that knows how to please me? No, and I will explain without circumlocution; A word often says more than a discourse: Of our union think of the anniversary, And you shall know why I love still The month of April.

Meanwhile Fernand was about to be 14; he felt a great repugnance for sedentary life, and the study of Latin bored him profoundly. His parents asked him not only to choose a career, but to give reasons for his choice. The hope of long voyages and a life of adventure drew him then toward the navy. On the occasion of the first of January 1855, the adolescent writes to his mother, and it is with a certain gravity that he tells her of his plans. The young scatterbrain seems to divine the future that awaits him.

Dear mother. — In a year perhaps I shall be given up to myself, and abandoned to my own strength. I shall not be slow in entering the career I have chosen. To whom shall I owe being able to occupy a rank in society and not be a man useless to himself and to others? Is it not, above all, to you, my mother? How count the pains, the fatigues, you have given yourself for me? By dint of receiving care, one gets used to it; one even comes to think it is owed us, and one would easily become ungrateful. But now that I begin to reflect, I do not fear falling into this pitfall. When I look back, when I see that it is you who watched over my childhood, who fed me, who took care of my education, of my health, how to show you all my gratitude? Never can it equal what you have done for me. It would be now for me to surround you with care, and yet I must depart. Today I can show you the feelings of my heart only by words; soon, I hope, my conduct will show you that I have profited from your counsel. I should be much happier still to stay beside you, to be occupied only with you and my father, to whom I owe so much. But this separation my career demands. I owe myself not only to my family; I must also make myself useful to society.

But to whom do I owe most, if not to my parents? It is from you that I have learned all I know: education, duties toward others, broad and generous ideas, what have you not done to cultivate my intelligence and lay the foundations of my future!

This New Year’s day, which should be so happy, since I spend it beside you, my mother, an idea comes to sadden it: I think that it will soon be the last I shall celebrate with my family.

Who knows where I shall be in a few years? How many leagues will separate me from you? Oh, how sad New Year’s day will be then; my brother, my sisters, can embrace you, and I shall only be able to write to you. I shall be alone among strangers who all, with their families, will spend joyously this day of renewal of the year; I shall have no one to confide my sorrows or my joys to, no one to speak to of my well-beloved parents.

But let us put aside these sad ideas; the moment of separation has not yet come; let us think only of the joy of spending this new year together. I want to think only of the happiness of being near you, my dear mother, of being able to embrace you and to express all the gratitude I feel.

Your son, F.-F. MILLIET

3

A very cruel sorrow was about to strike our family. My mother had brought back to Bonneville her daughter Jeanne. She was the most ravishing child I have ever seen. Her blonde hair, her admirable complexion, fresh as a rose, her bright and gentle eyes, of a periwinkle blue, her open and kind little face made us foresee that she would become the living portrait of her mother. I cannot say what exquisite grace our Jeanne had in all her movements, what charm in her smile, what precise intelligence and what kindness in her gaze. She was our admiration and our joy.

Our anxiety was great when she fell ill, when we saw her waste away rapidly!

Bonneville then had only a single doctor, an old fellow who had once been intelligent and learned, but whom intemperance had diminished even more than the years. He understood nothing of Jeanne’s illness: a vermifuge would have been enough to save her… And our poor angel died, through the fault of an old drunkard. (November 1854.)

Our sorrow was profound. My father has written nothing about the death of his daughter. I am grateful to him for it.

This first vision of death haunted me for a long time. I could not pass a funeral cortège without a heart-pang. I saw my little sister pale and inanimate in her cradle. It seemed to me that something in me had been broken… Surely if Jeanne had lived, she would have loved me as I loved her, we should have protected one another; she would not have abandoned me.

One consolation remained to us — our little sister Louise, a year old. During all her early childhood her face was extraordinary: a great prominent, oversized forehead, à la Victor Hugo, large dark eyes of a deep blue, a grave and meditative mien. Her calm never failed, but she already manifested an iron will.

4

A PHALANSTERIAN ATTEMPT IN TEXAS

Which is the socialist who has proposed to our country this admirable program of work and peace?

We have immense uncultivated territories to clear, roads to open, ports to dig, rivers to render navigable, canals to finish, our railway network to complete. We have, opposite Marseille, a vast kingdom to assimilate to France. We have all our great ports of the Ocean to bring closer to the American continent by the speed of those communications which still are lacking to us. We have everywhere, in short, ruins to raise up, false gods to cast down, truths to make triumph.

Thus spoke Napoleon III in his famous Bordeaux discourse: “The empire is peace.” Such were the promises; here are the facts: war in the Crimea, war in Italy, war in Mexico, Metz, Sedan, the invasion, the shame, the ruin.

Meanwhile, M. Milliet could no longer have illusions; the emperor’s popularity with the working class was undeniable. Madame de Tucé wrote, for instance, to her daughter on the occasion of the opening of a new street:

There are two hundred workmen opening the street; it is 36 feet wide; so you see the omnibuses crossing my garden, the carts entering your vegetable garden, the curious going to the railway station passing over my fine trees. After all, there is good and bad in it: regret for the charm of a fine garden, and increased value for our properties so well placed. The city has voted 170 thousand francs to indemnify us.

They work hard, eat heartily; the workmen earn up to three francs a day, and so all cry “Long live the Emperor!” at the top of their lungs.

The Chassevants are doing very brilliant business; they have at least three thousand workmen, and have had to send to Mayenne and Brittany for them. And despite that, Julien (their son) is going to Texas as is his friend Montreuil.

Indeed, our excellent friend Victor Considérant,⁷ was then occupied in organizing a phalansterian colony in America. The disciples of Fourier had the hope of realizing, on this distant land, the conceptions of their master.

In a brochure entitled Au Texas, Considérant began by recounting the trip he had made to the United States in 1853, and his visit to the North-American Phalanx, which had already existed for ten years.

The too small numbers (120 to 130 members) did not allow the attempting of the learned organization in combined series called a phalanstery. According to Fourier, every association ought to be conceived not merely as an agglomeration of juxtaposed individuals, but as a social being, of which each element cooperates in the life of the whole, in an integral and harmonic manner. Without this serial organism, association tends to drown individuals in the collective substance; drive and attraction are lacking in the work.

Nevertheless in the American Phalanx, some of the social problems seemed resolved: the suppression of domesticity, for example. “Visitors are charmed to find themselves served, from their first meal, by young girls, young boys, and ladies, who are the children and women of the establishment’s masters, and who, shortly after, in their turn have for servants those at whose orders they had been a moment before.”

The women take an active part in the deliberations and vote like the men. — No work is obligatory. Not the shadow of an authority to enjoin, repress, punish.

When it was objected to Considérant that the capital at his disposal was insufficient for the realization of his enterprise, he answered that the value of lands is a function proportional to the population that goes there. To bring people to a given zone is therefore the equivalent of creating value.

Considérant gave of Texas a fairy-tale description: Nature has done everything, all is prepared; one need only erect buildings, which the eye is astonished not to find. The soil is of superior richness; the prairie offers first-rate pastures: “Considerable tracts are exclusively occupied by wild wheat, by wild barley, or by wild oats, but which had no less the whole appearance of cultivated fields.

“Peaches, melons, grapes, and other fruits of temperate climates come there in profusion, while figs, oranges, lemons, dates, pineapples, olives, and the other fruits of the tropics abound in the southern parts. — The products of the great cultivation are long-staple cottons, maize, wheat, rye, barley, and the other grains, sugar-cane, potatoes, sweet potatoes, etc. Rice and tobacco grow in several places, and among indigenous plants one counts indigo, vanilla, sarsaparilla, and a number of medicinal products.”

Fernand listened with all his ears to the reading of passages such as this:

Considerable quantities of cattle, horses, mules, sheep, and pigs fatten on the prairies, requiring no care. Enormous herds of buffalo and wild horses traverse the prairies; deer, bears, and several other species of game feed there in profusion.

The territory is still infested with hordes of Indians, most of whom subsist by incursions and depredations, and who often show the most destructive and bloodthirsty dispositions.

The climate is delicious and of a remarkable salubrity. Winter is never rigorous. The summer heat, though intense, is greatly tempered by the regular and refreshing breezes that rise every day with the sun and do not fall before three in the afternoon.

Every year, when the tall grasses have been dried by winter, fire walks over the prairie with its sheets of flame and smoke, sometimes hurled across the plain faster than a horse at the gallop.

Fire is the prairie’s ally against the forest. The latter gains ground if the agricultural populations, regularizing the burning, govern it so as to favor the extension of the woods.

One can imagine what attraction these primitive procedures of cultivation must have exercised upon young imaginations: “One puts the plough on the prairie, one sows maize, and one gives a stroke of the harrow. The maize grows from two meters to three and a half in height, and gives a considerable harvest.” After this operation, the prairie has become a field where everything one wishes to sow will come abundantly. Wheat yields up to forty-five grains for one; beets reach up to eighty-two centimeters in circumference. — Considérant proposed to Brisbane, his companion, to bring one back, after the manner of the two Hebrew emissaries who are represented carrying the cluster of grapes they had cut in the promised land.

“Such harvests are obtained by a most easy labor and without manure. The humus layer measures sometimes up to five meters in depth.”

Victor Considérant proposed to the phalansterians to “associate in spirit, in heart, and in will, to found a society establishing itself in full consciousness of its goal and of its means; it would be a hearth of liberty, of light, of peaceful power, of sovereign attraction, and of radiant and liberating prosperity.”

Enthusiasm is contagious. My parents hastened to take shares in this hazardous enterprise.

Of the whole family, Paul was perhaps the one whom emigration to Texas tempted least. He vaguely glimpsed a regrettable absence of museums and libraries, the only regions toward which he was directed by his attractions and his destinies.

M. Milliet, deeply attached to his native soil, resigned himself only with regret to leaving Europe. Forced to recognize that the imperial regime was consolidating in France, and very saddened to see exile prolonged, he was seized with discouragement. At the moment of departing he composed the following verses; “the most despairing are the most beautiful songs”:

FAREWELLS TO THE OLD WORLD

The vessel is about to leave the land; The passengers are on deck, And in their eyes and on their brow Passes a flash of bitter joy. Why do they flee under other skies? They go to seek a fatherland… From the bosom of the moved crowd Come to them these words of farewell:

THE CHORUS

Pioneers of the future, full of a profound faith, You who keep watch when Paris sleeps, Depart! and may the sea cradle you on its waves, May a good wind lead you to port.

But they, seekers of the great problem, Unshakable in their faith, Mastering the emotion of their hearts, Send forth a supreme farewell:

A WIDOW

I leave you, O native land, And without remorse I can depart: Keep the gravestone Of my husband, valiant martyr…

If I stayed in these regions, One day my sons, grown up, By force would go to swell the ranks Of soldiers, hired assassins.

No, I hold them, I take them away Toward shores where Liberty, With the pure breath of her breath, Makes Humanity green again!

The lioness, from the voracious tiger Knows how to snatch her cubs: Napoleon, I set space Between my sons and your executioners.

THE CHORUS

Ravishing metamorphoses That the new times accomplish! Cypresses are changed into roses, The dead tree puts forth branches. Love alone is master of the world; One feels the earth tremble; From the bosom of the fertile tomb See life gushing forth in floods… The goddess of ancient times, Divine Hospitality, Has altars in America, Where Liberty triumphs!

THE EXILE

(it is my father who speaks)

For four years, banished from France, I drag my sad days afar, Seeking to seize Hope… The phantom always escapes. But a noise comes to my ear! Is it Paris awakening? No, it is only a royal sabbath: The people of the great city Cuts capers like a servile dog And licks the hand that beats it. Worshipping the god of force, The vile Caesar of the false oath, It leaves in peace this Corsican tiger To grind France beneath his tooth. What am I saying? In its strange drunkenness, It finds itself happy in its mire, Provided the master has smiled. Hugo, lay aside your iambs! Paris sings the dithyrambs Of Belmontet and of Méry. Why come to trouble its feasts? Remain in forgetfulness, vanquished! Be silent, exiles and poets, Hide your sword, O Spartacus! All is finished. France entire Bends her head, once so proud, Before the triumphant crimes. Stepmother forgetful and frivolous, She dances like a madwoman On the tomb of her children.⁸ And I say: Woe, anathema, To him who does not hear the tocsin! O France, pale courtesan, Stay on the arm of the assassin. Lavish on this hideous vampire Both the pearls of your smile And the braided gold of your hair; Go, you are nothing but a body without a soul, I leave you with your infamous one, And I curse you both!

THE CHORUS

(it is my mother’s voice)

Let your bitter lament Die without echo, For him who despairs Repose flies away. Let divine faith Kindle in your heart; Despise the thorn, See only the flower.

A YOUNG GIRL

France may treat me as a stepmother, She is my mother, and before her sorrow I feel still more how I idolize her, And I have fervent wishes for her happiness. Oh, soon let your long martyrdom cease, Beloved land… When to my future Happiness smiles with its sweetest smile, Hope comes to me that ills will end.

She was still singing when, upon the wet plain, The ship suddenly took a rapid flight. The land disappears, and, in the noise of the waves, Are extinguished the farewells, the songs… and the sobs.

Fernand wrote for his father’s name-day:

24 June 1855.

Dear Father. You have already amply paid your debt to society in sacrificing your repose, your personal happiness, for the realization of your idea, social regeneration. You have spent all your vigils on it; that is why you have been banished. If you had been an egoist, you would basely have bent your head and all would have been said. But you had children and you wanted to give them the example of courage. Your sacrifice will not have been useless. Be sure of it, dear father, after the example you have given us, it is impossible that we should not follow in your tracks. Yes, we shall follow the noble motto: “Do what you must, come what may.” Oh no! we shall not bend our heads, we shall not follow the example of the civilized⁹ who make themselves the valets of the first rascal who comes along. We shall do as you, dear father, we shall march straight to the goal and we shall never bend. It is to you, free men, that we owe glimpsing the dawn of happiness. It is your children who will reap the fruits of your labor. Glory be rendered to you! you will be blessed by future generations for having dared and undertaken universal happiness. And for whom have you so labored? For this world which has had Socrates, and which poisoned him, which had Jesus Christ, and which crucified him, which had Galileo, and which imprisoned him, which had Fourier at last, and which mocked and misunderstood him. It is to regenerate this vile and contemptible world, this world that despises everything that is holy, everything that is pure, everything that is great. But the destinies must be accomplished, progress must march on, and science must enlighten.

Dear father, you have always been ahead in ideas; you wish also to be ahead in execution. In Texas, friends who share your convictions are laying the foundations of a new society; let us go and find them. There, delivered from all the miseries the sight of which afflicts you in Europe, you will find friends whose ideas will be sympathetic to you; there you will find happiness, repose, but not inaction, which would not suit you. It is for youth to work and to continue what you have so well begun.

It was a great sorrow for Madame de Tucé to think that her daughter and grandchildren were going to leave Europe. Seeing her so sad, an old devoted servant, father of Jeanne’s nurse, wrote to my mother. His letter is short of spelling, but full of sincere affection and of that positive, somewhat down-to-earth spirit that characterizes the French peasant:

Saint-Rimay, 26 July 1855.

My deer Madam Millet,

You musnt be uneezy about your little Jeane; she is doing very well, she is very strong for her age. We see her at leest once or twice a week; I embrace her with all my hart for you, my deer Madam, telling her she’ll soon see her mama, her brothers and sister. Your mama is not well, on account of her age and the worry. What makes a great part of your mama’s sufferin is that she finds it hard to see us, and also to be far from you. Which is why she doesnt answer your letters, my deer Madam; the rumor is going round that you want to go even further away.

Since you say you trust me, I will tell you what I think. I would be hapy if I could turn you away from going far from your family, becos I think it is not to your advantage and your children’s. It would be much better, my deer Madam, for your mama, for you to come near her, near your brother, near your sister, and also come back to France near your goods and your friends; come, my deer Madam, I hope your mama will hold out her arms to receeve you with friendship, and her children whom she has long wished to see, and I have a desir to see you that is endless. As for Monsieur Milliet, my desir would be to see him too, but if that is impossible I embrace him with all my Heart, saying to him goodbye and a thousand times goodbye.

Receeve the letter of your very dear and obediant servant.

CHEVET LEGRET

Plainly this brave man could not understand that one should risk one’s fortune for the triumph of a generous idea. His short-sighted wisdom did not perceive what was egoistically cruel in the counsel he gave a young mother — to abandon to the sad solitude of exile the husband she loved deeply and whose great heart she admired.

Madame de Tucé sought by every means to retain her son-in-law and to save her daughter’s dowry. M. Milliet wrote to her:

I find it hard to understand how the conditions of the contract that endow you in ready money will be fulfilled. I shall await your explanations, after which one must wish what one cannot prevent. My greatest fear in all this is the delay that may result for the execution of our projects. I believe we shall be able to leave in twelve or fifteen months. The information of those gentlemen about the horses pleased me; it gives me an idea of what can be done over there for the breeding of horses. So I am beginning to build studs… in Texas.

Fernand was already practicing throwing the lasso to capture wild horses, after the method taught by Fenimore Cooper in his novels.

Then, supposing our fine dreams already realized, he wrote, as a style exercise:

A VISIT TO TEXAS

(I abbreviate the account a little)

Émile Reynaud and Léon Blanc, two of his friends from Europe, had come to visit the Colony, and Fernand was doing the honors: “Here is the cow stable; in this compartment you see the calves, in that one the heifers; over there are the cows with calf; here are the milking cows; here, separated by a partition, are the bulls. This building contains eight hundred head of horned cattle. — But to care for all this livestock, you need an enormous staff; that must cost you a great deal. — Not at all. Here we have no servants. Each one occupies himself according to his tastes. The people you see are paid, but they have in the profits only a share proportional to their work.” — The visitors admired in turn the sheep park, the domain reserved for goats, and finally the stud: “We have magnificent stallions, and they are cared for in a very particular way; their upkeep costs us dear, but they produce magnificent offspring. This is the covered riding-school; farther on is the racecourse; you will see tomorrow at a carousel that we have bold horsemen and skilled riders.”

From the top of a hill, the view extends over the countryside: “All that you see in the distance belongs to us. See what movement in those fields, how all those scattered herds in the prairie enliven the landscape, and what a proud air those young guardians have, who, accompanied by their dogs, are mounted on little horses with floating manes. These places of guardian are much sought after by the young boys, and as they are given by election, there is as much electioneering to obtain them as there would be in Europe to be named senator or deputy. Down there flows the river; here come the fishermen returning; their nets are full; we shall have fish for dinner. — Listen to those gunshots; they come from that wood, on the right on the hill. The hunters are filling their game-bags. I should like to take you to a very curious hunt, that of buffalo, but they are only met rather far from here, on the prairie; one must assemble in a caravan to make such a hunt.

”— Where,” said Léon, “is that troop of young girls and young boys going? They have an air of festival, and what do those beribboned carriages following them mean? — They are going to gather hay,” I answered, “to take it into that immense barn you see behind the stables. Here all painful labors are done by machines; the other labors are done as you see: a troop of every age and sex assembles, and the work is finished in an instant, without fatigue or trouble. But I believe the dinner hour is approaching.

”— The air is so pure, so brisk, that I feel well disposed to appreciate your cooking,” said Émile on entering the restaurant. ”— Well then, at what table do you wish to go? Here is the table of the refined, the table of the anchorites, that of the carnivores, and over there is the section of the vegetarians. Choose according to your appetite. — I am astonished to see how everyone expresses himself correctly, even that man in coarse clothes. — I should think so,” I replied, laughing, “that is Eugène Nus, famous poet and dramatic author. But he also loves field labor. You will see this evening if he is a man of wit. When he converses with de Pompéry and Toussenel, it is a pleasure to hear them. — And you,” resumed Léon, “what do you do here? — My dear friend, I am a merchant; I am in charge of the export of a part of the products of the Colony. In my moments of leisure I do a little carpentry, or I ride.”

The three friends visit the workshops of horology, jewelry, and goldsmithery: “It is one of the most important branches of our commerce. M. Plissonnier and M. Reynaud send watches, clocks, and jewels into almost all the States of America. Then here are the factories. There is a sugar refinery, the factories for cloths and linens of M. Boucicaut,¹⁰ the blast-furnaces for smelting metals are directed by M. Godin.”¹¹

After an evening spent in the salons in the company of artists, the two travelers were very satisfied with this organization. — “Upon my word,” said Léon, “I would gladly stay here. All that I see here enchants and attaches me. Nowhere have I seen people so happy. What if we ended our trip here? — I was about to propose it to you,” said Émile.

And it is thus that my guests became members of the Colony.¹²

The first emigrants to Texas, men full of illusions, were not farmers. The colony’s beginnings were difficult. In 1857, V. Considérant wrote to his friends:

A great part of the funds of the Colonization Society, of which I was the founder and head, have been engulfed under my eyes, in operations not conformable but forcibly contradictory to the plan proposed by me and adopted by you all.

Premature emigration, in precipitate and confused mode, certain ruin of all colonization enterprise; these two ideas were but one in my mind.

What made the weight of the evil crushing for my strength was the intimate nature of its causes: your hopes, your interests, our common goal, all that I had thought to serve and that was crumbling under me!

After some alternations of discouragement and hope, the affair ended by definitively foundering. It was for my parents and their children a great disappointment.

Yet M. Milliet never abandoned himself altogether to sadness.

HOPE

Our life is a mixture Of bitterness and sweetness, It is a strange assemblage Of misery and happiness.

One sees in it gold and mire; The worm soils the flower; The demon is next to the angel; From pleasure is born sorrow.

To endure existence, One must have faith, hope And Love, divine torch.

Woe to him who doubts, He gropes along the road That leads us to the tomb.

5

My sister Alix, two years older than I, received the same lessons as her brothers. Gay, witty, and mocking, she found a way to introduce into her style-exercises a few descriptions of things and people sketched from nature, with a caricatural verve which amused us by the malice of the observation. To give an idea of her turn of mind, I copy a few fragments of her compositions; they will amuse children of her age, if any are to be found who read these lines:

I have to write a narration on the infinite variety of the aspects of nature. Let us begin by an invocation: Divine inspiration, come second my vain efforts; you know the devoted heart that implores you; alas, do not let the severe remonstrances of my worthy professor fall upon my pensive brow! My ardent eyes look through the window to see whether you are coming… But I see only old Prospère, who wags her head as she knits. Inspiration is deaf, she does not come. In return, transpiration hurries up; for, always sweet and compassionate, seeing my gestures and my efforts, she pours balm and sweat upon my weary limbs.

When M. Fleury read these tomfooleries, he had a hard time keeping his professorial gravity; besides, old Mademoiselle Prospère was at her window, on the other side of the street, as if to demonstrate the truth of the description.

PORTRAIT OF SUZANNE

… You ask me to make for you the portrait of my friend Suzanne; here it is: Picture to yourself a long, thin body, surmounted by a head which appears very large, surmounted itself by a forest of frizzy, chestnut, and unruly hair. One would say a mossy rose about to bloom. She has blue eyes, to which she knows how to give an amiable air, although their habitual expression is malice. Her mouth has a very sweet smile, sometimes mocking, that lets one see teeth which are not precisely of ivory; well, they might have been! She loves music passionately, and so she has been endowed with great spider’s legs which play very well. I even believe she sings a little (Suzanne, not the legs). You cannot imagine a more charming character; she is a child with children and reasonable with reasonable people. As she is an artist to her finger-tips, she plays the great masters on every piano, harpsichord, or fiddle within her reach. As for capricious, she is a little so, and as for fantastic, she is so very much. It is impossible to find a better friend, more attached, more loving; as for me I find her perfect as she is.

OLD MAZON’S GEESE¹³

Old Mazon is a queer fellow, both physically and morally. Imagine a long body, of a thinness that is frightening, a bony face, little gray eyes almost imperceptible, which shine like phosphorus; his rough mustaches are graying. He tells fabulous things, gets excited in delivering them, and ends by believing them himself. He is at once doctor, gardener, animal-breeder, magnetizer, lover of turning tables, etc… Recently old Mazon had a chalet built that is at least as baroque as its owner. Rabbits and chickens were transplanted into huts ranged around the courtyard; then two geese came to enlarge his menagerie. But, one night, one of the workmen, who knew the desires of this maniac, did not stop short; he seized a goose and squeezed her neck to keep her from crying out. Fortunately her companion threw herself upon the thief and, with blows of beak and wings, did so well that the infamous ravisher had to let go and fled, abandoning his prey. Old Mazon did not fail to compare his geese to those of the Capitol, to award them the palm of heroism.

These two animals attached themselves to their masters and became more faithful guardians than dogs. None approached the chalet without their piercing cries giving notice of his entry; they bit the heels of intruders, pursuing by preference those who seemed to fear them.

Among these was the postman, a little dwarf, always dressed in goose-dropping yellow, ageless, waddling walk, voice of a hoarse weasel — there is the portrait of the individual.

Assailed more than once by the two terrible geese, he no longer dared enter the garden and shouted from afar: “Monsieur Mazon! a letter!”

M. Mazon turned a deaf ear. The gnome, fearing for his little tricks and for his yellow trousers, waved his cap to frighten his adversaries, but in combat the geese almost always had the upper hand. M. Mazon would then come up like a guardian angel to save the unfortunate postman.

Madame Mazon was obliged to leave for France and abandon her poultry-yard. Her husband had great difficulty getting the geese back into obedience. Sometimes he took them by gentleness, called them his little friends, his dear children! sometimes by threat, treating them as ingrates and scoundrels!

Madame Mazon returned, but the geese held it against her for having abandoned them. One was killed, which put the other into a great fury. She turned on her mistress, bruised her with blows of her wings and stung her with her beak. M. Mazon was persuaded that it was the soul of one of his enemies that was pursuing his wife, and he asked us to slaughter the fierce beast. The bargain concluded, he was moved, took pity on the fate of his goose, asked us not to make her suffer and to eat her with olives. My mother also wanted to fatten her, but as she refused to eat, her doom was decided. The cook was afraid of her; the maid was no braver; so they went to look for help, and the three of them cut off her head. Thus ended these two poor beasts who, after having valiantly guarded the house, were eaten by carnivorous masters, little grateful.

Pray for their souls! So be it!!

6

M. Fleury, our young rhetoric professor, painfully composed correct verses, which does not mean that he was a poet. His colleagues mocked a little at his Delille-style. In a description of trees in winter, I find, for example:

The white frosts, slipping over their yellow foliage, Were for our children an attractive image Of those fruits hung with a generous sugar On which the first warbler sees us as greedy as they.

One may be an excellent professor and a mediocre writer.

Following in this matter outdated precepts, he wanted everywhere and always to simplify, classify, find formulas. Thus he claimed to sum up in one word the character of each of his three pupils: “In Fernand, it is the heart; in Alix, the mind; in Paul, the imagination.”

However flattering it might be for us, this way of summing up a human being in a “master faculty” has always seemed to me false and superficial, because it is far too simple.

Fernand and Paul always remained fraternally united. Never the slightest quarrel between them. And yet it is hard to imagine two more opposed temperaments: At the age of fifteen, Fernand was a handsome boy of slender proportions, with somewhat protruding blue eyes, a sign of myopia. He had his mother’s beautiful hands and her complexion of a dazzling freshness. His character recalled, but only in certain respects, that of M. Milliet. A light and inattentive schoolboy, although endowed with a keen intelligence, he did not continue his Greek and Latin studies, but his happy memory afterward enabled him to speak rather fluently German, English, Italian, Spanish, and Arabic.

He sang out of tune and hardly profited from the drawing lessons his father gave him; but he excelled in all physical exercises: swimming, gymnastics, fencing, riding. He became a bold and elegant horseman. He could also have made an eloquent orator, words flowed so easily from his mouth. His gaiety, his audacity pushed even to temerity, his loyalty, his frankness, the visible pleasure he took in rendering service, made him sympathetic to all his comrades. His person summed up rather well the qualities and the faults customarily attributed to the French character. His seductive charm won him with women precocious and too numerous successes.

Paul was thin and not very robust. — Doctor Pollet had nicknamed him Secco. Awkward, timid, lacking quickness in retort, but hard-working and reflective, given to reverie and already melancholy, he preferred reading to childish games, solitude to noisy gatherings. Pacific, he calmed quarrels among schoolboys, but stubborn, when a cause seemed to him just, he defended it with obstinacy, pushing logic to its extreme consequences. Made rather for defense than for attack, he never sought combat, but danger never made him lose his coolness.

Always a little pedantically, M. Fleury compared the two brothers to two Homeric heroes: Fernand was the boiling Achilles, Paul the prudent Ulysses. He remarked that swift-footed Achilles has long legs the better to run; he is the man of action; he is vivid and impetuous; Ulysses, with his long torso and short legs, appeared taller when seated; he was the man of counsel.

I protest, however, against this comparison; not for my brother, who was very brave, but for myself, who was never crafty, nor artful, nor a liar. We were besides neither of us heroes.

A docile and conscientious schoolboy, I was well thought of by all my professors; I had good comrades who have remained faithful friends. Old ladies had for me a predilection that was rarely shared by young ones. Little amiable, I was little loved.

We had nevertheless, my brother and I, a passion that was common to us — that of reading. We devoured numerous volumes taken from the fine library of our friend and fellow-pupil Michel Rey. My father had transmitted to us his somewhat fanatical admiration for Victor Hugo, whose complete works he possessed. We subscribed to Lamartine’s Entretiens, a monthly publication, in which the ruined and aged poet wove brilliant variations on the principal masterpieces of the literature of every age. I let myself be seduced by these long, harmoniously cadenced sentences, where the majestic amplitude of form ill conceals what is superficial in the judgments.

I read at this time all the works of Shakespeare, nourishment far too strong for my age. I was absolutely incapable of appreciating the profound truth of the characters, but I yet divined that I had to do with a powerful genius, and I understood enough to be deeply moved.

At the Collège, the level of studies was so low that at the age of twelve I was placed in rhetoric. I learned by heart Bossuet’s funeral orations. There again what charmed me was the sonorous amplitude of the beautiful periods: like the great waves of the sea, they rise one after another with order and symmetry, make their plume of foam shine in the sun, then fall back majestically in a cadenced movement.

I also learned passages from Télémaque, and I admired greatly the noble and ornate simplicity of Fénelon, the gentleness and harmony of his poetic style, so richly sown with images that make one see what he paints, his generous and somewhat chimerical turn of mind.

Add to that a few pages of Chateaubriand, and you know perhaps the defect of which I have never quite cured myself, a tendency to bombast. Like a child who wants to hoist himself to the role of a great personage and gets entangled in clothes too large for his size, in my style-exercises, on the most familiar subjects, I took a solemn tone. The order and vigor of thoughts seemed to me secondary, if I succeeded in distantly recalling the music of the long oratorical periods.¹⁴

Oscar Orsat, the eldest of the nine children of the syndic of Samoëns, had written on my album a piece of verse. Schoolboys easily take themselves seriously. I therefore seized my lyre at once and thanked him by an acrostic. Excuse me if the bump of approbativeness leads me to copy here the flattering reply made by my friend:

“Plein de parfums, de douceur et de vie, “Au milieu d’un jardin que sa fleur vient orner, “Un lys candide et pur croît, beau de poésie; “Lis, et tu me diras qu’il a voulu rossonner.

Oscar would have become, no doubt, like his brothers, a distinguished man. He was killed in the war of 1870.

If M. Fleury idealized his pupils a little too much, Alix was there to paint them in a more realistic fashion.

ON BONNEVILLE AND ITS ENVIRONS,

BUT IN WHICH ONE SPEAKS OF QUITE OTHER THINGS

Among the charming valleys of Savoy, that of the Arve is one of the most gracious. On one side, the mountains are covered with verdure, dotted with little chalets of a gay and smiling aspect; on the other side, on the contrary, there are only great rocks almost always covered with snow. It is on the right bank of the Arve that Bonneville is found, a very small town, although it is the chief town of the province and the residence of the Intendant. The establishments one meets there most often are cafés, almost always full. The inhabitants are usually very thirsty; the least emotion dries up their throats. Do they lose a lawsuit, does one of their relatives pass from life to death? At once their throat becomes burning. Does any good news come to them, do they receive an inheritance? The same effect is produced. In short, there is no public rejoicing that is not amply moistened.

In so small a place, one would think people would know how to get on together and form pleasant gatherings, but no; people are divided into parties; they look at one another over the shoulder when they meet, and tear one another with sharp teeth on every occasion. In general, people are esteemed there only in proportion to the number of their crowns…

A family of French exiles came one day to settle in the midst of this clannish and cliquish population. The gossips eyed it and soon made it their prey. It was composed of the head, who passed for a fierce republican, and who yet had only very innocent habits, such as painting, the pipe, poetry, and vermouth; besides, the best husband and the most tender father one could find. His wife was an amiable and gay person¹⁵ whom the ladies of Bonneville called philosopher because she never went to mass. From time to time she had to leave her family to go to France where her business called her, and despite her philosophy, the poor mother never set out with dry eyes; on her return there were always vows never to part again. Then came the children: the eldest was a tall boy who was beginning rather late to become reasonable; he did not know what to do with his legs, and, having shot up suddenly, they bothered him enormously. Then a little girl a bit too mocking, not very respectful toward her professors, willingly playing tricks on them, but otherwise not in the least wicked and with no pretension at all. After that came a little dirty poet-mathematician, who willingly rolled on the ground and had a horror of the hairbrush; the said urchin was always hanging on his mother’s skirts. Then a very little girl, spoiled and petted by everybody, especially by her father, the aforesaid enemy of the family.

There follows a series of caricature portraits of the Collège professors.

The pleasantries of the little mocker wounded M. Fleury all the more in that they struck home.¹⁶

But I fear that the undersigned will end by putting you to sleep with her biographies; then she must occupy herself with finding a moral, an important thing, for without that she would pass for an immoral girl!

Why, too, did the former professor not marry? Never could one ask anything more apt, and then I should have added by way of moral that he who seeks always ends by finding. Well, let us think no more of it.

The winter was long and cold; even so, the exiles did not know boredom. It was because they admired nature, the mountains covered with snow seemed to them as imposing as they had been bare and smiling in summer. It was above all because all the members of this family were united, that they never remained idle — drawing, making verses, and busying themselves, the children with instructing themselves, the parents with watching over their studies.

Happiness can as well be found in a small town of Savoy as in a capital with balls and theaters; one only has to know how to make it spring up, and where could one better like to lodge than amid a well-united family, with good friends around it?

Alix, 1st January 1857.

APPENDIX TO CHAPTER III

PHALANSTERIAN DREAMS

The childish description of the Texas Colony written by Fernand giving only a very incomplete idea of what the phalansterians dreamed, I shall add a few traits to this imaginary picture, helping myself with the texts of Fourier and his disciples. It will be seen that the organization of a phalanstery is as far from communist constraint as from anarchic disorder; it is a learnedly combined system of hierarchized series.

Human passions are forces which it suffices to direct in order to make them useful. “Immortal Desire is the unique Energy that lifts up worlds, the inner hearth of will and power which gives each being the power to act. Deprived of a passion, man would be mutilated, as if deprived of a sense. His instincts, repressed and crushed until now like evil beasts, will be no more, once liberated at last, than the needs of universal attraction tending toward unity, working amid obstacles to melt into the final harmony, definitive expression of universal happiness.” Work, restored to honor, freely accepted by all, distributed according to tastes and natures, ceaselessly varied at the workers’ choice, will become health, gaiety, the very law of life.

When social organization shall be perfect enough to give free vent to all individual passions, when egoism shall thus have obtained all legitimate satisfactions, then will blossom forth a new passion, the noblest of all, that of Unitéism and of Harmony: each being will feel an ardent desire to reconcile his individual happiness with that of Humanity.

Man cannot live without the cooperation of his fellows, and the services he has received from them create for him duties. Beside the instincts that teach him his personal preservation, he has others, superior, which command him the perpetuation and perfecting of the species. Let us listen to this voice: It is she who commands our choice in love; it is she who inspires in us pity, sympathy, international benevolence, universal solidarity; it is she who can lead us to the finest acts of mutual aid and devotion.

Fourier observed children’s taste for brilliant spectacles, and also the spirit of imitation that leads them to reproduce every military evolution, whether it be military men on parade, levites in a procession, or shepherds in a theater ballet. “Gather a hundred toddlers at random, show them these different maneuvers, and they will hasten to imitate them. — And if you furnish them with little guns, little censers, little crooks, you will see them transported with joy, listening with respectful docility to the lessons you may wish to give them on the evolutions.”

For the Phalange, the Opera will no longer be a simple amusement, it will become a true theater of the people, the natural and attractive school of the Fine Arts.

“It is in the choruses of the Opera that the child will acquire the justness of voice and ear, the precision of movement, the passionate obedience in collective maneuvers, and above all the love of Unity, of which the harmonian Opera will always present him the image.”

In these festivals, where each is by turns actor and spectator, everything teaches order and measure: Song and instruments measure sounds; poetry is measured speech; gymnastics and dance are only measured movements; painting is the measure of forms and colors.

Thus the Opera can become at once the representation and the model of a social life of which all the manifestations would be harmoniously combined. It will be the school of hatching for artistic instincts, which all converge toward an ideal of beauty and fraternal union: painters, musicians, singers, choreographers, machinists, architects, and poets would all in fact act in concert. And there, employed for good, is that power of great spectacles over the masses — a power reproved, not without reason, in current society, by severe moralists, because it too often leads to mad expenditure and to debauchery.

THE FEAST OF UNITÉISM

Fernand had announced to his guests for the next day a great festival that was to celebrate the harmonious accord of men on the planet at last conscious of its unity. Up early in the morning, Émile and Léon saw the joyous band of children scatter over the meadows, like a swarm of bees, to gather there in emulation white daisies, wild roses, poppies, cornflowers, corncockles, and forget-me-nots.

Soon the crowd made its way toward a vast natural circus, surrounded with tiers and covered with immense awnings to protect the spectators from sun or rain. — In the center, on a high rock, stands the circular temple of Harmony, an edifice of white marble, masterpiece of new architecture. — On the steps of the temple are grouped the numerous ambassadors sent from the most distant countries to take part in this solemnity. They have donned their rich national costumes and go to sit before the altar, at the places of honor.

The procession begins with the third sex, the naive troop of the Cherubs and Cherubines, followed by the Seraphs and Seraphines, true little angels with blond hair. Their cheeks and lips are as fresh as the new flowers that they draw by handfuls from little baskets suspended at their necks by a sky-blue ribbon. Clumsy and grave, they search with their eyes for the approval of their mother who, from afar, smiles upon them in rapture.

Then come the little shepherds and shepherdesses, dressed in simple kidskin. They lead the flock of the year’s lambs, which already wore at the neck a bell or jingle. At the given signal, several dogs, each shaking his collar of bells, rally around them the young sheep, trained to their voice. The bells succeed one another by thirds, so that the signal proper to each platoon harmonizes with the note of the platoon that precedes and that which follows. Children and animals have been trained from their first days to execute maneuvers at the sound of an instrument and at the command of a few brief words. The children from five to nine years old are thus obeyed by the animals they love passionately. The flocks in motion form a moving symphony, and the plain fills with harmonious quiverings.

Allegro! The graceful Gymnasiennes make their entry, dressed in short skirts of pink muslin, in the manner of our Opera dancers. Light as dragonflies, they pass and repass beneath garlands of roses, held up in arbors by twelve Gymnasiens, chosen from among the most handsome young boys. Proudly standing, they have for all costume, as at the new Olympic games, only a flesh-colored belt.

The violins resound, and beneath these flowered alleys file in their turn the Damoiseaux and Damoiselles sumptuously arrayed in the richest stuffs — silk, satin, and velvet, set off with gold, jewels, and precious stones. These are the young fiancés and the young spouses. They dance in couples, tenderly entwined, to the sound of flageolets and flutes; a kind of voluptuous waltz draws them along in its rhythmic whirls and ends with a kiss from the dancer on the brow of his partner.

This corporation of precocious loves forms a contrast with the following, the tribe of the Jouvenceaux and Jouvencelles, of 18 to 20 years.

All falls silent. It is in the midst of a solemn silence that there rises toward the skies a sacred hymn. The harps and all the stringed instruments accompany this grave and enthusiastic song, music truly celestial. A murmur of admiration and sympathy salutes the entry of the Vestals, chaste virgins with long peploi of linen of an immaculate whiteness. Lily flowers crown their brow, and it is a great lily that they carry religiously in their hand. Their gentle faces with frank and pure gaze reflect the simple modesty of true chastity. They advance with slow steps and seem to glide upon the ground.

Beside them, a few Vestals — young savants and young ascetic thurifers — clothed in white sackcloth, carry a green palm and swing censers. These are the saints and the saintesses of the Phalange; masters of their senses enough to keep celibacy until the age of twenty. Their chastity is to assure their race a greater vigor, but prolonged later, it would be considered a fault against social hygiene and as a kind of sin.

Suddenly bursts forth an infernal racket: tocsin, drums, trumpets, cymbals, and all the brass unleashed. Hair streaming, wheeling their arms, and uttering sharp howls, the wild boys of the little hordes rush forth like a hurricane. With voice and spur, they urge on their little neighing black horses. A few young amazons, like Valkyries, have mixed with the bad boys. Fernand has been chosen by them to be their Khan; he passes by at full gallop, standing on his shaggy pony with ebony-colored mane, and rides round the altar waving triumphantly at the end of a pike the skin of the rattlesnake he killed that very morning. Then the young savages of the little horde line up in a half-moon, after the Tartar maneuver, to the acclamations of the crowd. Their costumes in dazzling colors are half yellow and half red; one would say a flower-bed of richly variegated tulips.

One of the druids, the venerable M. Chassevant, whose long white beard resembles that of Michelangelo’s Moses, explains to Fernand’s guests that the little hordes are assigned the repugnant and dangerous labors. So are usefully employed instincts which the old morality sought in vain to repress — the taste for filth, pride, impudence, insubordination. Many boys love to destroy, to break, even to kill; they doubtless obey instincts bequeathed by distant ancestors. Only a third has the taste for peaceful functions, while a third of tomboyish girls joins the little hordes for the service of manures, tripe-shops, the cleaning of sewers, the pursuit of reptiles and harmful beasts.

To these destructive tastes, the little hordes join besides the highest civic virtues: self-denial, contempt for riches, devotion. They make it a duty to brave the inclemencies and dangers for the happiness of society. Thus the highest rewards and the greatest honors are reserved for these young savages.

After them, as formerly at Sparta, advanced a chorus of venerable old men. Their slightly quavering voices began in a minor key a song of regrets that began thus:

When youth in flower rolled our gay springtimes, We flew to the aid of the weak, of slaves; If you could have seen how brave we were, Loving, generous!… Ah, those were the fine times, Our joyous springtime! (bis)

And the vibrant voices of the young men replied in a major key, with a manly pride:

What you then were, today we are, We too love, we brave danger. We bear worthily the proud name of men: Nothing human, nothing great is foreign to us, What matters danger! (bis)

Then, like young roosters, the children drew themselves up to cry out in their shrill voices:

Soon you shall see us walking in your tracks; We too know the path of honor. You are not so great that we may not surpass you, Better than you shall be the men of tomorrow, We, men of tomorrow! (bis)

We shall not describe the thirty-two choruses of the Phalange that filed past in turn, deploying all the luxury of their costumes and their decorations, all the magnificence of their oriflammes, of their banners adorned with embroideries and devices.

When all the corporations had taken their place, a general chorus resounded, celebrating the unity of the human race and universal fraternity.

The voices harmoniously mingled were powerfully sustained by all the orchestras united.

“Picture to yourselves,” said Considérant, “the festival thus celebrated on the same day over the whole earth, the incense, the flowers, the hymns and the canticles rising up to heaven from all the points of the Globe: the entire Globe, from pole to pole, bedecked with its great humanity, marrying all its voices, rallying its peoples and its races in an immense accord, in a single hymn sung in the same language, the language of love and happiness… Ah! it is to ravish the soul to heaven! You would believe that the Phalanges and the celestial Jerusalems had come down from on high upon this blessed and radiant Earth! Paradisiac Earth, that now communes in the measured harmony of the spheres, Radiant Earth, that rolls in the Heaven like a diamond sparkling beneath the fires of the sun, Earth, you are in heaven; what have you now to envy heaven?”

Utopias! someone will say. To this reproach I have answered thus:

To Charles Fourier

Fruitful illusion, I admire your power: Too happy in not knowing its sad destinies, Columbus sets out, seeking the Fortunate Isles, Marvelous paradise he thinks to perceive;

And his dream, dazzling hippogriff to behold, Spreading in the azure its unbridled wings, With a powerful flight bears him to mistaken shores… Genius astray is worth more than a cold knowledge.

Valiantly accept ephemeral sorrows, Bold navigators, borne toward glory, Sail, sail gaily upon the bitter waves!

Yes, your illusions were often mothers, Yes, in their divine flanks truths germinate; Men of little faith, respect our chimeras!

Footnotes

1. The great vogue of Courbet and of Zola was beginning. The Romantics of 1850, bold innovators in their day, were exasperated by the innovations of the young school, which asserted itself as a reaction against idealist fancy. ↩

2. Fernand had done nothing very extraordinary; nevertheless his ardor in lending help and his contempt of danger had been noticed. ↩

3. A trip to Annecy. ↩

4. Petronius, among others. ↩

5. M. Milliet did not know how to refuse money-help to those of his friends who applied to him. M. G…, among many others, made him lose a rather large sum in the working of anthracite mines. ↩

6. Celle, M. Milliet’s sister, had married Doctor de Montlovier. ↩

7. Born at Salins in 1808, Victor Considérant was admitted to the École Polytechnique and became a captain of engineers. He resigned to devote himself wholly to spreading the doctrines of Ch. Fourier. It was with this aim that he published the journals Le Nouveau Monde, then La Démocratie Pacifique, and finally the review entitled La Phalange. In 1849, on his master’s death, he was recognized as head of the phalansterian school. Elected deputy in 1848, he sat with the Mountain. His books Destinée Sociale and Le Socialisme devant le vieux monde remain, with that of Hubert Bourgin (Fourier, Paris 1905), among the best summaries of Fourier’s vast system. ↩

8. When my father read us these verses, his voice altered, tears came to his eyes, and we all wept to see this man, so brave and so good, weep. ↩

9. A term to which Fourier and his disciples give a sense of contempt. ↩

10. Founder of the Magasins du Bon Marché. ↩

11. Founder of the Familistère at Guise. The organization of these two fine establishments proves that not everything is utopia in Fourier’s system. The Colony of Condé-sur-Vesgre and all the cooperative societies, founded on the principle of participation in profits, are partial applications of the doctrine. ↩

12. See the appendix to chapter III. ↩

13. The quality Alix admired most was gaiety, and she was right, for it is a strength. ↩

14. Here is a specimen of this lyrical tone:

    THE FOUR AGES OF LIFE

    Before dawn, it is night; before spring, winter; before birth, an unknown state which is, so to speak, the night and winter of the soul.

    The sun rises, nature awakes, the child is born.

    Begone darkness, frosts, sadness! Here is the light, here is the verdure, here is the child!…

    The young man has for his sun hope and confidence; the future opens before him, etc…

    Why, cold reason, do you come to chill the ardor of this generous soul?

    The old man likes to share with his children the experience that the years have given him, and, surrounded by care, he ends by being extinguished amid the tears of those he had cherished. But why weep? After night will come dawn, after winter spring, after death a new life. ↩

15. It is necessary to know how not to say everything, especially when one has a natural disposition to observe by preference the defects or oddities of others. Rare are people of wit who dared sacrifice a biting joke to the fear of giving pain to their friends. ↩

16. It is necessary to know how not to say everything, especially when one has a natural disposition to observe by preference the defects or oddities of others. Rare are people of wit who dared sacrifice a biting joke to the fear of giving pain to their friends. ↩