Jean-Christophe. The Burning Bush. 1

PART ONE

Calm of heart. Winds suspended. Air without motion…

Christophe was at peace; tranquility lived in him. He took a measure of pride in having won it. And secretly, he felt some contrition about it. He was astonished by the silence. His passions were asleep; he believed, in good faith, that they would not wake again.

His great strength, a little brutal, was growing drowsy, without purpose, at loose ends. Beneath it all, a secret emptiness, a hidden “what’s the point” --- perhaps the sense of a happiness he had not known how to seize. He no longer had enough to struggle against, neither within himself nor against others. He no longer had enough difficulty even in working. He had reached the end of a stage; he was living off the sum of his earlier efforts; he exhausted too easily the musical vein he had opened; and while the public, naturally running behind, was discovering and admiring his past works, he himself was beginning to detach from them, without yet knowing whether he would press further. In the act of creation he enjoyed a uniform contentment. Art had become for him, at this moment in his life, nothing more than a beautiful instrument he played as a virtuoso. He felt himself, with some shame, becoming a dilettante.

“One needs,” Ibsen said, “to persevere in art, something more than natural genius: passions, sorrows that fill a life and give it meaning. Otherwise one does not create --- one writes books.”

Christophe was writing books. He was not accustomed to it. These books were beautiful. He would have preferred them less beautiful and more alive. This athlete at rest, who did not know what to do with his muscles, looked with the yawn of a bored wild animal at the years, the years of quiet work that lay ahead of him. And since, with his old stock of Germanic optimism, he easily convinced himself that everything was for the best, he thought that this was no doubt the inevitable end; he flattered himself that he had emerged from the storm, that he had become his own master. That was not saying much… Well. One reigns over what one has, one is what one can be… He believed he had come into port.

The two friends did not live together. When Jacqueline left, Christophe had thought that Olivier would come back to live with him. But Olivier could not. Despite his need to draw close to Christophe, he felt it was impossible to resume with him the life they had once shared. After the years spent with Jacqueline, it would have seemed to him intolerable, even sacrilegious, to let another person into the intimacy of his life --- even one who loved him a thousand times better and was better loved in return than Jacqueline had been. --- These things cannot be reasoned out.

Christophe had struggled to understand. He kept returning to the question, surprised, saddened, indignant. --- Then his instinct, sharper than his intelligence, warned him. Abruptly he fell silent and admitted that Olivier was right.

But they saw each other every day; and they had never been more closely united than now, when they lived under different roofs. Perhaps in their conversations they did not exchange their most intimate thoughts. They had no need to. The exchange happened of itself, without words, through the grace of loving hearts.

Both spoke little, absorbed --- one in his art, the other in his memories. Olivier’s grief was easing; but he did nothing to hasten it, he almost took pleasure in it: for a long time it was his only reason for living. He loved his child; but his child --- a squalling infant --- could not occupy much space in his life. There are men who are more lovers than fathers. There is no use being scandalized by it. Nature is not uniform; and it would be absurd to try to impose the same laws of the heart on everyone. No one has the right to sacrifice their duties to their heart. But at least one must acknowledge the heart’s right to be unhappy while doing its duty. What Olivier perhaps loved most in his child was the one whose flesh had formed it.

Until recently he had paid little attention to the sufferings of others. He was an intellectual, who lives too enclosed within himself. It was not selfishness --- it was the sickly habit of the dreamer. Jacqueline had further widened the emptiness around him; her love had drawn a magic circle between Olivier and other people, a circle that persisted after love was gone. And besides, he was by temperament a small aristocrat. Since childhood, despite his tender heart, he had kept his distance from the crowd, for reasons of bodily and spiritual delicacy. The smell and the thoughts of those people repelled him.

But everything had changed, in the wake of an ordinary news item, a banal incident he had just witnessed.

He had rented a very modest apartment in upper Montrouge, not far from Christophe and Cécile. The neighborhood was working-class, and the building was occupied by small rentiers, office workers, and a few laboring families. At any other time he would have suffered in surroundings where he found himself a stranger; but just now it hardly mattered, here or anywhere: everywhere he was a stranger. He barely knew who his neighbors were, and had no desire to find out. When he came home from work --- (he had taken a position at a publishing house) --- he shut himself in with his memories, and only left them to go see his child and Christophe. His lodgings were not home to him: they were the darkroom where images of the past were developed; the darker and more bare the room, the more sharply those inner images stood out. He scarcely noticed the faces he passed on the stairs. Without his being aware of it, however, certain ones fixed themselves within him. There are minds of such a nature that they truly see things only after they have passed. But then, nothing escapes them; the smallest details are engraved with a burin. Olivier was like that: he was populated by the shadows of the living. At the shock of an emotion, they would surface; and Olivier would be startled, would recognize them without ever having known them, would sometimes reach out his hands to grasp them… Too late.

One day, on leaving his building, he saw a crowd gathered at the entrance, around the concierge who was holding court. He was so little curious that he would have continued on his way without inquiring; but the concierge, eager to recruit one more listener, stopped him, to ask whether he knew what had happened to those poor Roussels. Olivier did not even know who “those poor Roussels” were; and he lent an ear, with polite indifference. When he learned that a working-class family --- father, mother, and five children --- had just killed themselves out of poverty, in his building, he stood like the others staring at the walls of the structure, listening to the narrator who never tired of beginning the story again. As she spoke, memories came back to him; he realized he had seen these people; he asked a few questions… Yes, he recognized them: the man --- (he could hear his wheezing breath on the stairs) --- a baker’s laborer, pale-complexioned, his blood sucked dry by the heat of the oven, hollow-cheeked, poorly shaved; he had had pneumonia at the start of winter; he had gone back to work insufficiently recovered; a relapse had come; for three weeks he had been without work and without strength. The wife, dragging one incessant pregnancy after another, crippled with rheumatism, exhausted herself cleaning other people’s homes, spent her days running around trying to obtain from the Assistance Publique meager aid that was in no hurry to arrive. In the meantime the children kept coming, and showed no sign of stopping: eleven years old, seven, three --- to say nothing of two others who had been lost along the way --- and to cap it all, twins who had chosen this moment to make their appearance; they had been born the previous month.

--- The day they were born, a neighbor recounted, the eldest of the five, little Justine --- poor child! --- burst into sobs, asking how she would manage to carry them both.

Olivier immediately saw again the image of the little girl --- a large forehead, pale hair drawn back, troubled grey eyes, protruding slightly. She was always met carrying provisions, or the smaller sister; or else she held by the hand the seven-year-old brother, a boy with a delicate, frail little face, who had one blind eye. When they passed on the stairs, Olivier would say, with his distracted politeness:

--- Pardon, mademoiselle.

She said nothing; she passed, stiff, barely stepping aside; but this token courtesy gave her a secret pleasure. The evening before, at six o’clock, going down, he had met her for the last time; she was carrying up a bucket of charcoal. He had scarcely noticed, except that the load seemed very heavy. But that is a natural thing, for children of the working class. Olivier had nodded, as usual, without looking. A few steps below, lifting his head mechanically, he had seen the small pinched face bending over the landing above, watching him descend. She had immediately turned away and resumed her climb. Did she know where that climb was leading her? --- Olivier had no doubt that she did, and he was haunted by the thought of that child, who was carrying death in her heavy bucket like a deliverance --- the poor little ones, for whom to be no more meant to suffer no more! He could not continue his walk. He went back to his room. But there, to feel those dead people nearby… a few walls separated them… To think that he had been living beside that anguish!

He went to see Christophe. His heart was tight; he told himself it was monstrous to have absorbed himself, as he had done, in vain regrets over love, when so many beings were suffering from miseries a thousand times more cruel, and when one could save them. His emotion ran deep; it was not slow to communicate itself. Christophe, easily moved, was shaken in his turn. At Olivier’s account, he tore up the page he had just written, calling himself a selfish man amusing himself with children’s games. But then he gathered up the torn pieces. He was too seized by his music; and his instinct told him that one work of art less would not make one more person happy. This tragedy of poverty was nothing new to him; since childhood he had been used to walking at the edge of such abysses and not falling in. In fact, he was severe in his judgment of suicide, at this moment in his life when he felt himself in full strength and could not conceive that anyone might, for whatever suffering it might be, renounce the struggle. Suffering and struggle --- what could be more natural? They are the backbone of the universe.

Olivier too had passed through similar ordeals; but he had never been able to make his peace with them, either for himself or for others. He had a horror of that poverty in which the life of his dear Antoinette had been consumed. After he had married Jacqueline, when he had let himself be softened by wealth and love, he had been eager to push away the memory of those sad years when his sister and he had spent themselves each day earning their right to live the next, without knowing whether they would manage it. Those images were returning now that he no longer had his youthful self-interest to protect. Instead of fleeing the face of suffering, he began to seek it out. He had not far to go to find it. In his state of mind, he was bound to see it everywhere. It filled the world. The world, that hospital… Oh, the agonies of the dying! Agonies of wounded flesh, heaving, rotting alive. Silent tortures of hearts consumed by grief. Children unloved, poor girls without hope, women seduced or betrayed, men deceived in their friendships, their loves and their faith, the lamentable throng of the wretched whom life has bruised and forgotten!… The most atrocious thing was not poverty and sickness; it was the cruelty of human beings toward one another. Barely had Olivier lifted the trapdoor that sealed the human hell than the cry of all the oppressed rose toward him --- the poor exploited, the persecuted peoples, Armenia massacred, Finland suffocated, Poland dismembered, Russia martyred, Africa delivered as carrion to the rapacious Europeans, the wretched of all humankind. He was overwhelmed by it; he heard it everywhere, he could no longer not hear it, he could no longer conceive that there were people who thought of anything else. He spoke of it endlessly to Christophe. Christophe, troubled, would say:

--- Be quiet! Let me work.

And since he found it hard to recover his balance, he would grow irritated, swear:

--- To the devil with it! My whole day is ruined! A lot of good it does you!

Olivier would apologize.

--- My friend, said Christophe, you must not keep staring into the abyss. One cannot go on living.

--- One must reach out a hand to those who are in the abyss.

--- No doubt. But how? By throwing ourselves in as well? Because that is what you want. You have a tendency to see in life nothing but what is sad about it. God bless you! This pessimism is charitable, certainly; but it is depressing. Do you want to create happiness? First, be happy yourself.

--- Happy! How can one have the heart to be happy, when one sees so much suffering? There can be no happiness except in trying to diminish it, by fighting the evil.

--- Very well. But it is not by rushing off to fight at random that I will help the unfortunate. One more poor soldier counts for little. But I can console through my art, spread strength and joy. Do you know how many miserable souls have been sustained in their suffering by the beauty of a thought, a winged song? To each his trade! You French, generous scatter-brains that you are, you are always the first to protest against every injustice, in Spain or Russia, without quite knowing what it’s about. I love you for it. But do you think you are advancing things? You throw yourselves in as bunglers, and the result is nothing --- when by chance it isn’t worse… And look, never has your art been more stunted than in this time when your artists claim to involve themselves in universal action. A strange thing, that so many petty dilettante masters and worldly-wise men dare set themselves up as apostles! They would do far better to pour their people a less adulterated wine. --- My first duty is to do well what I do, and to make you a healthy music, one that will rebuild your blood and put some sunlight into you.

To spread sunlight on others, one must have it within oneself. Olivier lacked it. Like the best men of his day, he was not strong enough to radiate strength all on his own. He could only have done so by joining with others. But with whom to join? Free in mind and devout in heart, he was rejected by every party, political and religious alike. They all competed with one another in intolerance and narrowness. The moment they had power, it was only to abuse it. Only the weak and the oppressed drew Olivier to them. In this at least he shared Christophe’s view, that before fighting distant injustices, one should fight the injustices close at hand, those that surround you and for which you bear some share of responsibility. Too many people are content to protest the evil done by others, without thinking of the evil they themselves commit.

He occupied himself first with assistance to the poor. His friend, madame Arnaud, belonged to a charitable organization. Olivier had himself admitted to it. But in the beginning, he suffered more than one disappointment: the poor people placed in his charge were not all worthy of interest; or they responded poorly to his sympathy, they were suspicious of him, they remained closed to him. Besides, an intellectual has difficulty being satisfied with simple charity: it irrigates such a small province of the country of misery! Its action is almost always fragmented, piecemeal; it seems to proceed by chance, dressing wounds as it discovers them; it is, in general, too modest and too hurried to venture down to the roots of the evil. Yet that search was one Olivier’s mind could not do without.

He set about studying the problem of social misery. He had no shortage of guides. At that time, the social question had become a matter for society. It was discussed in salons, in the theater, in novels. Everyone claimed to know it. A portion of the younger generation spent the best of their energies on it.

Every new generation needs a fine madness. Even the most selfish among the young have an overflow of life, a capital of energy that has been advanced to them and will not remain unproductive; they seek to spend it in action, or --- (more prudently) --- in theory. Aviation or Revolution. The sport of muscles or that of ideas. When you are young, you need to give yourself the illusion that you are taking part in a great movement of humanity, that you are renewing the world. What a beauty it is, to have senses that vibrate to every breath of the universe! One is so free and so light! One has not yet taken on the ballast of a family, one has nothing, one risks little. One is very generous when one can renounce what one does not yet hold. And then, it is so good to love and to hate, and to believe that you are transforming the earth with dreams and cries! Young people are like dogs on the alert: you see them tremble and bark at the wind. An injustice committed at the other end of the world sent them into a delirium.

Barking in the night. From one farmhouse to another, amid the great forests, they answered one another without respite. The night was restless. It was not easy to sleep, in those times. The wind carried through the air the echo of so many injustices!… Injustice is innumerable; to remedy one, you risk causing others. What is injustice? --- For one, it is the shameful peace, the dismembered homeland. For another, it is war. For this one, it is the destroyed past, the exiled prince; for that one, it is the despoiled Church; for a third, it is the stifled future, freedom in danger. For the people, it is inequality; and for the elite, it is equality. There are so many different injustices that each era chooses its own --- the one it fights, and the one it favors.

At that moment, the greater part of the world’s efforts were directed against social injustices --- and were unconsciously aimed at producing new ones.

And certainly, these injustices were great and spread before everyone’s eyes, now that the working class, growing in number and in power, had become one of the essential gears of the State. But in spite of the declamations of its tribunes and its bards, the situation of that class was not worse --- it was better than it had ever been in the past; and the change came not from its suffering more, but from its being stronger. Stronger, by the very force of the enemy capital, by the inevitability of economic and industrial development, which had assembled these workers into armies ready for combat and, through mechanization, had placed weapons in their hands, had made of every foreman a master who commanded over light, over lightning, over movement, over the energy of the world. From that enormous mass of elemental forces, which leaders had for some time been trying to organize, there rose a heat like a furnace, electric currents running one into the next through the body of human society.

It was not through its justice, or through the novelty and force of its ideas, that the cause of these people moved the intelligent bourgeoisie --- though the bourgeoisie wanted to believe so. It was through their vitality.

Their justice? A thousand other justices were being violated in the world, without the world stirring over them. Their ideas? Scraps of truths, gathered here and there, fitted to the interests and the proportions of one class, at the expense of the others. Absurd credo, like all credo --- the divine right of kings, the infallibility of popes, universal suffrage, the equality of men --- equally absurd, if one considers only their rational value and not the force that animates them. What did their mediocrity matter? Ideas do not conquer the world as ideas, but as forces. They do not take hold of men through their intellectual content, but through the vital radiance that, at certain moments in history, flows from them. You might say it is a scent rising: even the coarsest nostrils are seized by it. The most sublime idea will remain without effect, until the day it becomes contagious --- not by its own merits, but by those of the human groups who embody it and transfuse into it their blood. Then the dried plant, the rose of Jericho, suddenly flowers, grows, fills the air with its violent fragrance. --- Some of those ideas, whose blazing banner led the working classes to the assault of the bourgeois citadel, had come from the minds of bourgeois dreamers. As long as they had remained in bourgeois books, they were as if dead: museum objects, mummies swaddled in display cases that no one looks at. But the moment the people had seized them, they had made them of the people, they had added to them their feverish reality, which deformed them and animated them, breathing into these abstract reasons their hallucinated hopes, a burning wind of Hegira. They propagated from one to another. One was touched by them, without knowing by whom or how they had been carried. The persons themselves mattered little. The moral epidemic continued to spread; and it was possible that limited beings communicated it to beings of distinction. Everyone was a carrier, unknowing.

These phenomena of intellectual contagion belong to every era and every country; they make themselves felt even in aristocratic states, where closed castes attempt to maintain themselves. But nowhere are they more devastating than in democracies, which maintain no sanitary barrier between the elite and the crowd. The elite is immediately contaminated, whatever it does. Despite its pride and its intelligence, it cannot resist the contagion: for it is far weaker than it thinks. Intelligence is an island, which the human tides gnaw, crumble, and submerge. It re-emerges only when the tide withdraws. --- We admire the self-abnegation of the French privileged who abdicated their rights on the night of the Fourth of August. What is perhaps most admirable is that they could not have done otherwise. I imagine that many of them, returning to their townhouses, said to themselves: “What have I done? I was drunk…” What a magnificent drunkenness! Praised be the good wine and the vine that gives it! The vine whose blood intoxicated the privileged of old France was not one they had planted. The wine was drawn; there was nothing to do but drink it. Whoever drank it fell into delirium. Even those who did not drink grew dizzy, simply from breathing in the scent of the vintage as they passed. Harvests of the Revolution!… Of the wine of ‘89, nothing remains today in family cellars but a few flat bottles; but the children of our grandchildren will remember that their great-great-grandfathers had their heads turned by it.

It was a harsher wine, but no less strong, that rose to the heads of the young bourgeois of Olivier’s generation. They offered their class as a sacrifice to the new god, Deo ignoto: --- the people.

Certainly, they were not all equally sincere. Many saw in it only an opportunity to set themselves apart from their class by affecting to despise it. For most, it was an intellectual pastime, an oratorical exercise that they did not take entirely seriously. There is pleasure in believing that one believes in a cause, that one fights for it, or that one will fight --- at least, that one could fight. It is not even a bad thing to think that one risks something. Emotions of the theater.

They are quite innocent when indulged naively, with no self-interested calculation mixed in. --- But others, more calculating, played only with deliberate stakes; the popular movement was for them a means of rising. Like the Norse pirates, they took advantage of the rising sea to launch their boats into the interior of the land; they reckoned on penetrating deep into the great estuaries, and remaining lodged in the conquered cities while the sea withdrew. The channel was narrow and the tide capricious: one had to be skillful. But two or three generations of demagoguery had formed a race of corsairs for whom the trade held no more secrets. They passed boldly through, without so much as a glance for those who foundered along the way.

That rabble exists in every party; God be thanked, no party bears sole responsibility for it. But the disgust these adventurers inspired in the sincere and the convinced had led certain among them to despair of their class. Olivier saw young bourgeois, rich and educated, who felt the degradation of the bourgeoisie and their own uselessness. He was all too inclined to sympathize with them. Having first believed in the renewal of the people by the elite, having founded Popular Universities and spent freely there a great deal of time and money, they had witnessed the failure of their efforts; their hopes had been excessive, their discouragement equally so. The people had not come at their call, or had fled from them. When they came, they understood everything wrongly; they took from bourgeois culture only its vices and its absurdities. Finally, more than one mangy sheep had crept into the ranks of the bourgeois apostles and discredited them, exploiting the people and the bourgeoisie at the same time. It seemed then to the people of good faith that the bourgeoisie was condemned, that it could only infect the people, and that the people must at all costs free themselves and make their own way. They were left with no possible action other than predicting or foreseeing a movement that would happen without them and against them. Some found in this a joy of renunciation, of deep and disinterested human sympathy, which feeds on itself and on its own sacrifice. To love, to give oneself! Youth is so rich in its own resources that it can do without being paid in return; it does not fear being left without. And it can deprive itself of everything, except love. --- Others satisfied in this a pleasure of reason, an imperious logic; they sacrificed themselves not to men, but to ideas. These were the most intrepid. They felt a proud enjoyment in deducing from their reasoning the inevitable end of their class. It would have been more painful for them to see their predictions contradicted than to be crushed under the weight. In their intellectual intoxication, they cried out to those on the outside: “Harder! Strike harder! Let nothing of us remain!” --- They had made themselves the theorists of violence.

Of others’ violence. For, as usual, these apostles of brute energy were almost always men of distinction and weakness. More than one were functionaries of the very State they spoke of destroying --- diligent, conscientious, and obedient functionaries. Their theoretical violence was the revenge of their debility, of their grievances, and of the compression of their lives. But above all it was the sign of the storms rumbling around them. Theorists are like meteorologists: they describe in scientific terms not the weather to come, but the weather that is. They are the weathervane, which marks where the wind blows. When they turn, they are not far from believing that they are making the wind turn.

The wind had turned.

Ideas wear out quickly in a democracy, and all the more quickly the more swiftly they have spread. How many republicans in France had, in less than fifty years, grown sick of the republic, of universal suffrage, and of so many liberties won in a state of intoxication! After the fetishistic cult of numbers, after the smug optimism that had believed in holy majorities and expected from them the progress of humanity, the spirit of violence was blowing; the incapacity of majorities to govern themselves, their venality, their spinelessness, their base and cowardly aversion to all superiority, their oppressive cowardice, stirred up revolt; the energetic minorities --- all minorities --- appealed to force. A bizarre rapprochement, and yet an inevitable one, was forming between the royalists of the Action Française and the trade unionists of the C. G. T. Balzac speaks somewhere of those men of his time, “aristocrats by inclination, who made themselves republicans out of spite, simply to find many inferiors among their equals.” --- A meager pleasure. Those inferiors must be compelled to acknowledge themselves as such; and for that, there is no means but an authority that imposes the supremacy of the elite --- working-class or bourgeois --- upon the masses that oppress it. Young intellectuals, proud petty bourgeois, were making themselves royalists, or revolutionaries, out of wounded self-regard and hatred of democratic equality. And the disinterested theorists, the philosophers of violence, like good weathervanes, rose above them, battle-standards of the storm.

And then there was the band of literary men in search of inspiration --- those who know how to write, but are not quite sure what to write: like the Greeks at Aulis, becalmed by a dead flat sea, they can no longer move forward, and they wait impatiently for whatever favorable wind may come to fill their sails. --- One could see celebrated figures among them, those whom the Dreyfus Affair had unexpectedly torn from their labors of style and launched into public meetings. An example too widely followed, in the view of those who started it. A crowd of literary men now concerned themselves with politics and claimed to govern the affairs of the State. Everything served them as a pretext for forming leagues, launching manifestos, saving the Capitol. After the intellectuals of the vanguard, the intellectuals of the rear guard: the one was worth the other. Each of the two camps called the other “intellectual,” and called itself “intelligent.” Those who were fortunate enough to have a few drops of the people’s blood in their veins were proud of it; they dipped their pens in it, they wrote with it. --- All of them, bourgeois, discontented, and seeking to recover the authority that the bourgeoisie had irremediably lost through its own selfishness. It was rare for these apostles to sustain their apostolic zeal for long. At first, the cause won them successes that were probably not owing to their oratorical gifts. Their self-regard was deliciously flattered. Since then, they had carried on, with less success, and with some secret fear of appearing a little ridiculous. In the long run, this last feeling tended to gain the upper hand, doubled by the weariness of a role difficult to play for men of their refined tastes and their skepticism. They waited, to beat their retreat, for the wind to permit it, and for their escort as well. For they were prisoners of both. These Voltaires and these Joseph de Maistres of modern times concealed beneath their boldness of speech and writing a frightened uncertainty that tested the ground, feared being compromised in the eyes of young people, strove to please them, to be younger than they were. Revolutionaries, or counter-revolutionaries, by way of literature, they resigned themselves to following the literary fashion they had helped to create.

The most curious type that Olivier encountered, within this small bourgeois vanguard of the Revolution, was the revolutionary by timidity.

The specimen he had before him was called Pierre Canet. From a wealthy bourgeois family, and a conservative one, hermetically sealed against new ideas: magistrates and civil servants, who had distinguished themselves by sulking at those in power or by getting themselves dismissed; well-off bourgeois of the Marais, who flirted with the Church and thought little, but well. He had married, out of idleness, a woman with an aristocratic name, who thought no less well, nor any more. This bigoted, narrow, and backward world, which perpetually chewed over its own arrogance and bitterness, had ended by exasperating him --- all the more because his wife was ugly and bored him to death. Of average intelligence, with a fairly open mind, he had liberal aspirations, without quite knowing what they consisted of: it was not in his social circle that he could have learned what liberty was. All he knew was that it was not there; and he imagined that it was enough to leave that world in order to find it. He was incapable of walking alone. From his first steps outside, he was glad to join some college friends, certain of whom were enamored of syndicalist ideas. He found himself even more out of his element in this world than in the one he had come from; but he would not admit it: he had to live somewhere; and people of his shade of opinion --- that is to say, of no shade at all --- he could not find. God knows, however, that the seed of such people is not rare in France! But they are ashamed of themselves: they hide, or they dye themselves in one of the fashionable political colors, or even several. Besides, he was subject to the influence of his friends.

Following his usual habit, he had attached himself above all to the one most unlike him. This Frenchman, a French bourgeois and provincial at heart, had made himself the faithful Achates of a young Jewish doctor, Manousse Heimann, a Russian refugee who, in the manner of many of his compatriots, had the double gift of settling in at once among other people as if in his own home, and of finding himself so comfortable in any revolution that one might wonder what interested him more in it: the game, or the cause. The trials of others, and his own, were a diversion to him. Genuinely revolutionary, his habits of scientific thought led him to regard revolutionaries and himself as a kind of madmen. He observed this madness in others and in himself, even as he cultivated it. His exalted dilettantism and his extreme inconstancy of mind led him to seek out the most opposing milieux. He had connections among the men in power, and even in the world of the police; he nosed around everywhere, with that morbid and dangerous curiosity that gives so many Russian revolutionaries the appearance of playing a double game, and which sometimes turns that appearance into reality. It is not treachery --- it is versatility, and a disinterested one at that. How many men of action, for whom action is a theater, in which they bring the aptitudes of good comedians, honest but always ready to change roles! To that of revolutionary, Manousse was faithful, as much as he could be: it was the character that best suited his natural anarchy and his pleasure in demolishing the laws of the countries through which he passed. Despite everything, it was only a role. One never knew the share of invention and reality in what he said; and in the end, even he no longer knew it very well.

Intelligent and mocking, gifted with the psychological acuity of his double race, skilled at reading the weaknesses of others as readily as his own, and adept at playing on them, he had had no difficulty dominating Canet. He found it amusing to drag this Sancho Pança into escapades worthy of Don Quixote. He disposed of him without ceremony --- of his will, his time, his money --- not for his own benefit (he had no needs; no one knew from what or how he lived), but for the most compromising manifestations of the cause. Canet allowed himself to be led; he tried to persuade himself that he thought as Manousse did. He knew perfectly well the contrary: these ideas frightened him; they offended his common sense. And he did not like the people. Furthermore, he was not brave. This big fellow, tall, broad, and corpulent, with a chubby, clean-shaven face, short of breath, affable, pompous, and childlike in his speech, who had the chest of a Farnese Hercules and was quite a capable boxer and quarterstaff fighter, was the most timid of men. If he prided himself on being seen by his own kind as a subversive spirit, he trembled in secret before the boldness of his friends. No doubt this little shiver was not too unpleasant, so long as it was merely a game. But the game was becoming dangerous. These animals were growing aggressive; their claims were growing; they alarmed Canet in his deep-seated egoism, his ingrained sense of property, his bourgeois pusillanimity. He did not dare ask: “Where are you taking me?” But he cursed under his breath the nonchalance of people who love nothing so much as breaking their own necks, without troubling to ask whether they might not be breaking other people’s necks at the same time. --- Who obliged him to follow them? Was he not free to slip away from them? He lacked the courage. He was afraid of being left alone, like a child left behind on the road who weeps. He was like so many men: they have no opinion of their own, except that they disapprove of all extreme opinions; but to be independent, one would have to remain alone, and how many are capable of that! How many, even the most clear-sighted, will have the temerity to tear themselves free from the slavery of certain prejudices, certain postulates that weigh upon all men of the same generation? It would be to place a wall between oneself and others. On one side, liberty in the desert; on the other, mankind. They do not hesitate: they prefer mankind, the flock. It smells bad, but it keeps you warm. So they pretend to think what they do not think. It is not very difficult for them: they know so little what they think!… “Know thyself!”… How could they, those who have barely a self! In every collective belief, religious or social, those who truly believe are rare, because those who are truly human are rare. Faith is a heroic force; its fire has never burned but a few human torches; and even those often flicker. The apostles, the prophets, and Jesus himself have doubted. The rest are but reflections --- except at certain hours of drought of the soul, when a few sparks fallen from a great torch set the whole plain ablaze; then the fire dies out, and one sees no more than embers glowing beneath the ash. Scarcely a few hundred Christians truly believe in Christ. The others believe that they believe, or else they wish to believe.

It was thus with many of these revolutionaries. The good Canet wished to believe that he was one: he therefore believed it. And he was appalled by his own boldness.

All these bourgeois appealed to various principles: some to their hearts, others to their reason, others to their interests; some tied their way of thinking to the Gospel, others to Monsieur Bergson, others to Karl Marx, to Proudhon, to Joseph de Maistre, to Nietzsche, or to Monsieur Sorel. There were revolutionaries by fashion, by snobbery; there were those by savagery; there were those by hatred, there were those by love; there were those by need for action, by the warmth of heroism; there were those by servility, by a sheeplike instinct. But all of them, without knowing it, were swept along by the wind. They were the whirlwinds of dust one sees smoking in the distance on the great white roads, heralding that the squall is coming.

Olivier and Christophe watched the wind approach. Both had good eyes. But they did not see things in the same way. Olivier, whose lucid gaze penetrated in spite of himself into the unspoken thoughts of others, was saddened by their mediocrity; but he could perceive the hidden force that lifted them; the tragic aspect of things struck him more forcefully. Christophe was more sensitive to their comic aspect. Men interested him, not ideas in the least. He affected a contemptuous indifference toward them. He mocked social utopias. Out of a spirit of contradiction and instinctive reaction against the morbid humanitarianism that was the order of the day, he made himself out to be more selfish than he was; the self-made man, the robust upstart, proud of his muscles and his will, had rather too strong a tendency to regard as idlers those who did not possess his strength. Poor and alone, he had managed to prevail: let others do the same! Why speak of the social question! What question? Poverty?

--- I know something about that, he said. My father, my mother, and I have been through it. The only thing is to get out of it.

--- Not everyone can, said Olivier. The sick. The unlucky.

--- Let them be helped, that is simple enough. But from there to exalting them, as is done today, is quite a distance. Once upon a time, people invoked the odious right of the stronger. My word, I am not sure that the right of the weaker is not more odious still: it saps the energy of thought today, it tyrannizes and exploits the strong. One would think it had become a virtue to be sickly, poor, unintelligent, defeated --- a vice to be strong, healthy, victorious in the struggle, an aristocrat of mind and blood. And the most ridiculous thing is that the strong are the first to believe it… A fine subject for comedy, my dear Olivier!

--- I would rather be laughed at myself than make others weep.

--- Good fellow! said Christophe. Parbleu! Who says otherwise? When I see a hunchback, my own back aches… The comedy is one we are playing, not one we shall write.

He would not let himself be drawn in by dreams of social justice. His sturdy common sense, the common sense of the people, led him to believe that what had been would be.

--- If you were told that about art, how you would protest! observed Olivier.

--- Perhaps so. In any case, I only know anything about art. And so do you. I have no confidence in people who talk about what they do not know.

Olivier had no more confidence either. The two friends pushed their mistrust even a little too far: they had always kept themselves outside of politics. Olivier admitted, not without some shame, that he could not recall having exercised his right to vote; for ten years, he had not even picked up his registration card at the town hall.

--- Why should I take part, he would say, in a comedy I know to be useless? Vote? Vote for whom? I have no preference between candidates who are equally unknown to me, and who, I have every reason to expect, will equally betray their platform the day after the election. Watch over them? Call them back to their duty? My whole life would go to that, without result. I have neither the time, nor the strength, nor the oratorical gifts, nor the lack of scruples and the heart armored against the revolts of action. Better to abstain. I consent to endure the evil. At least I need not subscribe to it.

But in spite of his excessive clear-sightedness, this man who shrank from regular political action still nursed a chimerical hope in revolution. He knew it was chimerical; but he did not push it away. It was a kind of racial mysticism. One does not belong with impunity to the greatest destructive and constructive people of the West, to the people who destroy in order to build and build in order to destroy --- those who play with ideas and with life, and who constantly wipe the slate clean to begin the game again, and who stake their blood as the wager.

Christophe did not carry this hereditary Messianism within him. He was too Germanic to find much savor in the idea of revolution. He thought that the world could not be changed. So many theories, so many words, what useless noise!

--- I have no need, he would say, to make a revolution --- or to speechify about revolution --- to prove my strength to myself. Above all, I have no need, like these well-meaning young men, to overturn the State in order to restore a king or a Committee of Public Safety to defend me. A singular proof of strength! I know how to defend myself. I am not an anarchist; I love necessary order, and I venerate the Laws that govern the universe. But between those laws and myself, I need no intermediary. My will knows how to command, and it knows how to submit. You who have your mouths full of your classics --- remember your Corneille: « Moi seul, et c’est assez. » Your desire for a master disguises your weakness. Force is like light: those who deny it are blind. Be strong, quietly, without theories, without violence: like plants turning toward the day, all the souls of the weak will turn toward you.

But even as he protested that he had no time to waste in political discussions, he was less detached from them than he wished to appear. He suffered, as an artist, from the social unease. In his momentary dearth of strong passions, he would sometimes look about him and ask himself for whom he was writing. Then he saw the sad clientele of contemporary art --- that weary elite, those dilettante bourgeois --- and he thought:

--- What interest is there in working for these people?

Certainly, there was no shortage among them of refined minds, well-read, sensitive to craft, and not entirely incapable of appreciating novelty or --- (which amounts to the same thing) --- archaism in refined feeling. But they were blasé, too intellectual, too little alive to believe in the reality of art; they were interested only in the game --- the game of sonorities or the game of ideas; most were distracted by other worldly concerns, accustomed to dispersing themselves among multiple occupations, none of which was “necessary.” It was nearly impossible for them to penetrate beneath the surface of art, to feel its hidden heart; for them art was not flesh and blood: it was literature. Their critics elevated their inability to escape dilettantism into a theory --- an intolerant one at that. When by chance a few among them were sensitive enough to resonate with art’s voice, they lacked the strength to bear it; they were left unhinged and neurotic for life. Invalids or the dead. What was art doing in this hospital? --- And yet, in modern society, he could not do without these cripples; for they had money and the press; they alone could secure for the artist the means of living. He was obliged, therefore, to submit to this humiliation: intimate and anguished art, music into which one had poured the secret of one’s inner life, offered as entertainment --- as a distraction from boredom, or rather as a new form of boredom --- at performances and society evenings, to a public of snobs and exhausted intellectuals.

Christophe sought the true public, the one that believes in the emotions of art as in those of life, and feels them with a virgin soul. And he was obscurely drawn toward the new promised world --- the people. The memories of his childhood, of Gottfried and the humble ones who had revealed to him the deep life of art, or who had shared with him the sacred bread of music, inclined him to believe that his true friends were on that side. Like many other generous and naive young men, he harbored grand projects of popular art, of concerts and theaters of the people, which he would have been hard pressed to define. He awaited from revolution the possibility of an artistic renewal, and he claimed that this was for him the sole interest of the social movement. But he was deceiving himself: he was too alive not to be drawn in and swept up by the spectacle of the most living action then in play.

What interested him least in the spectacle were the bourgeois theorists. The fruits these particular trees bear are too often dried-up fruits; all the sap of life has congealed into ideas. Among these ideas, Christophe made no distinctions. He had no preference even for his own ideas, when he encountered them frozen into systems. With a good-natured contempt, he held himself apart from the theorists of strength as much as from those of weakness. In every comedy, the thankless role is that of the raisonneur. The audience prefers to him not only the sympathetic characters but the antipathetic ones. Christophe was audience in this regard. The arguers of the social question seemed tedious to him. But he amused himself by observing the others: the naive ones, the convinced ones, those who believed and those who wanted to believe, those who were dupes and those who sought to become so, even the honest brigands who ply their trade of raptors, and the sheep made to be shorn. His sympathy was indulgent toward the good-hearted, slightly ridiculous people, like the stout Canet. Their mediocrity did not shock him as it did Olivier. He watched them all with an affectionate and mocking interest; he believed himself detached from the play they were performing; and he did not notice that little by little he was letting himself be caught up in it. He thought he was only a spectator, watching the wind go by. Already the wind had touched him and was drawing him into its swirl of dust.

The social drama was double. The one the intellectuals were playing was the comedy within the comedy: the people paid it little heed. The real drama was theirs. It was not easy to follow; the people themselves had trouble finding their way in it. It was all the more unpredictable for that.

It was not that far more talking was done in it than acting. Bourgeois or people, every Frenchman is a great eater of words, as much as of bread. But not everyone eats the same bread. There is a luxury bread for delicate palates, and a more nourishing one for starving mouths. If the words are the same, they are not kneaded in the same way; the flavor and smell, the meaning, are different.

The first time Olivier, attending a popular meeting, tasted that bread, he had no appetite for it; the pieces stuck in his throat. He was sickened by the flatness of the thoughts, the colorless and barbarous heaviness of expression, the vague generalities, the childlike logic, that badly beaten mayonnaise of abstractions and unrelated facts. The impropriety and incorrectness of the language were not compensated for by the verve and vigor of popular speech. It was a newspaper vocabulary, threadbare rags picked up from the jumble-sale of bourgeois rhetoric. Olivier was struck above all by the lack of simplicity. He forgot that literary simplicity is not a natural thing but an acquired one: it is the conquest of an elite. The people of the cities cannot be simple; they always reach, by preference, for the most convoluted expressions. Olivier did not understand the effect that these bombastic phrases could have on the audience. He did not possess the key to them. We call foreign the languages of another race, and it never occurs to us that within a single race there are almost as many languages as there are social milieus. It is only for a restricted elite that words carry their traditional and age-old meaning; for others, they represent nothing more than their own experiences and those of their group. Some of these words, worn out for the elite and despised by it, are like an empty house where, since its departure, new energies and trembling passions have taken up residence. If you want to know the tenant, go inside the house.

That is what Christophe was doing.

He had been put in contact with these workers by a neighbor, a clerk employed by the state railways. A man of forty-five, short, aged beyond his years, his skull pitifully bald, his eyes sunken in their sockets, his cheeks hollow, his nose prominent, large and hooked, his mouth intelligent, his earlobes broken and misshapen: the features of a degenerate. His name was Alcide Gautier. He was not of the people, but of the middle bourgeoisie. From a good family that had spent all its modest means on the education of an only son, and that had been unable, for lack of resources, to allow him to pursue it to the end. Very young, he had obtained in a government administration one of those posts that seem to the poor bourgeoisie a harbor, and that are death --- living death. Once inside, he had never been able to get out. He had made the mistake --- (and it is a mistake in modern society) --- of marrying for love a pretty working-class girl, whose fundamental vulgarity had not taken long to blossom. She had given him three children. This household had to be supported. This man, who was intelligent and who longed with all his strength to complete his education, found himself bound hand and foot by poverty. He felt within himself latent powers that the difficulties of his life stifled; he could not come to terms with it. He was never alone. A clerk in the accounting office, he spent his days in mechanical drudgery, in a room he shared with other colleagues, vulgar and chatty; they talked of inane things, revenged themselves for the absurdity of their existence by backbiting their superiors, and mocked him because of his intellectual aspirations, which he had not had the wisdom to conceal from them. When he came home, he found a graceless and ill-smelling lodging, a noisy and common wife who did not understand him and treated him as a shirker or a madman. His children resembled him in nothing, took after the mother. Was it fair, all of this? Was it fair? So many disappointments, so much suffering, the perpetual constraint, the job that held him from morning to night, the impossibility of ever finding an hour of recollection, an hour of silence --- all of it had driven him into a state of exhaustion and neurasthenic irritation. To forget, he had taken to drink of late, as so many others had, and it was finishing him off. --- Christophe, who had struck up an acquaintance with him, was struck by the tragedy of this destiny: an incomplete nature, without sufficient culture and without artistic taste, but made for great things, and crushed by ill fortune. Gautier had immediately latched onto Christophe, as weak men who are drowning do when their hand encounters the arm of a strong swimmer. He had for Christophe a mixture of sympathy and envy. He drew him into popular meetings and introduced him to several leaders of the syndicalist party, to which he was attached only out of resentment against society. For he was a failed aristocrat. He suffered bitterly at being mixed in with the people.

Christophe, far more of the people than he --- all the more so for not being forced to be --- took pleasure in these meetings. The speeches amused him. He did not share Olivier’s distaste; he was not very sensitive to the ridicule of language. For him, one windbag was as good as another. He affected a general contempt for eloquence. But without taking the trouble to understand this rhetoric clearly, he felt its music through the one who spoke and through those who listened. The speaker’s power was multiplied a hundredfold by its resonance in the listeners. At first Christophe paid attention only to the former; and he felt curious to know some of the speakers.

The one who held the most sway over the crowd was Casimir Joussier --- a small, dark, pale man of thirty to thirty-five, with a Mongol’s face, lean and sickly, eyes burning and cold, sparse hair, a pointed beard. His power rested less on his gestures, which were poor and jerky, rarely in keeping with his words --- it rested less on his voice, which was hoarse and sibilant, with emphatic aspirations --- than on his very person, the violence of certainty and will that radiated from him. He seemed not to permit anyone to think differently from himself; and since what he thought was what his audience wanted to think, they had no difficulty understanding each other. He repeated the same things to them three times, four times, ten times; he never tired of hammering the same nail, with a furious tenacity; and his whole audience hammered, hammered, carried along by his example, hammered until the nail was embedded in the flesh. --- To this personal hold was added the trust inspired by his past, the prestige of multiple convictions, amply earned through violent articles. He breathed indomitable energy; but whoever knew how to look could detect, underneath it all, a great accumulated fatigue, a disgust with so much effort, and an anger at his fate. He was one of those men who spend, each day, more than their income of life. Since childhood he had worn himself out with work and poverty. He had done every kind of work: glassworker, plumber, typographer; his health was ruined; tuberculosis was eating away at him; it sent him plunging into fits of bitter discouragement, of mute despair, both for his cause and for himself; at other times it exalted him. He was a compound of calculated violence and morbid violence, of politics and passion. He had educated himself as best he could; he knew certain things very well --- science, sociology, his various trades; he knew many other things very poorly; and he was equally certain of the ones as of the others; he had utopias, sound ideas, ignorances, a practical mind, prejudices, experience, a suspicious hatred of bourgeois society. None of this prevented him from welcoming Christophe warmly. His pride was flattered to find himself sought out by a well-known artist. He was of the race of leaders, and, whatever he did, overbearing with ordinary workers. Although he sincerely wanted perfect equality, he achieved it more easily with those above him than with those below.

Christophe met other leaders of the labor movement. There was little warmth among them. If the common struggle made --- with difficulty --- a unity of action, it was far from making a unity of heart. One could see what a merely external and passing reality corresponded to the distinction of classes. The old antagonisms were only postponed and masked; but they all persisted. One found there the men of the North and those of the Midi, with their deep-seated disdain for each other. The trades were mutually jealous of their wages, and regarded each other with the undisguised sense, each of them, of being superior to the rest. But the great difference was --- and will always be --- that of temperament. Foxes and wolves and horned cattle, creatures with sharp teeth and those with four stomachs, those made to eat and those made to be eaten, sniffed at each other as they passed through the herd that chance of class and common interest had grouped together; and they recognized each other; and their hackles rose.

Christophe sometimes took his meals at a small restaurant-crèmerie run by a former colleague of Gautier’s, Simon, a railway employee who had been dismissed for strike activity. The establishment was frequented by syndicalists. Five or six of them gathered in a back room that opened onto a narrow, poorly lit interior courtyard, from which rose the tireless, desperate song of two caged canaries reaching toward the light. Joussier came with his mistress, the beautiful Berthe, a robust and coquettish girl, pale complexion, a crown of purple hair, her eyes wild and laughing. Trailing at her skirts was a handsome young man, vain, intelligent, and affected --- Léopold Graillot, a mechanical worker: he was the aesthete of the group. While calling himself an anarchist, and one of the most violent against the bourgeoisie, he had the soul of the worst kind of bourgeois. Every morning for years he had absorbed the erotic and decadent gossip from penny literary papers. These readings had shaped a strange head. A cerebral refinement in his fantasies of pleasure blended in him with an absolute lack of physical delicacy, with his indifference to cleanliness, with the relative coarseness of his life. He had developed a taste for this little glass of adulterated alcohol --- the intellectual alcohol of luxury, the unwholesome excitement of the unwholesomely rich. Unable to have their pleasures in the flesh, he inoculated them into his brain. It leaves a bad taste in the mouth, it breaks your legs. But one becomes the equal of the rich. And one hates them.

Christophe could not stand him. He had more sympathy for Sébastien Coquard, an electrician who was, along with Joussier, the most listened-to speaker. This one was not burdened by theories. He did not always know where he was going. But he went there straight. He was very much a Frenchman. A solid fellow of around forty, with a large, ruddy face, a round head, ginger hair, a river of a beard, the neck and voice of a bull. An excellent worker, like Joussier, but fond of laughing and drinking. The sickly Joussier watched this indiscreet good health with envious eyes; and though they were friends, a quiet hostility smoldered between them.

The proprietress of the crèmerie, Aurélie, a good woman of forty-five who must have been beautiful, and still was, despite the wear of years, would sit beside them with her needlework in hand, listening to their conversation with a cordial smile, her lips moving as they spoke; she would slip in a word of her own from time to time, and marked the rhythm of her remarks with her head, all while working. She had a married daughter and two children between seven and ten --- a girl and a boy --- who did their schoolwork at the corner of a sticky table, sticking out their tongues and catching along the way scraps of conversations that were not meant for them.

Olivier tried two or three times to accompany Christophe. But he did not feel at ease among these people. When these workers were not held to strict factory hours, called in by the persistent blast of a mill whistle, one could not imagine how much time they had to waste, whether after work, or between jobs, whether idling or unemployed. Christophe, who was going through one of those fallow periods of freedom when the mind has finished one work and waits for a new one to take shape, was in no more of a hurry than they were; he was happy to stay with his elbows on the table, smoking, drinking, and talking. But Olivier was offended in his bourgeois instincts, in his traditional habits of mental discipline, of regular work, of time scrupulously economized; and he did not like wasting so many hours this way. Besides, he knew neither how to talk nor how to drink. Then there was the physical unease, the secret antipathy that separates the bodies of men of different races --- the hostility of their senses that opposes the communion of souls, the flesh that revolts against the heart. When Olivier was alone with Christophe, he would speak to him, full of feeling, about the duty to fraternize with the people; but when he found himself in the presence of the people, he was incapable of it, despite his good will. Whereas Christophe, who cared nothing for such ideas, was effortlessly the brother of any worker he met in the street. Olivier felt a genuine sorrow at finding himself so distant from these men. He tried to be like them, to think like them, to speak like them. He could not. His voice was muffled, veiled, and did not ring like theirs. When he tried to adopt some of their expressions, the words stuck in his throat or clashed strangely. He watched himself, he constrained himself, he constrained them. And he knew it. He knew he was for them a stranger and a suspect, that none of them had any warmth for him, and that when he left, everyone breathed a sigh of relief. He caught in passing hard, icy looks, those hostile glances that bitter workers ground down by poverty cast at the bourgeois. Christophe may have caught his share of them as well; but he noticed nothing.

Of all the company, the only ones disposed to befriend Olivier were Aurélie’s children. These were drawn to the bourgeois rather than repelled by him. The little boy was fascinated by bourgeois thought; he was intelligent enough to love it, not quite enough to understand it; the girl, very pretty, whom Olivier had once brought to Mme Arnaud’s home, was hypnotized by luxury; she felt a silent rapture sitting in beautiful armchairs, touching beautiful dresses, being with beautiful ladies; she had the instinct of a little social climber, yearning to escape the working class toward the paradise of bourgeois wealth and comfort. Olivier felt no inclination whatever to cultivate such dispositions; and this naïve homage paid to his class did not console him for the quiet antipathy of his other companions. He suffered from their ill will. He had such an ardent desire to understand them! And in truth, he did understand them --- too well, perhaps; he observed them too closely, and they were irritated by it. He brought to it no indiscreet curiosity, only his habit of analyzing souls and his need to love.

He was not long in seeing the secret drama of Joussier’s life: the illness consuming him, and the cruel game his mistress was playing. She loved him, she was proud of him; but she was too full of life; he knew she was slipping away from him, that she would slip away; and jealousy burned through him. She made it her amusement; she provoked the men, enveloped them in her glances and her voluptuous atmosphere: she was a shameless brusher-by. Perhaps she was being unfaithful with Graillot. Perhaps she took pleasure in letting him believe it. In any case, if it was not today, it would be tomorrow. Joussier did not dare forbid her to love whom she liked: did he not profess, for woman as for man, the right to be free? She reminded him of this, with a mocking insolence, one day when he was insulting her. A tormenting struggle was playing out in him between his libertarian theories and his violent instincts. In his heart, he was still a man of the old order, despotic and jealous; in his reason, a man of the future, a man of utopia. She, she was the woman of yesterday and tomorrow, of all time. --- And Olivier, who witnessed this hidden duel whose ferocity he knew from his own experience, was filled with pity for Joussier as he saw his weakness. But Joussier could sense that Olivier was reading him; and he was far from grateful for it.

Another presence also followed this game of love and hatred with an indulgent eye. It was the proprietress, Aurélie. She saw everything without appearing to. She knew life. This good woman, sound, calm, settled, had led a fairly free youth. She had been a florist; she had had a bourgeois lover; she had had others. Then she had married a worker. She had become a good mother and wife. But she understood everything --- all the follies of the heart, Joussier’s jealousy as well as the “youth” that wanted to have its fun. In a few affectionate words she tried to bring them into accord.

--- “One had to be conciliating; it wasn’t worth getting upset over so little…”

She was not surprised that nothing she said made any difference…

--- “That’s how it is. People always have to torment themselves…”

She had the fine popular unconcern over which misfortunes seem to glide. She had had her share of them. Three months before, she had lost a fifteen-year-old boy she had been very fond of; it had been a deep grief; but now she was active and cheerful again. She said:

--- “If you let yourself dwell on it, you couldn’t go on living.”

And she no longer dwelt on it. It was not selfishness. She could not do otherwise; her vitality was too strong; the present absorbed her: lingering in the past was impossible. She made do with what was and would make do with whatever came. If the revolution came and turned upside down what was right side up and right side up what was upside down, she would always land on her feet, she would do whatever needed doing, she would be in her place wherever she was placed. At bottom, she had only a moderate belief in the revolution. She had little faith in much of anything. It goes without saying that she had her cards read in moments of perplexity, and that she never failed to make the sign of the cross when a funeral passed by. Quite free and tolerant, she had the skepticism of the Parisian people, that wholesome skepticism which doubts, as one breathes, with lightness. For being the wife of a revolutionary, she showed no less a maternal irony toward the ideas of her husband and his party --- and of other parties --- just as she did toward the follies of youth --- and of middle age. She was not easily moved by much. But she took an interest in everything. And she was ready for good fortune as for bad. In short, she was an optimist.

--- “No need to worry… Things always work out, as long as you keep your health…”

She and Christophe were bound to get along --- they had not needed many words to see that they were of the same family. From time to time they exchanged a good-humored smile while the others talked and argued. But more often she laughed to herself, watching Christophe as he in his turn allowed himself to be drawn into those discussions, where he immediately brought more passion than anyone else.

Christophe took no notice of Olivier’s isolation and discomfort. He never tried to read what was going on in the depths of people. But he drank and ate with them, he laughed and he argued. They were not wary of him, even when they quarreled violently among themselves. He didn’t mince words with them. At bottom, he would have been hard pressed to say whether he was with them or against them. He didn’t ask himself the question. No doubt, if forced to choose, he would have been a syndicalist against socialism and all doctrines of the State --- that monstrous entity which manufactures civil servants, men-machines. His reason approved of the powerful effort of the trade associations, whose double-edged axe strikes at once the dead abstraction of the socialist State and the sterile individualism, that crumbling of energies, that dispersal of collective force into individual weaknesses --- the great modern misery for which the French Revolution bears partial responsibility.

But nature is stronger than reason. When Christophe found himself in contact with the unions --- those formidable coalitions of the weak --- his robust individualism reared up. He could not help despising these men who needed to chain themselves together in order to march into battle; and if he granted that they must submit to this law, he declared it was not for him. Add to this that if oppressed weaklings inspire sympathy, they utterly cease to do so when they become oppressors themselves. Christophe, who had once cried out to isolated decent folk: “Unite yourselves!” felt a disagreeable sensation when he found himself for the first time in the middle of these unions of decent folk mixed with others who were less decent, all of them filled with a sense of their rights, their power, and ready to abuse it. The best of them, those Christophe loved, the friends he had met in the House at every floor, gained nothing from these fighting associations. They were too tender-hearted and too timid not to be frightened by them; they were destined to be among the first to be crushed by them. They stood in relation to the workers’ movement in the same position as Olivier and the most generous of the young bourgeois. Their sympathies went to the workers who were organizing. But they had been raised in the cult of freedom: and that was precisely what the revolutionaries cared least about. Who, for that matter, cares about freedom today? An elite without influence on the world. Freedom is passing through dark days. The popes of Rome proscribe the light of reason. The popes of Paris extinguish the lights of heaven. And Monsieur Pataud, the lights of the streets. Everywhere imperialism triumphs: the theocratic imperialism of the Roman Church; the military imperialism of mercantile and mystical monarchies; the bureaucratic imperialism of Masonic and rapacious republics; the dictatorial imperialism of revolutionary committees. Poor freedom, you are not of this world!… The abuses of power that the revolutionaries preached and practiced revolted Christophe and Olivier. They had little regard for the yellow workers who refused to suffer for the common cause. But they found it abominable that anyone should claim to compel them by force. --- And yet, one must take a side. In reality, the choice today is not between imperialism and freedom, but between one imperialism and another. Olivier said:

--- Neither one nor the other. I am for the oppressed.

Christophe hated the tyranny of oppressors no less. But he was swept along in the wake of force, following behind the army of the rebellious workers.

He had little idea of it. He declared to his dining companions that he was not with them.

--- As long as you are concerned only with material interests, he said, you don’t interest me. The day you march for a faith, then I’ll be one of you. Otherwise, what am I doing between two bellies? I am an artist; I have a duty to defend art; I must not enlist it in the service of a party. I know that in recent times ambitious writers, driven by an unhealthy desire for popularity, have set a bad example. It doesn’t seem to me that they served very well the cause they were defending in that way; but they betrayed art. To preserve the light of intelligence: that is our role. We must not muddy it in your blind struggles. Who will hold the light if we let it fall? You will be very glad to find it still intact after the battle. There must always be workers busy keeping the machine’s fire burning while others are fighting on the ship’s deck. To understand everything, to hate nothing. The artist is the compass that, during the storm, always points North.

They called him a windbag; they said that when it came to compasses, he had lost his own; and they allowed themselves the luxury of contemning him with friendly condescension. For them, an artist was a clever fellow who arranged things so as to work as little and as pleasantly as possible.

He replied that he worked as hard as they did, that he worked harder than they did, and that he had less fear of work. Nothing disgusted him as much as sabotage, the spoiling of work, idleness erected into a principle.

--- All these poor people, he said, afraid for their precious skins!… Good God! I have been working without rest since I was ten years old. You don’t love work; you are, at bottom, bourgeois. … If only you were capable of destroying the old world! But you can’t. You don’t even want to. No, you don’t want to. Howl all you like, threaten, play the part of the one who’s going to exterminate everything. You have only one thought: to get your hands on it, to lie down in the still-warm bed of the bourgeoisie. Apart from a few hundred poor wretches of laborers who are always ready to have their skin torn open, or to tear open someone else’s, without knowing why, --- for the pleasure of it --- for the pain, the age-old pain that is bursting out of them, all the others think only of getting out, of slipping into the ranks of the bourgeois at the first opportunity. They become socialists, journalists, lecturers, men of letters, deputies, ministers… Bah! bah! don’t shout against that one! You’re no better. He’s a traitor, you say?… Fine. Who’s next? You’ll all go through it. Not one of you resists the bait. How could you? Not one of you believes in the immortal soul. You are bellies, I tell you. Empty bellies thinking only of filling themselves.

At this they would get angry and all talk at once. And all the while they quarreled, it happened that Christophe, carried away by his passion, ended up more revolutionary than any of them. Try as he might to resist: his intellectual pride, his complacent vision of a purely aesthetic world made for the joy of the spirit, sank underground at the sight of injustice. Aesthetic, a world where eight men in ten live in destitution or hardship, in physical or moral misery? Come now! One has to be a shameless privileged person to dare claim such a thing. An artist like Christophe, in his heart of hearts, could not help but be on the side of the workers. Who has more to suffer, than the worker of the spirit, from the immorality of social conditions, from the scandalous inequality of wealth distributed among men? The artist dies of hunger, or becomes a millionaire, for no other reason than the whims of fashion and those who speculate upon it. A society that lets its elite perish, or pays it in an extravagant way, is a monstrous society; it needs a good sweeping out. Every man, whether he works or not, has the right to a minimum of life. Every piece of work, whether good or mediocre, must be compensated not at the price of its real value --- (Who is the infallible judge of that?) --- but according to the legitimate and normal needs of the worker. For the artist, the scholar, the inventor who brings it honor, society can and must ensure a sufficient pension to guarantee him the time and means to honor it still more. Nothing beyond that. The Joconde is not worth a million. There is no relationship between a sum of money and a work of art; the work is neither above nor below: it is apart. The question is not to pay for it; the question is for the artist to live. Give him enough to eat and to work in peace. It is absurd and disagreeable to want to make him a thief of other people’s property. Let it be said plainly: every man who possesses more than is necessary for his life, the life of his family, and the normal development of his intelligence, is a thief. What he has in excess, others lack. How many times have we not smiled sadly, hearing talk of the inexhaustible wealth of France, the abundance of fortunes, we workers, laborers, intellectuals, men and women who, since we were born, have exhausted ourselves at our tasks to earn enough not to die of hunger, often failing to earn it, seeing the best of us succumb to the strain --- we who are the moral and intellectual elite of the nation! You who have more than your share of the world’s wealth, you are rich from our suffering and our poverty. This does not trouble you; you do not lack for sophisms to reassure yourself: sacred rights of property, fair struggle for life, the supreme interests of the State-Moloch and of Progress, that fabulous monster, that problematic improvement to which one sacrifices the good --- the good of others. --- It nonetheless remains true, and all your sophisms will never manage to deny it: “You have too much to live on. We have not enough. And we are worth as much as you. And some of us are worth more than all of you put together.”

And so the intoxication of the passions surrounding him communicated itself to Christophe. Afterward, he would be astonished at these bursts of eloquence. But he attached no importance to them. He amused himself with this mild excitement, which he attributed to the bottle. He only regretted that the bottle was not better; and he praised his Rhine wines. He continued to believe himself detached from revolutionary ideas. But there occurred the singular phenomenon that Christophe brought to their discussion, even to their defense, a growing passion, while that of his companions seemed, by comparison, to be diminishing.

In fact, they had fewer illusions than he did. Even the most violent leaders, those most feared by the bourgeoisie, were uncertain at bottom and devilishly bourgeois. Coquard, with his laugh of a stallion whinnying, put on a fierce voice and made terrible gestures; but he only half believed in what he was saying: the pleasure of speaking, of commanding, of acting; he was a braggart of violence. He saw through bourgeois cowardice, and he made a game of terrorizing it by appearing stronger than he was; he had no difficulty admitting as much to Christophe, with a laugh. Graillot criticized everything, everything anyone wanted to do: he made everything miscarry. Joussier always asserted, he never wanted to be wrong. He saw very clearly the flaw in his own argument, and this only made him more obstinate; he would have sacrificed the victory of his cause to the pride of his principles. But he alternated between fits of stubborn faith and fits of ironic pessimism, in which he bitterly judged the lies of ideologies and the futility of all effort.

Most of the workers were the same. They fell, in a moment, from the intoxication of words into discouragement. They had immense illusions; but these rested on nothing; they had not painfully won and fashioned them for themselves; they had received them ready-made, through that law of least effort that led them in their leisure to the tavern and the music hall. An incurable laziness of thought, which had more than enough excuses: it is the crushed beast that asks only to lie down and ruminate in peace on its feed and its dreams. But once those dreams had been slept off, nothing remained but a greater weariness and a hangover. Endlessly they caught fire for a leader; and a short time later, grew suspicious of him and cast him aside. The saddest thing was that they were not wrong: the leaders were drawn, one after another, by the lure of wealth, success, vanity; for one Joussier whom the consumption eating away at him, death at close range, preserved from temptation, how many others betrayed, or grew weary! They were victims of the plague gnawing at the politicians of that time, in every party: demoralization by women or by money, by women and by money --- (the two scourges are one). --- One could see, in the government as in the opposition, first-rate talents, men who had in them the stuff of great statesmen --- (in Richelieu’s time, they might perhaps have been so) --- but they were without faith, without character; the need, the habit, the weariness of pleasure had drained them; it made them commit, in the midst of sweeping projects, incoherent acts, or suddenly drop everything, their affairs in progress, their country or their cause, to rest and enjoy themselves. They were brave enough to be killed in battle; but very few of these leaders would have been capable of dying at their task, at their post, immovable, fist on the helm and eyes unflinchingly fixed on the invisible goal.

The awareness of this fundamental weakness cut the revolution off at the knees. These workers spent a large part of their time accusing one another. Their strikes always failed, owing to the perpetual disagreements among the leaders or among the trades, between the reformists and the revolutionaries, --- the profound timidity beneath the menacing bluster, --- the hereditary sheepishness which, at the first legal summons, sent these rebels back under the yoke, --- the cowardly selfishness and baseness of those who took advantage of the others’ revolt to push themselves forward with the masters, to make their self-interested loyalty valued and dearly purchased. To say nothing of the disorder inherent to crowds, of popular anarchy. They were quite willing to carry out trade strikes with every revolutionary character; but they did not want to be treated as revolutionaries. They had no taste for bayonets. They imagined that one could make an omelet without breaking eggs. In any case, they preferred that the eggs be broken by someone else.

Olivier watched, observed, and felt no surprise. He had recognized at once how far these men fell short of the work they claimed to be carrying out; but he had also recognized the inexorable force that was sweeping them along; and he could see that Christophe, without knowing it, was following the current. As for himself---he who would have asked nothing better than to be carried away---the current had no use for him. He remained on the bank and watched the water flow past.

It was a powerful current: it bore along an enormous mass of passions, interests, and faith, all pressing forward, colliding, merging, with bursts of foam and contradictory eddies. The leaders were at the head, the least free of all, for they were being pushed---and perhaps, of everyone, the least believing: they had once believed, and were like those priests they had so often mocked, locked into their vows, into a faith they had once held and were now compelled to profess until the end. Behind them, the bulk of the flock was brutal, uncertain, and shortsighted. The majority believed by chance, because the current was now running toward these utopias; by evening they would believe no longer, because the current would have shifted. Many believed out of a need for action, out of a desire for adventure, out of romantic foolishness. Others, out of rationalizing logic stripped of common sense. Some, out of goodness. The shrewd ones used ideas only as weapons in the battle; their aims were immediate: they were fighting for a specific wage, for a set number of working hours. The worst harbored the secret hope of coarse revenge against their wretched lives.

But the current that bore them was wiser than they were, and it knew where it was going. What did it matter that it must momentarily break against the dike of the old world? Olivier foresaw that a social revolution would be crushed today. But he also knew that it would reach its ends through defeat no less than through victory: for oppressors only yield to the demands of the oppressed when those oppressed inspire them with fear. Thus, the violence of the revolutionaries served their cause no less than the justice of that cause. Both were part of the plan of the blind and certain force that drives the human flock…

« For consider what you are, you whom the Master has called. According to the flesh, there are not many among you who are wise, nor many who are strong, nor many who are noble. But He has chosen the foolish things of the world to confound the wise; and He has chosen the weak things of the world to confound the strong; and He has chosen the vile things of the world and the despised things and the things that are not, to abolish the things that are… »

Nevertheless, whatever Master governed things---(Reason or Unreason)---and though the social organization being prepared by syndicalism represented a relative step forward for the future, Olivier did not believe it was worth Christophe’s or his own while to pour all their capacity for illusion and sacrifice into this hand-to-hand struggle, which would open no new worlds. His mystical hope of the revolution had been disappointed. The people did not seem to him better, or much more sincere than the other classes; above all, they were not different enough. In the midst of the torrent of murky interests and passions, Olivier’s gaze and heart were drawn to the islands of independents, the small groups of true believers, who emerged here and there like flowers on the water. The elite may try and want to merge with the crowd: it always gravitates toward the elite---the elite of all classes and all parties---those who carry the flame. And the sacred duty is to ensure that the flame does not go out in their hands.

Olivier had already made his choice.

A few houses from his own was a cobbler’s stall, set a little below street level---a few planks nailed together, with dirty windowpanes and squares of paper replacing broken glass. You went down three steps to enter, and had to hunch your back to stand upright inside. There was just enough room for a shelf of old shoes and two stools. All day long, in keeping with the tradition of the cobbler of old, the master of the premises could be heard singing. He whistled, hammered his soles, bellowed in a hoarse voice bawdy songs and revolutionary anthems, or called out through his fishbowl window to the neighborhood women passing by. A magpie with a broken wing, which hopped along the sidewalk, would come from a concierge’s lodge to visit him. It would perch on the first step at the entrance of the stall and watch the cobbler. He would stop for a moment to say ribald things to it in a high, fluting tone, or would do his best to whistle the Internationale at it. The bird would stay there, beak raised, listening gravely; from time to time it would make a little plunge, beak forward as if bowing, and flap its wings awkwardly to recover its balance; then it would suddenly wheel about, abandoning its interlocutor in mid-sentence, and with one wing and one stubby winglet fly off to the back of a bench, from where it taunted the neighborhood dogs. Then the cobbler would go back to beating his uppers; and the flight of his audience did not prevent him from finishing, to the very end, the interrupted speech.

He was fifty-six years old, with a jolly and gruff air, small laughing eyes beneath enormous eyebrows, a bald crown that rose like an egg above a nest of hair, hairy ears, a black gap-toothed mouth that opened like a well in fits of laughter, a bristly and dirty beard into which he plunged both hands with their large fingers black with shoe polish. He was known in the neighborhood as père Feuillet, called Feuillette, called papa La Feuillette---people said La Fayette to infuriate him: for the old man, in politics, flew opinions of scarlet; in his youth he had been caught up in the Commune, sentenced to death, and ultimately deported; he was proud of his memories and lumped together in his resentments Badinguet, Galliffet, and Foutriquet. He attended revolutionary meetings faithfully and was an enthusiast of Coquard, for the avenging ideal that Coquard prophesied with such a fine beard and a voice of thunder. He never missed one of his speeches; he drank in his words, laughed at his jokes with his jaw hanging open, foamed at his invectives, rejoiced in the battles and the promised paradise. The next day, at the stall, he would reread in his newspaper the summary of the speeches; he read them aloud, to himself and to his apprentice; the better to savor them, he made the apprentice read them to him and boxed the boy’s ears when he skipped a line. As a result, he was not always punctual in delivering work on the promised dates; on the other hand, it was solid work: it wore out feet, but it was itself indestructible.

The old man had with him a thirteen-year-old grandson, hunchbacked, sickly, and rachitic, who ran his errands and served as his apprentice. The boy’s mother, at seventeen, had run away from her family to go off with a shiftless laborer who had turned apache, was quickly caught and sentenced, and disappeared. Left alone with the child, rejected by her family, she raised little Emmanuel. She had transferred onto him the love and hatred she had felt for her lover. She was a woman of violent and jealous character, to a pathological degree. She loved her child with wild abandon, handled him brutally, then, when he fell ill, was driven half mad with despair. On her bad days, she would put him to bed without supper, without a crust of bread. When she dragged him by the hand through the streets, if he was tired, if he refused to go any farther and let himself drop to the ground, she would haul him up with a kick. Her speech was incoherent, and she swung from tears to a hysteria of wild gaiety. She had died. The grandfather had taken in the child, then six years old. He was fond of him; but he had his own way of showing it: it consisted of roughing the boy up, calling him by various insults, twisting his ears, cuffing him from morning to night in the course of teaching him his trade; and at the same time he instilled in him his social and anticlerical catechism.

Emmanuel knew that his grandfather was not a bad man; but he was always ready to raise his elbow to ward off a slap; the old man frightened him, especially on evenings after a binge. For père la Feuillette had not earned his nickname for nothing: he got himself soused two or three times a month; on those occasions he talked at random, laughed, played the swaggerer, and it ended with a few blows to the boy. More noise than harm. But the child was timid; his frail condition made him more sensitive than others; he had a precocious intelligence, and he had inherited from his mother a fierce and unruly heart. He was shaken by his grandfather’s brutalities, just as he was by his revolutionary declamations---(the two went together; it was especially when the old man was drunk that he held forth).---Everything outside resonated within him like the stall shaking at the passage of heavy omnibuses. In his fevered imagination there mingled, in the vibrations of a belfry, his daily sensations, his great childhood sorrows, the lamentable memories of a premature experience, stories of the Commune, scraps of evening classes, of newspaper serials, of meeting speeches, and the murky, torrential sexual instincts he had inherited from his people. All of it together formed a world of dream---monstrous, trembling---from which, out of the opaque night and the marshy chaos, dazzling jets of hope shot upward.

The cobbler would sometimes drag his apprentice to the tavern at Aurélie’s. It was there that Olivier first noticed the little hunchback who had a swallow’s voice. Among these workers with whom he rarely conversed, he had had plenty of time to study the child’s sickly face, with its prominent forehead, its wild and humiliated look; he had witnessed the jovial coarseness directed at him, at which the boy’s features would tighten in silence. He had seen, at certain revolutionary harangues, those velvet brown eyes radiate the chimerical ecstasy of future happiness---that happiness which, even if it were ever to come about, would change very little in this wretched destiny. At such moments, his gaze illuminated his ungainly face and made you forget it. Even the beautiful Berthe was struck by it; one day she told him so, and without warning kissed him on the mouth. The child started; he went pale with shock and drew back, his face twisted with disgust. The girl did not have time to notice; she was already busy quarreling with Joussier. Only Olivier noticed Emmanuel’s distress; he followed the boy with his eyes as he had retreated into the shadows, hands trembling, head lowered, looking sideways at the girl with glances that burned with wounded anger. He drew closer to him, spoke to him gently, politely, and drew him out… Who can say the good that a gentle manner can do for a heart starved of consideration? It is like a drop of water drunk eagerly by parched earth. Only a few words were needed, a smile, for little Emmanuel to give himself to Olivier in the secret of his heart and to decide that Olivier belonged to him. Afterward, when he met him in the street and discovered they were neighbors, it seemed to him like a mysterious sign from fate that he had not been mistaken. He would watch for Olivier’s passage in front of the stall so as to call out a greeting; and if it happened that Olivier, distracted, did not glance his way, Emmanuel felt offended.

He had a great joy when Olivier one day came in to père Feuillette’s with an order. When the work was done, Emmanuel went to deliver it to Olivier; he had watched for his return home so as to be sure of finding him in. Olivier, absorbed in his thoughts, paid scant attention to him, paid, said nothing; the child seemed to be waiting, glancing here and there; he was leaving reluctantly. Olivier, with his natural kindness, sensed what was passing in him; he smiled and tried to strike up a conversation, despite the awkwardness he always felt in talking with someone from working people. This time he managed to find words that were simple and direct. An intuition of suffering made him see in the child---(in too simplified a way)---a small bird wounded by life, like himself, who consoled itself with its head tucked under its wing, huddled sadly on its perch, dreaming of wild flights into the light. A similar feeling of instinctive trust drew the child toward him; he felt the pull of that silent soul, which did not shout, which spoke no rough words, where one felt sheltered from the brutalities of the street; and the room, filled with books, lined with shelves where the dreams of centuries lay sleeping, inspired in him a quasi-religious reverence. To Olivier’s questions he did not try to dodge; he answered willingly, with abrupt flashes of proud wildness; but he lacked the words to express himself. Olivier patiently and carefully unwrapped this dark, stuttering soul; he came gradually to read in it its hopes and its ridiculous, touching faith in a renewal of the world. He had no desire to laugh at it, knowing that it was dreaming the impossible and would not change mankind. Christians too have dreamed the impossible; and they did not change mankind. From the age of Pericles to that of M. Fallières, where is the moral progress?… But every faith is beautiful; and when others fade, one must salute those that are kindling: there can never be too many. Olivier watched with tender curiosity the uncertain glimmer that burned in the child’s mind. What a strange mind!… Olivier could not manage to follow the movement of that thought---incapable of a sustained, reasoned effort, moving in lurches, and, while you were speaking to it, staying far behind you, not following, clinging to an image evoked, one never knew how, by a word spoken a moment before, then suddenly catching up with you, leaping past you, drawing from a commonplace thought, from a cautious bourgeois sentence, a whole enchanted world, a heroic and deranged credo. This soul, which slumbered with sudden bounding awakenings, had a childlike and powerful need for optimism; to everything one said to it, art or science, it added an ending from an obliging melodrama that led back to its own chimeras and satisfied them.

Out of curiosity, Olivier read aloud to the boy on Sundays. He thought he could hold his interest with realistic, familiar stories, and read him Tolstoy’s Childhood Reminiscences. The boy was unimpressed; he said:

--- Well, yes, that’s how it is — everyone knows that.

And he could not understand why anyone would go to such trouble to write things that were real…

--- A kid is a kid, he said disdainfully.

He was no more moved by the interest of history; and science bored him — it was for him a tedious preface to a fairy tale: invisible forces pressed into man’s service, like terrible and vanquished spirits. What was the point of so many explanations? When you’ve found something, you don’t need to say how you found it, only what you found. Analysis of thought is bourgeois luxury. What souls from the working class need is synthesis — ready-made ideas, for better or worse, and more often worse than better, but ideas that tend toward action, realities big with life and charged with electricity. Of all the literature Emmanuel might have known, what moved him most was the epic pathos of a few pages of Hugo and the smoky rhetoric of those revolutionary orators whom he did not quite understand, and who, no more than Hugo, always understood themselves. The world was for him, as for them, not a coherent assembly of reasons or facts, but an infinite space drowned in shadow and trembling with light, where great sun-lit wingbeats swept through the night. Olivier tried in vain to impart his bourgeois logic to him. The rebellious, restless soul slipped from his hands; and it wallowed in the vagueness and collision of its hallucinated sensations, like a woman in love who surrenders with her eyes closed.

Olivier was at once drawn to and unsettled by what he sensed in the child that was so close to himself — solitude, proud weakness, idealistic ardor — and yet so different: that unbalanced reason, those blind and unbridled desires, that sensual wildness which had no conception of good and evil as bourgeois morality defines them. He only glimpsed a part of that wildness, which would have frightened him had he known the whole of it. He never suspected the world of troubled passions that rumbled in the heart and mind of his young friend. Our bourgeois atavism has made us too tame. We dare not even look within ourselves. If we were to speak the hundredth part of the dreams an honest man has, or the desires that pass beneath the skin of a chaste woman, there would be an outcry of scandal. Peace upon the monsters! Close the gate. But let us know that they exist, and that in untried souls they are poorly chained. --- The boy had all the erotic desires and dreams that people agree to regard as perverse; they seized him unawares, in gusts, in sudden squalls — all the more scorching for being inflamed by the ugliness that isolated him. Olivier knew nothing of this. In his presence, Emmanuel felt ashamed. He absorbed the contagion of that peace and purity. The example of such a life was a tamer for him. The child felt a violent love for Olivier. And his suppressed passions rushed into tumultuous dreams: human happiness, social brotherhood, the miracles of science, fantastic aviation, wild and barbarous poetry — a whole heroic, erotic, childlike world, splendid and vulgar, through which his intelligence and will jolted along, in idleness and in fever.

He had little time to give himself over to it, especially in his grandfather’s shop, which never fell silent for an instant — whistling, hammering, and talking from morning to night. But there is always room for dreaming. How many days of reverie one can live through, standing up, eyes open, in a single second of life! --- The worker’s labor accommodates itself quite well to intermittent thought. His mind would struggle to follow, without a deliberate effort of will, a long chain of close reasoning; and if it manages to do so, there are always a few links missing here and there; but in the intervals between rhythmic movements, ideas slip in, images rise up; the regular gestures of the body summon them, like a bellows at the forge. The thought of the people! A sheaf of smoke and fire, a rain of sparks that go out, blaze up, and go out again! But sometimes one of them, carried by the wind, sets fire to the dried forests and the rich bourgeois haystacks…

Olivier managed to get Emmanuel into a printing house. It was the boy’s own wish; and the grandfather raised no objection — he was glad enough to see his grandson more learned than himself, and he had a respect for printer’s ink. In the new trade the work was harder than in the old; but among the crowd of workers, the boy felt freer to think than in the shop, alone at his grandfather’s side.

The best moment came at the lunch hour. Far from the flood of workers who invaded the little tables on the pavement and the wine shops of the neighborhood, he would slip away, limping, toward the nearby square; and there, astride a bench beneath the canopy of a chestnut tree, near a bronze faun who danced with a cluster of grapes in his hand, he would unwrap his bread and the piece of charcuterie folded in greasy paper; and he would savor it slowly, in the middle of a circle of sparrows. On the green lawn, small jets of water let fall their fine rain in a sizzling net. In a sunlit tree, slate-blue pigeons with round eyes cooed. And all around was the perpetual hum of Paris, the rumble of carriages, the rustling sea of footsteps, the familiar cries of the street, the distant laughing flute of a china-mender, a road-laborer’s hammer ringing on the cobblestones, the noble music of a fountain — all the feverish and golden envelope of the Parisian dream. --- And the little hunchback, astride his bench, his mouth full, in no hurry to swallow, drifted into a delicious torpor in which he no longer felt his aching spine and his frail soul; he was bathed entirely in a vague and heady happiness.

--- ”…Warm light, sun of justice that will shine for us tomorrow, do you not already shine? Everything is so good, so beautiful! One is rich, one is strong, one is well, one loves… I love, I love everyone, everyone loves me… Ah, how good it is! How good it will be, tomorrow!…”

Factory sirens would whistle; the boy awoke, swallowed his mouthful, took a long drink from the Wallace fountain nearby, and, back inside his hunchbacked shell, went off with his skipping, limping gait to take his place at the printing house, before the cases of magic letters that would one day write the Mane Thecel Pharès of the Revolution.

Old Feuillet had an old friend, Trouillot, the stationer, on the other side of the street. A stationery-and-haberdashery shop where you could see, in the window, pink and green sweets in jars and cardboard dolls with neither arms nor legs. From one pavement to the other, one standing in his doorway, the other in his shop, they exchanged winks, nods, and other varied pantomimes. At certain hours, when the cobbler was tired of hammering and had, as he put it, a cramp in his backside, they would call out to each other — La Feuillette in his yelping bawl, Trouillot with an indistinct lowing, like a hoarse calf — and they would go together to sip a glass at the nearby counter. They were in no hurry to return. They were dreadful chatterers. They had known each other for nearly half a century. The stationer had also played his small part in the great melodrama of 1871. You would never have guessed it, looking at that placid, heavy man, a black cap on his head, wearing a white smock, with his gray old soldier’s moustache, his vague pale-blue eyes streaked with red, beneath which his eyelids formed pouches, his flabby, shining cheeks perpetually perspiring, dragging one leg along — gouty, short of breath, his tongue sluggish. But he had lost none of his old illusions. Exiled to Switzerland for a few years, he had there met companions of various nations, and in particular Russians who had initiated him into the beauties of fraternal anarchy. On this point he disagreed with La Feuillette, who was an old Frenchman, a partisan of the firm hand and of absolutism within liberty. On everything else, each was as firm a believer as the other in social revolution and the workers’ Salente of the future. Each was enamored of a leader in whom he embodied the ideal of what he would have wished to be. Trouillot was for Joussier, and La Feuillette for Coquard. They argued interminably about what divided them, considering their common convictions assured — (so sure of them were they that, between two swigs, they nearly believed them already accomplished). --- Of the two, the more argumentative was the cobbler. He believed by reason; or so he flattered himself — for God knows his reason was of a singular variety, and could fit no foot but his own. Yet, less expert in reasoning than in shoes, he insisted that other minds wear shoes cut to his last. The stationer, less combative and lazier, did not take the trouble to demonstrate his faith. One only demonstrates what one doubts. He did not doubt. His perpetual optimism saw things as he desired them to be, and did not see them when they were otherwise, or forgot them at once. Whether by will or by apathy, it cost him no effort: contrary experiences slid off his hide without leaving a mark. --- Both were romantic old children who had no sense of reality, and for whom the revolution, whose very name intoxicated them, was a fine story one tells oneself and of which one can no longer say with certainty whether it will ever come, or whether it has already come. And both had faith in Humanity-as-God, by transposition of their hereditary habits, bent for centuries before the Son of Man. --- It goes without saying that both were anticlerical.

The amusing thing was that the good stationer lived with a very devout niece who did with him as she pleased. This small, very dark, plump woman, with lively eyes, gifted with a fluency of speech made all the more striking by a strong Marseille accent, was a widow of a clerk at the Ministry of Commerce. Left alone without means, with a little girl, and taken in by her uncle, this bourgeoise, who had pretensions, was not far from believing she was doing her shopkeeper relative a favor by selling in his shop; she held court with the airs of a dethroned queen — which, fortunately for the uncle’s business and for his customers, was tempered by her natural exuberance and her need to talk. A royalist and a clerical, as befitted a person of her distinction, Madame Alexandrine displayed her sentiments with a zeal all the more indiscreet for the wicked pleasure she took in teasing the old unbeliever in whose home she had installed herself. She had made herself mistress of the household, responsible for the conscience of all within it; if she could not convert the uncle — (and she swore to herself she would catch him in extremis) — she gave herself the wholehearted pleasure of dipping the devil in holy water. She pinned to the walls images of Our Lady of Lourdes and Saint Anthony of Padua; she adorned the mantelpiece with little painted fetishes under glass globes; and, when the season came, she set up in her daughter’s alcove a chapel for the month of Mary, with small blue candles. One could not say what prevailed in her aggressive devotion — a very real affection for the uncle she wished to convert, or the joy she took in annoying him.

The good man, apathetic and somewhat drowsy, let it go on; he did not risk taking up the combative provocations of his formidable niece: with a tongue so well hung, it was impossible to fight back; above all, he wanted peace. Only once did he lose his temper, when a small Saint Joseph attempted to slip surreptitiously into his bedroom, above his bed; on this point he won out — for he nearly had a fit, and the niece took fright; the experiment was not repeated. In everything else he gave way, affecting not to notice; that smell of the good Lord did cause him some unease; but he did not wish to think about it. Deep down, he admired his niece, and he took a certain pleasure in being ill-treated by her. And besides, they were at one in doting on the little girl, young Reine, or Rainette.

She was twelve or thirteen years old, and she was always sick. For months, a hip ailment had kept her stretched out and captive, one whole side of her body molded into a plaster trough, like a little Daphne in her bark. She had the eyes of a wounded doe and the washed-out complexion of plants deprived of sunlight; a head too large, made to look even larger by her pale blond hair, very fine and drawn back very tightly; but a mobile and delicate face, a lively little nose, and a kind childlike smile. Her mother’s devotion had taken on, in this suffering and idle child, an exalted character. She spent hours reciting her rosary, a little coral rosary the Pope had blessed; and she would break off to kiss it with fervor. She did almost nothing all day long; needlework tired her; Mme Alexandrine had not given her a taste for it. She barely read a few insipid Tracts, some bland miraculous tale whose pretentious and flat style struck her as poetry itself --- or accounts of crimes with colored illustrations in the Sunday papers that her stupid mother put into her hands. She barely managed a few crochet stitches, moving her lips, paying less attention to her work than to the conversation she was carrying on with some sainted friend of hers, or even with the good Lord. For one must not think it takes a Joan of Arc to receive such visits; all of us have received them. Only, as a rule, the celestial visitors let us speak alone, seated by our hearth; and they say nothing. Rainette never thought to take offense: silence gives consent. Besides, she had so much to say on her part that she barely left them time to answer: she answered for them. She was a silent chatterbox; she took after her mother in the volubility of her tongue; but that torrent seeped away into inner words, like a stream that disappears underground. --- Naturally, she took part in the conspiracy against her uncle, to convert him; she rejoiced at every inch of the house wrested from the spirit of darkness by the spirits of light; and more than once she sewed a holy medal inside the lining of the old man’s coat, or slipped a rosary bead into one of his pockets, which the uncle, to please his little niece, pretended not to notice. --- This takeover of the priest-eater by the two devout women caused the cobbler both indignation and delight. He never tired of making crude jokes about women who wear the trousers; and he mocked his friend for letting himself be put under the slipper. In truth, he had no business playing the wit: he himself had been afflicted for twenty years with a shrewish and sober wife who called him a drunken old fool and before whom he lowered his crest. But he was careful not to mention it. The stationer, somewhat ashamed, defended himself feebly, professing in slurred tones a Kropotkin-style tolerance.

Rainette and Emmanuel were friends. Since early childhood they had seen each other every day. To tell the truth, Emmanuel rarely dared slip into the house. Mme Alexandrine looked at him with a cold eye, as the grandson of a godless man and as a dirty little cobbler’s brat. But Rainette spent her days on a chaise longue near the window on the ground floor. Emmanuel would drum on the panes in passing; and, his nose pressed against the glass, he would pull a funny face of greeting. In summer, when the window stayed open, he would stop, his arms resting a little high on the window ledge --- (he imagined this pose showed him to advantage, that his shoulders hunched in a casual attitude made up for his real deformity) --- and they would talk. Rainette, who was not spoiled for visitors, no longer thought to notice that Emmanuel was hunchbacked. Emmanuel, who was afraid of girls, afraid and repelled, made an exception for Rainette. This little invalid, half-petrified, was for him something intangible and distant, not quite real. Only the evening when beautiful Berthe kissed him on the mouth, and again the following day, he kept away from Rainette with an instinctive repulsion; he walked past the house without stopping, his head down; and he lingered at a distance, wary and distrustful, like a wild dog. Then he came back. She was so little a woman! When he came out of the workshop, passing as unobtrusively as possible through the stitchers in their long work smocks, like nightgowns --- those tall, restless, laughing girls whose hungry eyes undressed you as you walked by --- how he would bolt toward Rainette’s window! He was grateful to his friend for being an invalid: he could, with her, strike an air of superiority, even a touch of protectiveness. He made the most of his importance; he reported events from the street, placing himself in a favorable light. Sometimes, when he was feeling gallant, he would bring Rainette roasted chestnuts in winter, a bunch of cherries in summer. She, for her part, gave him those multicolored sweets that filled the two jars in the shop window; and together they looked at illustrated postcards. These were happy moments; both of them forgot the sad body that caged their children’s souls.

But it also happened that they began to talk, the way grown-ups do, about politics and religion. Then they became just as stupid as the grown-ups. The good understanding ceased. She would talk about miracles, novenas, or pious pictures edged with paper lace and days of indulgence. He would say these were all nonsense and mummery, as he had heard his grandfather say. But when he in turn wanted to tell about the public meetings the old man had taken him to, and the speeches he had attended, she interrupted him with contempt and said that all those people were drunkards. The conversation turned sour. They fell to talking about their parents; each repeated to the other, one about the mother, the other about the grandfather, the insulting things the grandfather and the mother had said. Then they talked about each other. They tried to say unpleasant things. They managed it easily enough. He said the crudest ones. But she knew how to find the cruelest words. Then he would leave; and when he came back, he would tell her he had been with other girls, that they were pretty, and that they had laughed a lot together, and that they were going to meet again the following Sunday. She said nothing; she pretended to despise what he was saying; and then suddenly she flew into a rage, flung her crochet hook at his head, screaming at him to go away, that she hated him; and she hid her face in her hands. He left, not proud of his victory. He desperately wanted to push aside those thin little hands, to say it wasn’t true. But he forced himself, out of pride, not to go back.

One day, Rainette had her revenge. --- He was with his workshop companions. They didn’t much like him, because he kept himself as much apart from them as possible and either said nothing, or said too much, in a naively pretentious way, like a book, or rather like a newspaper article --- (he was stuffed with them). --- That day, they had started talking about the revolution and the times to come. He was getting carried away, and he was making a fool of himself. A companion cut him down brutally:

--- First off, you, we don’t need you anymore, you’re too ugly. In the future society, there won’t be any hunchbacks. They’ll throw them in the water at birth.

That sent him plummeting from his heights of eloquence. He fell silent, stricken. The others were doubled over with laughter. For the whole rest of the afternoon he did not open his mouth. In the evening he headed home; he was in a hurry to get back, to hide in a corner and suffer alone. Olivier ran into him; he was struck by his ashen face; he sensed his pain.

--- You’re hurting. Why?

Emmanuel didn’t want to talk. Olivier pressed him gently. The boy kept silent; but his jaw was trembling, as if he were close to tears. Olivier took him by the arm and brought him home. Though he himself felt, as well, toward ugliness and illness, that instinctive and cruel revulsion of those not born with the souls of nursing sisters, he let nothing of it show.

--- Someone hurt you?

--- Yes.

--- What did they do?

The boy opened his heart. He said he was ugly. He said his companions had told him their revolution was not for him.

--- It’s not for them either, my boy, nor for us. It’s not a matter of one day. We work for those who come after us.

The boy was disappointed that it was so far off.

--- Doesn’t it give you pleasure to think that we’re working to bring happiness to thousands of boys like you, to millions of beings?

Emmanuel sighed, and said:

--- It would still be good to have a little happiness oneself.

--- My boy, you mustn’t be ungrateful. You live in the most beautiful city, in the era richest in wonders; you’re not stupid, and you have good eyes. Think of all the things there are to see and to love around you.

He showed him a few.

The child listened, shook his head, and said:

--- Yes, but to think that you’ll always be shut up inside this skin!

--- But no, you’ll get out of it.

--- And then it will be over.

--- What makes you think so?

The boy was astonished. Materialism was part of his grandfather’s credo; he thought that only the churchy crowd believed in eternal life. He knew his friend was not one of them; and he wondered whether Olivier was speaking seriously. But Olivier, holding him by the hand, spoke to him at length about his idealist faith, about the unity of limitless life, which has neither beginning nor end, and of which the billions of beings and the billions of moments are merely the rays of the single sun. But he did not say it in that abstract form. Instinctively, speaking to him, he adapted himself to the child’s mind; ancient legends, the material and profound imaginings of old cosmogonies came back to him; half laughing, half serious, he spoke of metempsychosis and the series of countless forms through which the soul flows and filters, like a spring passing from basin to basin. He wove in Christian memories and the images of the summer evening that bathed them both. He was seated near the open window; the boy stood beside him, his hand in Olivier’s. It was a Saturday evening. The bells were ringing. The first swallows, back only recently, skimmed the walls of the houses. The distant sky smiled above the city, which was wrapping itself in shadow. The child, holding his breath, listened to the fairy tale his great friend was telling him. And Olivier, for his part, warmed by the attention of his small listener, let himself be caught up in his own stories.

There are, in life, decisive seconds when, just as the electric lights suddenly come on in the night of a great city, the eternal flame lights up in the dark soul. A single spark is enough, leaping from one soul and passing to the one that waits, the fire of Prometheus. That spring evening, the quiet words of Olivier kindled, in the spirit hidden within the little misshapen body like a dented lantern, the light that never goes out. He understood nothing of Olivier’s arguments; he barely heard them. But those legends, those images which for Olivier were beautiful fables, a kind of parable, became flesh within him, became reality. The fairy tale came alive and pulsed around him. And the vision framed by the window of the room, the men passing in the street, the rich and the poor, and the swallows grazing the walls, and the worn-out horses dragging their loads, and the stones of the houses drinking in the shadow of dusk, and the paling sky where the light was dying --- all that outer world suddenly pressed itself into him like a kiss. It lasted only a flash. Then it faded. He thought of Rainette, and said:

--- But the ones who go to mass, the ones who believe in the good Lord, they’re crackpots all the same, aren’t they?

Olivier smiled:

--- They believe, he said, as we do. We all believe the same thing. Only, they believe less than we do. They are people who, to see the light, need to close their shutters and light their lamp. They put God into a man. We have better eyes. But it’s always the same light that we love.

The boy was making his way home through the dark streets where the gas lamps were not yet lit. Olivier’s words were buzzing in his head. He told himself that it is just as cruel to mock people for having bad eyes as for being hunchbacked. And he thought of Rainette, who had pretty eyes; and he thought that he had made them cry. That was unbearable to him. He retraced his steps, went back to the stationer’s house. The window was still half-open; he gently slid his head through and called in a low voice:

--- Rainette.

She did not answer.

--- Rainette. I’m sorry.

Rainette’s voice, from the shadow, said:

--- Wicked boy! I hate you.

--- I’m sorry, he repeated.

He fell silent. Then, with a sudden impulse, he said, even more quietly, troubled, a little ashamed:

--- Rainette, you know, I believe in good Gods too, like you.

--- Really?

--- Really.

He said it mostly out of generosity. But, having said it, he believed it a little.

They stayed without speaking. They couldn’t see each other. What a beautiful night, outside!… The little invalid murmured:

--- Won’t it be lovely, when we’re dead!

You could hear the soft breath of Rainette.

He said:

--- Good night, little frog.

Rainette’s tender voice said:

--- Good night.

He left, feeling lighter. He was glad that Rainette had forgiven him. And somewhere deep inside, the little whipping boy was not displeased that another had suffered on his account.

Olivier had retreated back into his solitude. Christophe soon followed him there. Clearly, their place was not in the syndicalist movement. Olivier could not enlist with these people. And Christophe did not want him to. Olivier drew away from it in the name of the weak, the oppressed; Christophe, in the name of the strong, the independent. But whether they had withdrawn, one at the prow, the other at the stern, they were nonetheless aboard the same ship that was carrying the army of workers and all of society along with it. Free and sure of himself, Christophe contemplated with provocative interest the coalition of the proletariat; he needed to steep himself from time to time in the popular vat: it relaxed him; he came out of it more vigorous and refreshed. He had kept up his acquaintance with Coquard, and continued to take his meals, now and then, at Aurélie’s. Once there, he kept little watch over himself; he gave free rein to his whimsical moods; paradox held no fear for him; and he took a mischievous pleasure in pushing his interlocutors to the most extreme and absurd consequences of their principles. No one ever knew whether he was speaking seriously or not: for he grew passionate as he spoke, and by the end he had lost sight of his original paradoxical intent. The artist let himself be intoxicated by the fervor of others. In one such moment of aesthetic excitement, it happened that he improvised, in the back room of Aurélie’s shop, a revolutionary song which, tried out and repeated on the spot, was spreading through the workers’ circles by the very next day. He was compromising himself. The police were watching him. Manousse, who had connections at the heart of the matter, was warned by a friend of his, Xavier Bernard, a young clerk at the prefecture of police who dabbled in literature and claimed to be mad about Christophe’s music --- (for dilettantism and the anarchic spirit had crept even among the watchdogs of the Third Republic).

--- Your Krafft is playing a dangerous game, Bernard had told him. He’s strutting about. We know what to make of it; but in high places they wouldn’t mind catching a foreigner --- and a German at that --- mixed up in these revolutionary schemes: it’s the classic way to discredit the party and sow suspicion within it. If this fool isn’t careful, we’ll be forced to arrest him. It’s a nuisance. Warn him.

Manousse warned Christophe; Olivier begged him to be prudent. Christophe did not take their advice seriously.

--- Bah! he said, they know I’m not dangerous. I’m perfectly entitled to have a little fun. I love these people, they work as I do, they have a faith as I do. True, it’s not the same faith, we’re not in the same camp… Very well! We’ll fight it out, then. That doesn’t displease me. What do you want? I can’t stay coiled up in my shell like you. I need to breathe. I suffocate among the bourgeois.

Olivier, whose lungs were less demanding, felt quite at home in his narrow lodgings and the calm company of his two friends, even though one of them, Mme Arnaud, had thrown herself into charitable works, and the other, Cécile, was so absorbed in the care of her child that she spoke of nothing else and to no one else, in that cooing, prattling tone that strives to model itself on the chatter of a fledgling and transform its shapeless song into human speech.

From his time among the working-class circles, two acquaintances had stayed with him. Both were independents, like himself. One, Guérin, was an upholsterer. He worked as it suited him, in a capricious fashion, but with great skill. He loved his trade; he had a natural taste for objects of art, which he had developed through observation, practice, and visits to museums. Olivier had asked him to repair an old piece of furniture: the work was difficult, and the craftsman had carried it off with skill; he had spent considerable effort and time on it, yet asked Olivier only a modest wage, so happy was he at having succeeded. Olivier took an interest in him, questioned him about his life, tried to learn what he thought of the labor movement. Guérin thought nothing of it; it was of no concern to him. At bottom, he was not of that class, nor of any class. He read little. All his intellectual formation had come through the senses --- the eye, the hand, the innate taste of the true Parisian working people. He was a happy man. The type is not rare in the working petite bourgeoisie, which is one of the most intelligent races in the nation: for it achieves a fine balance between manual work and the healthy activity of the mind.

Olivier’s other acquaintance was of a more singular variety. He was a postman by the name of Hurteloup. A fine-looking man, tall, with clear eyes, a small blond beard and mustache, an open and cheerful air. One day when he came to deliver a registered letter, he had stepped into Olivier’s room. While Olivier signed, he was making a circuit of the bookcase, his nose close to the spines:

--- Ha! ha! he said, you have the classics… He added:

--- I collect history books myself. All about Burgundy.

--- You’re Burgundian? asked Olivier.

--- «Bourguignon salé, L’épée au côté, La barbe au menton, Saute Bourguignon.»

replied the postman, laughing. I’m from near Avallon. I have family papers going back to 1200 and something…

Olivier, intrigued, wanted to know more. Hurteloup was only too happy to talk. He did indeed belong to one of the oldest families in Burgundy. One of his ancestors had been on the crusade of Philippe-Auguste; another had been Secretary of State under Henri II. The decline had begun in the seventeenth century. At the time of the Revolution, the family, ruined and fallen, had plunged into the popular pool. Now it was coming back to the surface, through the honest work, the physical and moral vigor of the postman Hurteloup, and his fidelity to his race. His favorite pastime was to gather historical and genealogical documents relating to his family or their place of origin. In his free hours, he went to the Archives to copy old papers. When he didn’t understand something, he would ask one of his clients --- a Chartiste or Sorbonnard --- to explain it. His illustrious ancestry did not go to his head; he spoke of it, laughing, without a shadow of embarrassment or resentment against ill fortune. He had a carefree and robust gaiety that was a pleasure to see. And Olivier, watching him, thought of the mysterious ebb and flow of the lives of races, which runs full to the brim for centuries, for centuries disappears underground, then surges up again after having drained new energies from the depths of the soil. And the people appeared to him as an immense reservoir into which the rivers of the past vanish and from which the rivers of the future emerge --- which, under another name, are sometimes the same ones.

Guérin and Hurteloup were congenial to him; but it was easy to see that they could not serve him as real society; between them and him, there was not much conversation possible. Little Emmanuel occupied him more; he came to see him now almost every evening. Since the magical exchange between them, a revolution had taken place in the child. He had flung himself into reading with a furious hunger for knowledge. He emerged from his books dazed, stupefied. He seemed less intelligent than before; he barely spoke; Olivier could draw from him only monosyllables now; to his questions, the child would respond with nonsense. Olivier was losing heart; he tried not to show it; but he believed he had been mistaken and that the boy was entirely stupid. He did not see the formidable work of feverish incubation that was taking place in the depths of that soul. He was, besides, a poor teacher, better at scattering handfuls of good grain at random in the fields than at weeding the ground and digging the furrows. The presence of Christophe added still more to the confusion. Olivier felt an awkwardness at displaying his little protégé before his friend; he was ashamed of Emmanuel’s stupidity, which became overwhelming whenever Jean-Christophe was there. The child would then lock himself in a fierce silence. He hated Christophe, because Olivier loved him; he could not bear that another should hold a place in his master’s heart. Neither Christophe nor Olivier suspected the frenzy of love and jealousy that was gnawing at this child’s soul. And yet Christophe had once passed through there himself. But he did not recognize himself in this being, forged from a different metal than his own. In this obscure amalgam of unhealthy inheritances, everything --- love and hatred and latent genius --- rang with a different sound.

The first of May was approaching. An anxious murmur ran through Paris. The braggart leaders of the C.G.T. helped to spread it. Their newspapers announced the great day had come, summoned the workers’ militias, and hurled the word of terror that strikes the bourgeois at their most sensitive point: the belly… Feri ventrem… They threatened them with the general strike. Frightened Parisians fled to the countryside, or laid in provisions as though for a siege. Christophe had run into Canet in his automobile, bringing back two hams and a sack of potatoes; he was beside himself; he no longer knew quite which party he belonged to; he was seen by turns as an old republican, a royalist, and a revolutionary. His cult of violence was a maddened compass whose needle leapt from north to south and back again. In public, he continued to join in the braggadocio of his friends; but he would have embraced in petto the first dictator who came along to sweep away the red specter.

Christophe laughed at this universal cowardice. He was convinced that nothing would happen. Olivier was less certain. From his bourgeois birth, there always remained in him something of that faint eternal trembling which the memory and the dread of Revolution produces in the bourgeoisie.

--- Come now! said Christophe, you can sleep easy. Your Revolution is not coming tomorrow. You’re all afraid of it. Afraid of blows. It’s everywhere. Among the bourgeois, in the people, throughout the nation, throughout all the nations of the West. There’s not enough blood left, people are afraid to shed it. For forty years, everything has been settled in words and newspaper articles. Just look at your famous Affair. Didn’t you cry out enough: “Death! Blood! Carnage!”… O Gascon cadets! So much saliva and ink! How many drops of blood?

--- Don’t be so sure, said Olivier. This fear of blood is the secret instinct that at the first blood shed, the beast will see red, the brute will reappear beneath the civilized man; and God knows then who will be able to muzzle it! Everyone hesitates before war; but when war breaks out, it will be atrocious.

Christophe shrugged his shoulders and said it was no accident that the era had for its heroes Cyrano the boaster and the bantam rooster Chantecler, heroes who lie.

Olivier shook his head. He knew that in France, boasting is the beginning of action. All the same, he no more than Christophe believed in any imminent movement: it had been announced too many times, and the government was on its guard. There was reason to think that the syndicalist strategists would put off the battle to a more opportune moment.

In the second half of April, Olivier had a bout of influenza; it came back to him every winter, at roughly the same time, and it stirred up an old bronchitis. Christophe moved in with him for two or three days. The illness was mild enough and passed quickly. But it brought with it, as usual for Olivier, a moral and physical fatigue that persisted for some time after the fever broke. He lay in bed for hours at a stretch, with no desire to get up, no desire to move; he lay there watching Christophe’s back as he sat at his table, working.

Christophe was absorbed in his work. Sometimes, when he was tired of writing, he would get up abruptly and go to the piano; he played, not what he had written, but whatever came under his fingers. Then a strange phenomenon would occur. While what he was writing was conceived in a style that recalled his earlier works, what he played seemed to come from another man. It was a world of harsh and disorderly breath. There was a derangement in it, a violent or broken incoherence, that recalled nothing of the powerful logic and order that reigned in the rest of his music. It seemed as though these unguarded improvisations, which escaped the eye of consciousness, which sprang from the body more than from thought, like an animal cry, revealed a disequilibrium of the soul, a storm gathering in the depths of the future. Christophe was not aware of it; but Olivier listened, watched Christophe, and was vaguely uneasy. In his weakened state, he had a singular keenness of perception, a far-reaching vision: he could see things that no one else noticed.

Christophe struck a final chord and stopped, sweating, slightly dazed; he looked at Olivier with still-clouded eyes, broke into a laugh, and went back to his table. Olivier asked him:

--- What was that, Christophe?

--- Nothing at all, said Christophe. I’m stirring the water to draw the fish.

--- Are you going to write that down?

--- That? What do you mean, that?

--- What you just played.

--- And what did I play? I’ve already forgotten.

--- But what were you thinking about?

--- I don’t know, said Christophe, passing his hand over his forehead.

He went back to writing. Silence fell again in the room of the two friends. Olivier continued to watch Christophe. Christophe felt that gaze; and he turned around. Olivier’s eyes were fixed on him with such warmth!

--- Lazybones! he said cheerfully.

Olivier sighed:

--- What’s the matter? asked Christophe.

--- Oh, Christophe! To think there are so many things in you, right here, close to me, treasures that you will give to others and of which I will have no share!…

--- Are you out of your mind? What’s come over you?

--- What will your life be? Through what dangers, what sorrows, will you still have to pass?… I would like to follow you, I would like to be with you… I won’t see any of it. I’ll fall stupidly by the wayside.

--- Stupid you certainly are. Do you imagine that even if you wanted to, I would let you fall behind?

--- You’ll forget me, said Olivier.

Christophe rose and went to sit on the bed beside Olivier; he took him by the wrists, damp with the sweat of weakness. The collar of his shirt had come open; one could see the thin chest, the skin too transparent, frail and taut as a sail that a breath of wind inflates and is about to tear. Christophe’s sturdy fingers clumsily rebuttoned the collar. Olivier let him do it.

--- Dear Christophe! he said tenderly. I have had great happiness in my life, all the same!

--- What’s all this? said Christophe. You’re doing as well as I am.

--- Yes, said Olivier.

--- Then why are you talking nonsense?

--- You’re right, said Olivier, ashamed and smiling. It’s this flu that gets you down.

--- You have to shake it off. Come on! Get up.

--- Not now. Later.

He remained lost in reverie. The next day he got up. But it was only to go on daydreaming by the fire. April was mild and misty. Through the warm veil of silver fog, small green leaves were unfolding from their cocoons, invisible birds were singing to the hidden sun. Olivier unwound the spindle of his memories. He saw himself as a child, in the train carrying him away from his little town, through the fog, with his mother weeping. Antoinette was alone, in the other corner of the carriage… Delicate profiles, fine landscapes, painted themselves in the depths of his eyes. Beautiful lines of verse came of their own accord, arranging their syllables and their singing rhythms. He was near his table; he had only to reach out and take his pen and set down these poetic visions. But the will was lacking; he was weary; he knew that the fragrance of his dreams would evaporate the moment he tried to fix them. It was always thus: the best of himself could not be expressed; his mind was like a valley full of flowers; but almost no one could gain access to it; and as soon as the flowers were gathered, they wilted. Only a few had managed to survive, languidly --- a few slender short stories, a few poems, which breathed a sweet and dying breath. This artistic impotence had long been one of Olivier’s deepest griefs. To feel so much life within oneself that one cannot save!… --- Now he was resigned to it. Flowers have no need of being seen in order to bloom. They are only more beautiful in the fields where no hand gathers them. Blessed are the flowering fields that dream in the sun! --- There was little sun; but Olivier’s dreams bloomed all the more for that. What stories he told himself in those days --- sad, tender, fantastic! They came from no one knew where, drifting like white clouds across a summer sky, dissolving into the air, others taking their place; he was peopled with them. At times the sky remained empty; in its light, Olivier grew drowsy, until once more the silent ships of dream glided by with their great wings spread wide.

In the evenings the little hunchback came. Olivier was so full of his stories that he told him one, smiling and absorbed. How often he spoke, like this, in front of him, without the child uttering a word! One ended by forgetting his presence… Christophe, who arrived in the middle of the tale, was struck by its beauty, and asked Olivier to begin the story again. Olivier refused:

--- I’m like you, he said. I no longer know it myself.

--- That’s not true, said Christophe. You’re a devil of a Frenchman who always knows exactly what he says and does --- you never forget anything.

--- Alas! said Olivier.

--- Then begin again.

--- It tires me. What’s the point?

Christophe was annoyed.

--- That’s not right, he said. What is your mind for? What you have, you throw away. It’s lost forever.

--- Nothing is lost, said Olivier.

The little hunchback stirred from the stillness in which he had remained throughout Olivier’s tale --- turned toward the window, his eyes vacant, his face creased, looking hostile, so that one could not guess what he was thinking. He stood up and said:

--- It will be fine tomorrow.

--- I’ll wager, Christophe said to Olivier, that he wasn’t even listening.

--- Tomorrow, the first of May, continued Emmanuel, his sullen face brightening.

--- That’s his story, said Olivier. You’ll tell it to me tomorrow.

--- Nonsense! said Christophe.

The next day, Christophe came to fetch Olivier for a walk in Paris. Olivier had recovered; but he still felt that strange weariness; he had no desire to go out, he had a vague apprehension, he did not like mixing with crowds. His heart and his mind were brave; but his flesh was weak. He was afraid of mobs, of scuffles, of all forms of brutality; he knew too well that he was made to be their victim, without being able to defend himself, without even wishing to: for he had as great a horror of causing suffering as of suffering himself. Sickly bodies tremble more than others before physical pain, because they know it better, because they have less resilience to resist, and because their overexcited imagination presents it to them more immediate and more raw. Olivier blushed at this cowardice of his body, which contradicted the stoicism of his will; and he struggled to overcome it. But this morning, any contact with other people was particularly painful for him; he would have wished to stay shut indoors all day. Christophe scolded him, teased him, insisted at all costs that he go out, to shake off his torpor: for ten days he had taken no air. Olivier pretended not to hear. Christophe said:

--- Very well, I’ll go without you. I’m going to see their first of May. If I’m not back this evening, you can tell yourself I’ve been locked up.

He left. On the staircase, Olivier caught up with him. He did not want to let Christophe go alone.

Few people in the streets. A few young working girls, with a sprig of lily of the valley. Workers in their Sunday clothes strolled about with an idle air. On street corners, near Métro stations, policemen clustered in groups, keeping themselves concealed. The railings of the Luxembourg were closed. The weather remained misty and mild. It had been so long since anyone had seen the sun!… The two friends walked arm in arm. They spoke little, but they were fond of each other. A few words evoked intimate things from the past. In front of a mairie, they stopped to look at the barometer, which showed a tendency to rise.

--- Tomorrow, said Olivier, I will see the sun.

They were very close to Cécile’s house. They thought of going in, to kiss the child.

--- No, that will be for the way back.

On the other side of the water, they began to encounter more people. Peaceful strollers, Sunday faces and dress; idlers with their children; workers loitering. Two or three wore a red wild rose in their buttonhole; they looked inoffensive: they were revolutionaries who forced themselves to be so; one sensed in them a benevolent and optimistic heart, satisfied by the slightest occasions for happiness; whether the weather was fine, or merely passable, on this holiday, they were grateful… they hardly knew to whom… to everything around them. They walked without hurrying, beaming, admiring the buds on the trees, the pretty outfits of the little girls going by; they said with pride:

--- Only in Paris can you see children as well dressed as that.

Christophe made fun of the famous upheaval that had been predicted… Good people!… He had affection for them, with a grain of contempt.

As they pushed further on, the crowd thickened. Shifty pale faces, brutish mugs, slipped through the current, lurking, waiting for the moment and the prey to snap up. The dregs were being stirred. With every step, the river grew more turbid. Now it flowed, opaque and heavy. Like bubbles of air rising from the bottom to a greasy surface, voices calling out, whistles, hawkers’ cries, pierced through the murmur of the multitude and made one sense the accumulated layers beneath. At the end of the street, near Aurélie’s restaurant, there was a sound like sluice gates. The crowd broke against barriers of police and troops. Before the obstacle, it formed a dense mass that heaved, whistled, sang, laughed, with contradictory eddies… The laughter of the people --- the only way to express a thousand obscure and deep feelings that cannot find an outlet through words!…

This multitude was not hostile. It did not know what it wanted. While it waited to find out, it amused itself --- in its own way, nervous, brutal, not yet malicious --- it amused itself by pushing and being pushed, by insulting the police or insulting itself. But little by little it grew irritable. Those coming from behind, impatient at seeing nothing, were all the more provocative for having less to risk, sheltered behind that human shield. Those at the front, crushed between those who pushed and those who resisted, grew all the more exasperated as their situation became intolerable; the force of the current pressing against them multiplied their own strength a hundredfold. And all of them, as they were packed more tightly against one another, like cattle, felt the warmth of the herd penetrating their chests and their loins; and it seemed to them that they formed a single block; and each one was all, each one was a giant with the arms of Briareus. A wave of blood surged back at intervals through the heart of the thousand-headed monster; eyes turned hateful, and cries turned murderous. Individuals concealed in the third or fourth row began throwing stones. At the windows of the houses, families watched; they thought themselves at a spectacle; they egged on the crowd, and waited, with a small tremor of anguished impatience, for the troops to charge.

In the midst of these compact masses, with knees and elbows, Christophe forced his way like a wedge. Olivier followed him. The living block opened for an instant to let them pass, and closed again immediately behind them. Christophe was jubilant. He had completely forgotten that five minutes earlier he had denied the possibility of a popular uprising. He had barely put his foot in the current when he was seized by it: a stranger to this French crowd and its grievances, he had suddenly dissolved into it; he cared little what it wanted --- he wanted; he cared little where he was going --- he was going, breathing that breath of madness.

Olivier followed, carried along but without joy, lucid, never losing consciousness of himself, a thousand times more of a stranger than Christophe to the passions of this people that was his own, and yet swept away by them, like a piece of wreckage. The illness that had weakened him was loosening his bonds with life. How far he felt from these people!… Since he had no delirium and his mind was clear, the smallest details of things imprinted themselves on him. He watched with delight the golden nape of a girl in front of him, her pale and slender neck. And at the same time, the acrid smell fermenting from these heaped bodies sickened him.

--- Christophe! he pleaded.

Christophe did not listen.

--- Christophe!

--- What?

--- Let’s go home.

--- Are you afraid? said Christophe.

He kept going. Olivier, with a sad smile, followed him.

A few rows ahead of them, in the dangerous zone where the crowd pressed back like a wall, he caught sight of his friend the little hunchback, perched on the roof of a newspaper kiosk. Hanging on with both hands, crouching in an uncomfortable position, he was looking out beyond the barrier of troops, laughing; and he turned back toward the crowd with an air of triumph. He noticed Olivier and gave him a radiant look; then he turned back again to watch over there, toward the square, with eyes widened by hope, waiting… For what? --- For what was to come… He was not alone. So many others around him were waiting for the miracle! And Olivier, looking at Christophe, saw that Christophe was waiting too.

He called to the child, shouted at him to come down. Emmanuel pretended not to hear, and did not look at him again. He had seen Christophe. He was quite pleased to expose himself in the melee, partly to show his courage to Olivier, partly to punish him for being with Christophe.

Meanwhile, they had found in the crowd a few of their friends --- Coquard with his golden beard, who was expecting nothing but a bit of jostling, and who with an expert eye was keeping watch for the moment when the vessel was about to overflow. Further on, beautiful Berthe, exchanging coarse words with her neighbors while letting herself be pawed. She had managed to slip to the front row, and was making herself hoarse insulting the police. Coquard came up to Christophe. Christophe, on seeing him, recovered his mocking tone:

--- What did I say? Nothing will happen at all.

--- We’ll see, said Coquard. Don’t stay too long here. It won’t be long before things turn ugly.

--- What nonsense! said Christophe.

At that precise moment, the cuirassiers, tired of having stones thrown at them, advanced to clear the entrances to the square; the central brigades moved ahead at a run. Immediately, the rout began. According to the Gospel’s words, the first were the last. But they applied themselves to not remaining so for long. To make up for their defeat, the furious fugitives booed those who were pursuing them, and cried: “Murderers!” before a single blow had been struck. Berthe slipped between the ranks like an eel, letting out sharp cries. She rejoined her friends; and sheltered behind Coquard’s broad back, she caught her breath, pressed herself against Christophe, pinched his arm --- from fear or for some other reason --- shot a glance at Olivier, and shook her fist at the enemy, shrieking. Coquard took Christophe by the arm and said:

--- Let’s go to Aurélie’s.

They had only a few steps to walk. With Graillot and a few workers, Berthe had already preceded them there. Christophe was about to enter, with Olivier behind him. The street was like a ridge; from the pavement in front of the dairy, one looked down on the roadway from a height of five or six steps. Olivier breathed, out of the flow at last. He felt reluctant at the idea of finding himself again in the reeking atmosphere of the café and the ranting of those fanatics. He said to Christophe:

--- I’m going home.

--- Go on, my dear fellow, said Christophe. I’ll join you in an hour.

--- Don’t expose yourself anymore, Christophe!

--- Coward! said Christophe, laughing.

He went into the dairy.

Olivier was about to turn the corner of the shop. A few steps more and he would have been in a side alley that would have taken him away from the crush. The image of his little protégé flashed through his mind. He turned back and searched with his eyes. He caught sight of him at the precise moment when Emmanuel, who had slipped down from his lookout post, went rolling across the ground, knocked over by the crowd; the fleeing men trampled over him; the police were closing in. Olivier did not stop to think: he leaped down the steps and ran to help. A laborer saw the danger --- the drawn sabers, Olivier reaching out his hand to the child to lift him up, the brutal surge of officers knocking them both down. He shouted and threw himself in, in his turn. Some comrades followed at a run. Others who were on the threshold of the tavern. Then, at their shouts, the rest who had gone inside. The two groups seized each other by the throat like dogs. And the women, who had stayed at the top of the steps, let out a wailing cry. --- So it was that the aristocratic little bourgeois tripped the spring of a battle that no one had wanted less than he.

Christophe, swept along by the workers, had plunged into the fray without knowing what had caused it. It was the last thing on his mind that Olivier might be caught up in it. He believed him already far away, entirely safe. Nothing could be seen of the fighting. Each man had enough to do watching who was attacking him. Olivier had vanished in the whirlpool, like a boat going under. A thrust that had not been meant for him had caught him in the left breast; he had just fallen; the crowd was trampling over him. Christophe had been swept by a surge to the far end of the battlefield. He brought no animosity to it; he let himself be pushed and pushed back with a kind of glee, as at a country fair. He thought so little of the seriousness of things that, when seized by an officer of enormous build and seizing him in turn with both arms, he had the absurd idea of saying to him:

--- Shall we waltz, mademoiselle?

But when a second officer jumped on his back, he shook himself like a boar and battered them both with his fists: he had no intention of being taken. One of his opponents, the one who had grabbed him from behind, rolled across the cobblestones. The other, furious, drew his saber. Christophe saw the point of the blade two inches from his chest; he dodged and, twisting the man’s wrist, tried to wrench the weapon away. He no longer understood; up to that moment it had seemed like a game. They stood there struggling, breathing in each other’s faces. He had no time to think. He saw murder in the other man’s eyes; and murder awoke in him. He saw that he was about to be slaughtered like a sheep. With a sudden movement he turned the wrist and the saber back against the man’s chest; he thrust, he felt that he was killing, he killed. And suddenly everything changed before his eyes; he was drunk, he howled.

His cries produced an unimaginable effect. The crowd had scented blood. In an instant it became a savage pack. Shots were fired from every direction. From the windows of the houses the red flag appeared. And the old atavism of the Parisian revolutions conjured up a barricade. The street was stripped of its paving stones, the gas lamps twisted, the trees felled, an omnibus overturned. Use was made of a trench that had been open for months for the works of the Métropolitain. The cast-iron railings around the trees, broken into pieces, furnished projectiles. Weapons came out of pockets and from the depths of houses. In less than an hour it was an insurrection: the whole neighborhood in a state of siege. And on the barricade, Christophe, unrecognizable, howled his revolutionary song, which twenty voices repeated.

Olivier had been carried to Aurélie’s. He was unconscious. They had laid him in the dark back room on a bed. At the foot of it the little hunchback stood, stricken. Berthe had at first had a great shock: from a distance she had thought Graillot was the one who was wounded, and her first cry, on recognizing Olivier, had been:

--- What a relief! I thought it was Léopold.

Now moved to pity, she was holding Olivier and supporting his head on the pillow. With her usual composure, Aurélie had removed his clothing and was applying a first dressing. Manousse Heimann was there most opportunely, with Canet, his inseparable companion. Out of curiosity, like Christophe, they had come to watch the demonstration; they had witnessed the brawl and seen Olivier fall. Canet was weeping like a calf; and at the same time he was thinking:

--- What possessed me to get mixed up in this business?

Manousse examined the wounded man; at once he judged him lost. He had some affection for Olivier; but he was not a man to linger over what he could not change; and he gave no more thought to him, turning his mind to Christophe. He admired Christophe, while regarding him as a pathological case. He knew his views on the Revolution; and he wanted to drag him out of the stupid danger that Christophe was running for a cause that was not his own. The risk of getting his head knocked in during the skirmish was not the only one: if Christophe were taken, everything pointed to him for reprisals. He had been warned long since that the police were watching him; they would pin on him not only his own follies but those of others as well. Xavier Bernard, whom Manousse had just encountered drifting through the crowd as much for amusement as from professional duty, had signaled to him in passing and said:

--- Your Krafft is an idiot. Would you believe he’s playing the hero on the barricade! We won’t miss him this time. For God’s sake, get him away.

Easier said than done. If Christophe were to learn that Olivier was dying, he would go raving mad, he would kill, he would be killed. Manousse said to Bernard:

--- If he doesn’t leave this instant, he’s done for. I’m going to take him away.

--- How?

--- In Canet’s automobile, which is there at the corner of the street.

--- But I beg your pardon, I beg your pardon… said Canet, taken aback.

--- You’ll drive him to Laroche, Manousse went on. You’ll get there in time for the Pontarlier express. You’ll pack him off to Switzerland.

--- He’ll never agree.

--- He’ll agree. I’ll tell him that Jeannin will meet him there, that he’s already left.

Without listening to Canet’s objections, Manousse went to find Christophe on the barricade. He was not very brave; he hunched his shoulders every time he heard a shot; and he counted the paving stones he walked on --- (even number or odd) --- to know whether he would be killed. But he did not retreat; he went all the way. When he arrived, Christophe, perched on a wheel of the overturned omnibus, was amusing himself by firing a revolver into the air. Around the barricade, the rabble of Paris, vomited up from the cobblestones, had swollen like dirty water in a sewer after a heavy rain. The original fighters had been drowned in it. Manousse called out to Christophe, who had his back to him. Christophe did not hear. Manousse climbed toward him, pulled him by the sleeve. Christophe pushed him away, nearly knocked him down. Manousse, tenacious, hoisted himself up again, and shouted:

--- Jeannin…

In the din the rest of the sentence was lost. Christophe fell suddenly silent, let his revolver drop, and, scrambling down from his perch, he rejoined Manousse, who pulled him away.

--- You have to flee, said Manousse.

--- Where is Olivier?

--- You have to flee, Manousse repeated.

--- Why the devil? said Christophe.

--- In an hour the barricade will be taken. Tonight you’ll be arrested.

--- And what have I done?

--- Look at your hands… Come!… Your case is clear, they won’t spare you. Everyone recognized you. Not a moment to lose.

--- Where is Olivier?

--- At home.

--- I’ll go and join him.

--- Impossible. The police are waiting for you at the door. He sent me to warn you. Get out of here.

--- Where do you want me to go?

--- To Switzerland. Canet will take you in his automobile.

--- And Olivier?

--- We don’t have time to talk…

--- I’m not leaving without seeing him.

--- You’ll see him there. He’ll meet up with you tomorrow. He’s taking the first train. Quickly! I’ll explain.

He seized Christophe. Christophe, dazed by the noise and by the gust of madness that had just blown through him, incapable of understanding what he had done or what was being asked of him, let himself be led away. Manousse took him by one arm, took Canet with the other hand --- Canet was not thrilled by the role being assigned to him in the affair --- and installed them in the automobile. Good Canet would have been grieved for Christophe to be caught; but he would have preferred that someone other than himself do the saving. Manousse knew him. And since his cowardice inspired a certain doubt in him, on the verge of leaving them, at the moment when the automobile snorted to go, he suddenly changed his mind and climbed in beside them.

Olivier had not regained consciousness. There was no one left in the room but Aurélie and the little hunchback. The dismal room, without air, without light! It was nearly dark… For a moment Olivier surfaced from the abyss. On his hand he felt the lips and tears of Emmanuel. He smiled faintly and with an effort put his hand on the child’s head. How heavy his hand was!… He disappeared again…

Near the head of the dying man, on the pillow, Aurélie had placed a small bunch of flowers from the first of May, a few sprigs of lily of the valley. A tap left partly open dripped in the courtyard into a bucket. Images trembled for a second at the depths of his mind, like a light about to go out… A house in the provinces, wisteria on the walls; a garden where a child played: he lay stretched out on a lawn; a fountain scattered its drops into a stone basin. A little girl was laughing…