Money

Money

money CAHIERS DE LA QUINZAINE

Money. — The author of this cahier, — of the cahier that is coming, of the cahier of which this one is only the preface, — is the man to whom I owe the most. I was a little boy of eight years, lost in an excellent primary school, when M. Naudy was named director of the École Normale of the Loiret.

Nothing is so mysterious as those muffled preparations which await the man on the threshold of every life. Everything is decided before we are twelve years old. Twenty years, thirty years of relentless labor, a whole life of toil will not undo what has been done, will not redo what has been undone once for all, before us, without us, for us, against us.

In every life there are a few such recrossings, every life is commanded by a very small number of these certain recrossings; nothing is done without them; nothing is done save by them; and the first of all commands all the others both directly and through them all the rest.

It was the time of the folies scolaires — the school follies. The reactionaries used to name school follies, in that time, very honest constructions, in brick or in cut stone, where children were taught to read. These school follies were perpetrated by the State, by the departments, by the communes; and sometimes by a generous donor. They were generally very clean houses, and which in any case were worth much more for the children than the mud of the gutter. And than the gutter of the street. It must be admitted that in that time they (these school follies) did indeed have rather an insolent air. Not because they were sumptuous. They put it in the newspapers, that they were sumptuous. They were simply clean; and decent. But because they were a little too conspicuous. They had sprung up a little too everywhere at once. And perhaps a little too quickly. They had been put up too many at the same time. And those one saw, one saw too much. They were too white, too red, too new. Forty years have passed over these corners of the earth. A simple voyage to Orléans would convince you without difficulty that today all these school buildings are like us: they are not too conspicuous.

By what recrossing must it be that it was in the old faubourg, three or four hundred meters from my mother’s house, perhaps less, for I had short legs, that they had just finished this scholastic palace which was then the École Normale of the schoolmasters of the Loiret. At seven I was put to school. I was not near coming out of it. But after all that was not altogether my fault. And the consequences either were doubtless not altogether my fault.

I was put to the École Normale. That was not to be the last time. It signified that time that I was made to enter that pretty little annex school which dwelt in a corner of the first courtyard of the École Normale, on the right as you entered, like a kind of rectangular nest, administrative, solemn and gentle. This little annex school naturally had a director of its own, whom one had to take care not to confuse with the director of the École Normale itself. My director was M. Fautras. I see him still from here. He was a great government. He had been a prisoner in Germany during the war. He came back from far away. That conferred upon him a severe luster, a grandeur of which we no longer have any idea. It is in this same school that I was to meet a few years later the true master of all my beginnings, the gentlest, the most patient, the noblest, the most courteous, the most beloved, M. Tonnelat.

If we live long enough to reach the age of confessions, if so many undertakings begun on all hands leave us the space to put into writing a world we have known, I shall try to represent a little what that admirable world of primary education was around 1880. More generally I shall try to represent what then was that whole admirable world of workers and peasants, let us say it in one word, that whole admirable people.

It was rigorously the ancient France and the people of the ancient France. It was a world to whom applied this beautiful name, this beautiful word people received its full, its antique application. When one says the people today, one does literature, and even one of the lowest, electoral, political, parliamentary literature. There is no longer a people. Everyone is bourgeois. Since everyone reads his newspaper. The little that remained of the ancient or rather of the ancient aristocracies has become a low bourgeoisie. The ancient aristocracy has become like the others a bourgeoisie of money. The ancient bourgeoisie has become a low bourgeoisie, a bourgeoisie of money. As for the workers they have only one idea, which is to become bourgeois. That is even what they call becoming socialists. There are scarcely any but the peasants who have remained deeply peasants.

We were brought up in a wholly other world. One can say in the most rigorous sense of the terms that a child brought up in a city like Orléans between 1873 and 1880 literally touched the ancient France, the ancient people, the people, plain and simple, that he literally participated in the ancient France, in the people. One can even say that he participated in it entirely, for the ancient France was still whole, and intact. The débâcle came about, if I may so say, all in one piece, and in less than a few years.

We shall try to say it: We have known, we have touched the ancient France and we have known it intact. We were children of it. We have known a people, we have touched it, we were of the people, when there was one. The least workman of that time was a man of the ancient France and today the most unbearable of M. Maurras’s disciples is not for an atom a man of the ancient France.

We shall try, if we can, to represent that. A woman very intelligent, and who walks briskly toward her seventy-and-some years, was saying: The world has changed less during my first sixty years than it has changed during the last ten years. One must go further. One must say with her, one must say beyond her: The world has changed less since Jesus Christ than it has changed in thirty years. There was the antique age (and biblical). There was the Christian age. There is the modern age. A farm in the Beauce, even after the war, was infinitely closer to a Gallo-Roman farm, or rather to the same Gallo-Roman farm, for its mores, for its statute, for its seriousness, for its gravity, for its very structure and institution, for its dignity (and even, at bottom, to a farm of Xenophon), than today it resembles itself. We shall try to say it. We have known a time when, when a goodwife said a word, it was her very stock, her being, her people that spoke. That came forth. And when a workman lit his cigarette, what he was going to tell you was not what the journalist said in this morning’s paper. The freethinkers of that time were more Christian than our devout today. An ordinary parish of that time was infinitely closer to a parish of the fifteenth century, or of the fourth century, let us say of the fifth or of the eighth, than to a present-day parish.

That is why one is exposed to being extremely unjust toward Michelet and all those of his stock, and what is perhaps still more serious, to being extremely unhearing of Michelet and of all those of his stock. To being unintelligent of them. When today one says the people, in fact one is making a figure of speech, and even a rather poor figure, and even a figure altogether vain, I mean a figure into which one can put nothing at all. And further a political figure, and a parliamentary figure. But when Michelet and those of his stock spoke of the people, it is they who were in reality itself, it is they who spoke of a being and who had known that being. Now that being there, that people, is the one we too have known, is the one in which we were brought up. It is the one we have known still in its full functioning, in all its life, in all its stock, in all its fine free play. And nothing made one foresee; and it seemed that it must never end. Ten years later there was nothing left. The people had set itself relentlessly to kill the people, almost instantaneously, to suppress the very being of the people, a little as the family of Orléans, a little less instantaneously perhaps, set itself relentlessly to kill the king. Besides everything we suffer from is at bottom an Orleanism; Orleanism of religion; Orleanism of the Republic.

That is what would have to be marked in Confessions. And try to make it be seen. And try to make it be heard. All the more exactly, all the more preciously, and if we can all the more uniquely as one shall never see that again. There are innocences that cannot be recovered. There are ignorances that fall absolutely. There are irreversibles in the life of peoples as in the life of men. Rome never became thatched huts again. Not only, in the whole, is everything irreversible. But there are ages, irreversibles proper.

Will it be believed, we were nourished in a gay people. In that time a worksite was a place of the earth where men were happy. Today a worksite is a place of the earth where men recriminate, hold grudges, fight each other; kill each other.

In my time everyone sang. (Except me, but I was already unworthy of being of that time). In most of the trades they sang. Today they grumble. In that time one earned, so to speak, nothing. The wages were of a baseness of which one has no idea. And yet everyone had food. There was in the humblest houses a kind of ease the memory of which has been lost. At bottom one did not reckon. And one had no need to reckon. And one could raise children. And one raised them. There was not that sort of frightful economic strangulation which presently from year to year gives us another turn of the screw. One earned nothing; one spent nothing; and everyone lived.

There was not that economic strangulation of today, that scientific, cold, rectangular, regular, clean, neat, without a smudge, implacable, wise, common, constant strangulation, convenient as a virtue, where there is nothing to say, and where he who is strangled is so evidently in the wrong.

One shall never know how far the decency and rightness of soul of that people went; such a delicacy, such a deep culture shall not be found again. Nor such a delicacy and precaution of speech. Those people would have blushed at our best tone of today, which is the bourgeois tone. And today everyone is bourgeois.

Will we be believed, and this comes back to the same thing, we have known workers who wanted to work. They thought only of working. We have known workers who in the morning thought only of working. They rose in the morning, and at what hour, and they sang at the idea that they were leaving to work. At eleven o’clock they sang as they went to the soup. In short it is always Hugo; and it is always to Hugo that one must come back: Ils allaient, ils chantaient — they went, they sang. To work was their very joy, and the deep root of their being. And the reason of their being. There was an incredible honor of work, the most beautiful of all honors, the most Christian, the only one perhaps that stands upright. That is for instance why I say that a freethinker of that time was more Christian than one of our devout today. Because one of our devout today is necessarily a bourgeois. And today everyone is bourgeois.

We have known an honor of work exactly the same as that which in the Middle Ages governed the hand and the heart. It was the same one preserved intact underneath. We have known that care pushed to perfection, equal in the whole, equal in the most infinitesimal detail. We have known that piety of the work well made, pushed, maintained to its most extreme exigencies. I have seen all my childhood through chairs re-caned in exactly the same spirit and the same heart, and the same hand, as that same people had carved its cathedrals.

What remains today of all that? How has one made, out of the most laborious people on earth, and perhaps the only laborious people on earth, the only people perhaps which loved work for work, and for honor, and to work, this people of saboteurs, how has one been able to make of it this people which on a worksite puts its whole study into not doing a stroke. It will be in history one of the greatest victories, and doubtless the only one, of bourgeois intellectual demagogy. But it must be admitted that it counts. This victory.

There was the Christian revolution. And there was the modern revolution. There are the two that must be counted. An artisan of my time was an artisan of no matter what Christian time. And doubtless perhaps of no matter what antique time. An artisan today is no longer an artisan.

In this fine honor of the trade converged all the most beautiful, all the noblest sentiments. A dignity. A pride. Never to ask anything of anyone, they said. That is in what ideas we were brought up. For to ask for work, that was not to ask. That was the most normally in the world, the most naturally to claim, not even to claim. It was to put oneself in one’s place in a workshop. It was, in a laborious city, to put oneself tranquilly in the place of work that awaited you. A worker of that time did not know what it is to beg. It is the bourgeoisie that begs. It is the bourgeoisie which, making them bourgeois, taught them to beg. Today in that very insolence and in that brutality, in that sort of incoherence which they bring to their claims, it is very easy to feel that dull shame, of being forced to ask, of having been brought, by the event of economic history, to begging. Ah yes, they ask something of someone, presently. They even ask everything of everyone. To demand is still to ask. It is still to serve.

These workers did not serve. They worked. They had an honor, absolute, as is the property of an honor. A chair-rung had to be well made. That was understood. It was a primacy. It did not have to be well made for the wages or by means of the wages. It did not have to be well made for the boss nor for the connoisseurs nor for the boss’s clients. It had to be well made itself, in itself, for itself, in its very being. A tradition, come, mounted from the deepest of the stock, a history, an absolute, an honor willed that this chair-rung be well made. Every part of the chair that was not seen was exactly as perfectly made as what was seen. It is the very principle of cathedrals.

And again it is I who search so long, I a degenerate. For them, with them there was not the shadow of a reflection. The work was there. One worked well.

It was not a question of being seen or not seen. It was the very being of the work that had to be well made.

And an incredibly deep sentiment of what we today name the honor of sport, but in that time spread everywhere. Not only the idea of making it yield the best, but the idea, in the best, in the good, of making it yield the most. Not only who would do best, but who would do most, it was a fine continual sport, of every hour, by which life itself was penetrated. Woven. A bottomless disgust for the badly-done work. A more than great-lord contempt for him who had badly worked. But the idea did not even come to them.

All honors converged in this honor. A decency, and a fineness of language. A respect of the hearth. A sense of respect, of all respects, of the very being of respect. A ceremony so to speak constant. Besides the hearth still often merged with the workshop and the honor of the hearth and the honor of the workshop was the same honor. It was the honor of the same place. It was the honor of the same fire. What has all that become. Everything was a rhythm and a rite and a ceremony from the little rising. Everything was an event; sacred. Everything was a tradition, a teaching, everything was bequeathed, everything was the holiest habit. Everything was an elevation, interior, and a prayer, all day long, sleep and waking, work and the bit of rest, bed and table, soup and beef, house and garden, door and street, courtyard and doorstep, and the plates on the table.

They said laughing, and to vex the priests, that to work is to pray, and they did not believe how truly they spoke.

So much was their work a prayer. And the workshop was an oratory.

Everything was the long event of a fine rite. They would have been very surprised, these workers, and what would have been, not even their disgust, their incredulity, how they would have believed one was joking, if one had told them that a few years later, on worksites, the workers, — the companions, — would officially propose to do as little as possible; and that they would consider that as a great victory. Such an idea for them, supposing they could conceive it, would have been to bear a direct attack upon themselves, upon their being; it would have been to doubt their capacity, since it would have been to suppose that they would not yield as much as they could. It is like supposing of a soldier that he will not be victorious.

They too lived in a perpetual victory, but what another victory. What the same and what another. A victory of every hour of the day in all the days of life. An honor equal to any military honor. The very sentiments of the imperial guard.

And in consequence or together all the fine sentiments adjoined or connected, all the fine sentiments derived and filial. A respect of the old; of parents, of kinship. An admirable respect of children. Naturally a respect of woman. (And one must say it, since today that is what is so lacking, a respect of woman by woman herself). A respect of family, a respect of the hearth. And above all a proper taste and a respect of respect itself. A respect of the tool, and of the hand, that supreme tool. — I am losing my hand from working, the old folk would say. And that was the end of ends. The idea that one could have damaged one’s tools on purpose would not even have seemed to them the last of sacrileges. It would not even have seemed to them the worst of follies. It would not even have seemed to them monstrous. It would have seemed to them the most extravagant supposition. It would have been as if one had spoken to them of cutting off one’s hand. The tool was only a longer, or harder hand (with steel nails), or more particularly affected. A hand one had made for oneself expressly for this or that.

A worker to damage a tool, for them, would have been, in this war, the conscript who cuts off his thumb.

One earned nothing, one lived on nothing, one was happy. It is not a matter here of giving oneself over to the arithmetics of the sociologist. It is a fact, one of the rare facts we know, that we have been able to embrace, one of the rare facts to which we can bear witness, one of the rare facts that is incontestable.

Note that today at bottom it does not amuse them to do nothing on the worksites. They would rather work. They are not in vain of that laborious stock. They hear that call of the stock. The hand that itches, that wants to work. The arm that is bored, doing nothing. The blood that runs in the veins. The head that works and which by a sort of coveting, anticipated, by a sort of preemption, by a true anticipation seizes in advance upon the work done. Like their fathers they hear that muffled call of the work that wants to be done. And at bottom they are disgusted with themselves, with damaging the tools. But there: very well-placed gentlemen, savants, bourgeois, have explained to them that that was socialism, and that that was the revolution.

For it cannot be too often repeated. All the evil has come from the bourgeoisie. All the aberration, all the crime. It is the capitalist bourgeoisie that has infected the people. And it has precisely infected it with the bourgeois and capitalist spirit.

I say expressly the capitalist bourgeoisie and the great bourgeoisie. The laborious bourgeoisie on the contrary, the petty bourgeoisie has become the most unhappy of all the social classes, the only one today that really works, the only one that consequently has preserved intact the workers’ virtues, and as its recompense the only one in the end that really lives in poverty. It alone has held on, one wonders by what miracle; it alone still holds on, and if there is some re-establishment, it is because it is the one that will have preserved the statute.

Thus the workers have not preserved the workers’ virtues; and it is the petty bourgeoisie that has preserved them.

The capitalist bourgeoisie on the contrary has infected everything. It infected itself and it infected the people, with the same infection. It infected the people doubly; and itself remaining itself; and through the deserter portions of itself which it inoculated into the people.

It infected the people as antagonist; and as mistress of teaching.

It infected the people of itself, in itself and remaining itself. If the bourgeoisie had remained not so much perhaps what it was as what it had to be and what it could be, the economic arbiter of the value that is sold, the working class asked only to remain what it had always been, the economic source of the value that is sold.

It cannot be too often repeated, it is the bourgeoisie that began to sabotage and all sabotage took its birth in the bourgeoisie. It is because the bourgeoisie set itself to treating the work of man as a value of the exchange that the worker also set himself to treating his own work as a value of the exchange. It is because the bourgeoisie set itself to making perpetually market-coups on the work of man that the worker, he too, by imitation, by collusion and encounter, and one might almost say by understanding, set himself to making continually market-coups on his own work. It is because the bourgeoisie set itself to exercising a perpetual blackmail upon the work of man that we live under this regime of market-coups and of perpetual blackmail which are notably the strikes: Thus has disappeared this notion of the just price, of which our bourgeois intellectuals today make a great mockery, but which was no less the durable foundation of a whole world.

For, and here is the second and no less redoubtable infection: at the same time that the bourgeoisie introduced and practiced sabotage on a great scale on its own account, at the same time it introduced into the workers’ world the patented theoreticians of sabotage. At the same time as on the outside it gave the example and the model, at the same time within it gave the teaching. The socialist political party is entirely composed of bourgeois intellectuals. It is they who invented sabotage and the double desertion, the desertion of work, the desertion of the tool. To say nothing here of military desertion, which is a particular case of the great desertion, as military glory was a particular case of the great glory. It is they who made the people believe that that was socialism and that that was the revolution. The socialist syndicalist parties were able to believe more or less sincerely that they were operating or that they were constituting by themselves a reaction against the political parties, against the unified party; by a very frequent historical phenomenon, by a new application and a new verification of a very old law of antagonisms this reaction to a politics is itself political, this party constituted is itself a new political party, another political party, an antagonist political party. The syndicalist parties are themselves, themselves as much, infested, and infected with political elements, the same ones, other intellectuals, the same ones, other bourgeois, the same ones. They were able to believe more or less sincerely that they had rid themselves of the old socialist political personnel. They did not rid themselves of the old socialist political spirit, which was eminently a bourgeois spirit, in no wise a people spirit. At first sight it may seem that there are many more genuine workers in the socialist syndicalist personnel than in the socialist political personnel, which is for so to speak entirely composed of bourgeois. And it is true if one wishes, if one proceeds, if one wishes to see, if one wishes to count by the superficial methods of a sociological census. It is true only in appearance. In reality they are still infiltrated, and infected, with purely intellectual elements, purely bourgeois. And above all the very great number of workers one sees there are not really workers, do not really, directly, purely proceed from the people, from the ancient people. They are in reality workers of the second zone, of the second formation, embourgeoisified workers (the worst of bourgeois), workers if I may so say dressed up in their Sunday bourgeoisie, intellectuals at the seams, the worst of intellectuals, advantageous workers, even more stupid, if that be possible, than the bourgeois their models and than the intellectuals their masters, wretches not only rotten with pride but hampered in a clumsy pride, smeared in metaphysics where then they understand nothing at all anymore, advantageous workers, cut off from their people, lopped off from their stock, to say all in one word wretches who play the smart aleck.

It cannot be too often repeated. All that world is Jauresist. That is to say at bottom all that world is radical. That is to say bourgeois. It is everywhere the same demagogy; and it is everywhere the same emptiness; the one as much as the other; the other carrying forward the one. That poverty of thought, perhaps unique in the history of the world, that lack of heart which is in politics the proper mark of the radical party has in a common Jauresism won over the whole socialist political party and step by step the syndicalist party. All that world is at bottom of the radical world. Same indigence, same lamentable poverty of thought. Same lack of heart. Same lack of stock. Same lack of people. Same lack of work. Same lack of tool. Everywhere the same clumsy embarrassments. Everywhere the same eloquences. Everywhere the same parliamentarism, the same superstitions, the same parliamentary trickeries, the same see-sawings. Everywhere this same hollow pride, those stiff arms, those orators’ fingers, those hands that do not know how to handle the tool. Everywhere these same metaphysical embarrassments. And these heads like hazelnuts. They have been able to give another matter, another point of application to their radicalism, or to pretend to. But the very mode and the being of their radicalism is the same. Same deep infecundity and same same need of infecundity. And that same deep need not to be reassured, about the others, about themselves, so long as they do not feel that good sentiment of infecundity. That perpetual disarray, that anxiety, that mortal disquiet, that perpetual alert, that constant terror that there should be, that there should come somewhere some fecundity, that some life, some stock, some work should be made, should come, should be founded, should be born.

I do not wish to come back here upon this name of Jaurès. The man who represents in France the German imperial politics has fallen below the contempt that can be addressed at the lowest. This representative in France of German imperialist politics, German capitalist politics, and particularly German colonial politics, has fallen into a universal contempt. This traitor in essence was able to betray a first time socialism for the profit of the bourgeois parties. He was able to betray a second time Dreyfusism for the profit of reason of State. And for what other profits. He was able to betray these two mystiques for the profit of these two politics. He has tried to betray a third time. He has tried to betray France itself for the profit of German politics. And of the most bourgeois German politics. He has here met a resistance which should warn him of what awaits him in the shameful crowning of his career and that so many turpitudes will not perhaps always find an equal success. What he had made of socialism, what he had made of Dreyfusism, he wished to make of France too. A miserable rag. But it turned out that France was better guarded.

I beg the reader’s pardon for pronouncing here the name of M. Jaurès. It is a name that has become so basely befouled that when one writes it to send it to the printers one has the impression that one is afraid of falling under the blow of one knows not what penal laws. The man who has infected with radicalism both socialism and Dreyfusism. This sort of Mac-Mahon of parliamentary eloquence. The man who has always capitulated before all demagogies. And not only who has capitulated but who has always entwined all capitulations with the festoonings of his airs of bravery. And not only who has always capitulated himself and for himself, but who has always had the mania, sickly, the monomania, of capitulating not only for all the causes he represented, more or less usefully, but for a heap of causes that no one had ever thought of entrusting to him, and of which he had the mania of taking charge himself. He has so much the vice and the abject taste of capitulation that not only does he capitulate at home and in his own causes, but he seizes everywhere upon any causes whatever, solely to make them capitulate. This drum-major of capitulation. This man who has never been anything but a radical, and even a radical opportunist, a radical center-left, and who has infected with radicalism precisely all that was the contrary of radicalism, all that could hope to escape a little from radicalism.

What I wish to say today of M. Jaurès is only this. What can there be in common between this man and the people, between this great parvenu bourgeois, paunchy, with arms like a tumbler-doll, and a man who works. In what is he of the people. In what does he know a little what the people is. What does he have in common with a worker. And is it not the greatest misery of this time, that it should be such a man who speaks for the people, who speaks in the people, who speaks of the people.

All I wanted to say today, is that this great contempt that one universally has for M. Jaurès prevents one from seeing that everyone (I say in the political parties) does Jauresism, and thus radicalism. The government does much less of it, even when it is radical, even when it is the same personnel, because radicalism is good for exploiting a country, but everyone, and even the radicals, find it really impossible for governing it.

Under this reserve everyone does Jauresism and thus inside everyone does radicalism. I say everyone in the political parties. And even and perhaps above all those who boast most of not doing it, and of doing the contrary. The unified do it, but the syndicalists too do it, and as much, and the same. In France everyone is radical. (I do not say in the government, I say in politics). The few who are not radicals are clericals, and it is the same thing.

It is a great misery to see workers listen to a Jaurès. He who works listening to him who does nothing. He who has a tool in his hand listening to him who has in his hand only a forest of hairs. He who knows in the end listening to him who does not know, and believing that it is the other who knows.

Now let no one make me say what I do not say: I say: We have known a people one shall never see again. I do not say: One shall never see a people. I do not say: The stock is lost. I do not say: The people is lost. I say: We have known a people one shall never see again.

Others shall be seen. For several years symptoms have been multiplying that let one glimpse a better future. Today is better than yesterday, tomorrow will be better than today. The good sense of this people is perhaps not dried up forever. The unique virtues of the stock will perhaps be found again. They will doubtless be found again. One must only know that we are passing, let us say that we have just passed through the worst crisis through which this people has ever had to pass. And further through an entirely new crisis. And further through a crisis of which one could have had no idea. One must not say: This stock has seen many others, it will see this one too, as in the song:

J’en ai oublié bien d’autres, J’oublierai bien celui-là.

One must say: This stock has seen many others. It has never seen so much. It has never seen the like. It will get through this one. Also. In addition. It has in its veins the finest carnal blood. And it has patrons such as there are none in the world.

There are other wisdoms. There are other forms. There are other statutes. There is a forewarned wisdom, a vaccinated wisdom, a serious wisdom, a severe wisdom, a wisdom after. But how not to regret the wisdom before, how not to give a last remembrance to that innocence we shall not see again. One cannot represent to oneself what was then the health of that stock. And above all that good humor, general, constant, that climate of good humor. And that happiness, that climate of happiness. Evidently one did not yet live in equality. One did not even think of it, of equality, I mean of social equality. A common inequality, commonly accepted, a general inequality, an order, a hierarchy that seemed natural did but tier the different levels of a common happiness. Today one speaks only of equality. And we live in the most monstrous economic inequality that has ever been seen in the history of the world. One lived in that time. One had children. They had in no way that impression which we have of being in the penal colony. They had not as we do this impression of an economic strangulation, of an iron collar that grips the throat and tightens every day by another notch. They had not invented this admirable mechanism of the modern continuous-jet strike, which always makes wages go up by a third, and the cost of living by a good half, and misery by the difference.

Of all that people the best were perhaps still those good citizens who were our schoolmasters. It is true that for us they were not instituteurs, or hardly. They were maîtres d’école — schoolmasters. It was the time when contributions were still taxes. I shall try one day if I can to render what it was then to be of the personnel of primary instruction. It was civism itself, devotion without measure to the common interest. Our young École Normale was the hearth of secular life, of secular invention in the whole department, and even I have a sort of idea that it was a model both in that and in everything for the other departments, at least for the bordering departments. Under the direction of our particular director, the director of the annex school, young masters of the École Normale came each week to teach us. Let us speak well: they came to take the class. They were like the young Baras of the Republic. They were always ready to shout Vive la République! — Vive la nation, one felt that they would have shouted it even under the Prussian saber. For the enemy, for us, confusedly the whole enemy, the spirit of evil, was the Prussians. It was already not so stupid. Nor so distant from the truth. It was in 1880. It is in 1913. Thirty-three years. And we are back to it.

Our young masters were handsome as black hussars. Slender; severe; belted. Serious, and a little trembling with their precocious, their sudden omnipotence. A long black trouser, but, I think, with a violet piping. Violet is not only the color of bishops, it is also the color of primary instruction. A black waistcoat. A long black frock-coat, very straight, well-falling, but two crossings of violet palms on the lapels. A flat cap, black, but a recrossing of violet palms above the forehead. This civil uniform was a kind of military uniform still more severe, still more military, being a civic uniform. Something, I think, like the famous cadre noir of Saumur. Nothing is so handsome as a fine black uniform among military uniforms. It is the line itself. And severity. Worn by these urchins who were really the children of the Republic. By these young hussars of the Republic. By these nurslings of the Republic. By these black hussars of severity. I believe I have said that they were very old. They were at least fifteen. Every week one would come up from the École Normale to the Annex School; and it was always a new one; and thus this École Normale seemed an inexhaustible regiment. It was like an immense governmental depot, of youth and of civism. The government of the Republic was charged with furnishing us with so much youth and so much teaching. The State was charged with furnishing us with so much seriousness. This École Normale made an inexhaustible reservoir. It was a great question, among the goodwives of the faubourg, to know if it was good for the children to change masters like that every Monday morning. But the partisans answered that one always had the same master, who was the director of the Annex School, who he did not change, and that this house, since it was the École Normale, was certainly what was most learned in the department of the Loiret and consequently, doubtless, in France. And in all the other departments. And there was that time when the prefect came to visit the school. But this would draw me into confidences. I learned then (as I should have learned another piece of the history of France) that one must not call him monsieur plain and simple, but monsieur le préfet. Besides, I must say it, he was very content with us. He was named Joli or Joly. We found very natural (and even, between us, a little necessary, a little fitting) that a prefect should have so gracious a name. I should not be surprised if it were the same one who still today, still served by this gracious name, but having slightly reinforced it, under the name of M. de Joly or de Joli today presides at Nice (or recently presided) over the destinies of the Alpes Maritimes and receives or received many sovereigns. And the first verses I had heard in my life and of which one said to me: These are called verses, were the Soldats de l’an II: ô soldats de l’an deux, ô guerres, épopées. One sees how it has served me. Until then I believed they were called fables. And the first book I received as a prize, at the Easter vacation, were precisely the fables of La Fontaine. But this would draw me into sentimentalities.

I should like to say some day, and I should like to be able to say it worthily, in what friendship, in what fine climate of honor and of fidelity this noble primary instruction then lived. I should like to make a portrait of all my masters. All have followed me, all have remained obstinately faithful to me in all the poverties of my difficult career. They were not like our fine masters of the Sorbonne. They did not believe that, because a man has been your pupil, one is obliged to hate him. And to combat him; and to seek to strangle him. And to envy him basely. They did not believe that the fine name of pupil was a sufficient title for so much vileness. And for becoming the butt of so much base hatred. On the contrary they believed, and if I may say so they practiced, that to be master and pupils, that constitutes a sacred bond, much akin to that bond which from filial becomes paternal. Following Lapicque’s fine word they thought that one has not only duties toward one’s masters but that one has them also and perhaps above all toward one’s pupils. For after all one’s pupils, one has made them. And that is grave enough. These young men who came each week and whom we officially called pupil-masters, because they were learning to become masters, were our elders and our brothers. There I knew, I say as a pupil-master, that man of such a great heart and of so much goodness who has read since such a fine and serious scientific career, Charles Gravier, and who is I think today assistant of malacology at the Muséum. And who ought to be more. There I knew, on the very personnel of the École Normale the bursar, M. Lecompte, the very type of what all that world had of serious, of severe, of punctual, of just, of probity, and at the same time of punctual and of delicate; and at the same time of benevolent and of friend and of severely affectionate; and at the same time of silent and of modest and of well in his place. In him was summed up all the order of that beautiful society.

These functionaries, these schoolmasters, this bursar had in no way either entrenched themselves or come out of the people. Of the working and peasant world. Neither did they in any way sulk at the people. Nor did they in any way intend to govern it. Barely to lead it. One must say that they intended to form it. They had the right, for they were worthy of it. They did not succeed, and it was a great misfortune for everyone. But if they did not succeed, I do not see who could congratulate himself on it. And who, in their place, ever succeeded in it. And if they did not succeed, it is that certainly it was impossible.

Come out of the people, but in the other sense of coming out, sons of workers, but above all of peasants and of small proprietors, often small proprietors themselves, of some scrap of land somewhere in the department, they remained the same people, in no way dressed up in Sunday best I beg you to believe, only a little more aligned, a little more ranged, a little ordered in those fine gardens of schoolhouses.

Above all they did not play the smart alecks. They were just in their place in a well-made society. They knew how far they would go, and also they got there infallibly.

It was in 1880. It was therefore in all the fury and the glory of the invention of laicization. We did not perceive it. We were yet well placed to perceive it. Not only the normal schools, newly created, I think, not only the young normal schools were the heart and the hearth of young laicization, but our École Normale of Orléans was a pure among the pure. It was one of the heads and one of the hearts of laicization. M. Naudy personally was a great laicizer. Happy childhood. Happy innocence. Benediction upon a good stock. Everything was good for us. Everything succeeded for us. We took from all hands and they were always wholesome nourishments. We went to catechism, on Thursday I think, in order not to disturb class hours. The catechism was very far from there, in town, in our antique parish of Saint-Aignan. Not everyone has a parish like that. One had to go back up half the faubourg as far as the porte Bourgogne, go down half the rue Bourgogne, turn to the left into that street that was called I think the rue de l’Oriflamme and cross the cloister cold as a cellar under its heavy chestnut trees. Our young vicars told us exactly the contrary of what our young pupil-masters (or our young under-masters, as they were also called, but it was a designation perhaps a little less exact, and above all a little less elegant) told us. (A little less noble). We did not perceive it. The Republic and the Church distributed to us teachings diametrically opposed. What did it matter, provided they were teachings. There is in teaching and in childhood something so sacred, there is in that first opening of the child’s eyes upon the world, there is in that first gaze something so religious that these two teachings bound themselves in our hearts and that we well know that they will remain there eternally bound. We loved the Church and the Republic together, and we loved them with one same heart, and it was with a child’s heart, and for us it was the vast world, and our two loves, glory and faith, and for us it was the new world. And presently… Presently evidently we do not love them on the same plane, since we have been taught that there are planes. The Church has our faith, and all that belongs to her. But God alone knows how engaged in honor and in heart we have remained in this Republic, and how resolved we are to remain engaged in it, because it was one of the two purities of our childhood.

We were the serious little boys of that serious city, innocent and at bottom already careworn. We took seriously all that one told us, and what our lay masters told us, and what our Catholic masters told us. We took everything to the letter. We believed entirely, and equally, and with the same belief, in all that there was in the grammar and in all that there was in the catechism. We learned the grammar and equally and likewise we learned the catechism. We knew the grammar and equally and likewise we knew the catechism. We have forgotten neither the one nor the other. But here we must come to a phenomenon much less simple. I want to speak of what came to pass in us with respect to these two metaphysics, since it is understood that there must indeed be a metaphysic under everything. I have said it enough, in the time when I was a prose-writer.

We come here to an extreme difficulty, to a point of difficulty. It is the moment not to dodge difficulties, above all this one which is important. It is also the moment to take one’s responsibilities.

Everyone has a metaphysic. Patent, latent. I have said it enough. Or else one does not exist. And even those who do not exist nevertheless have, equally have a metaphysic. Our masters were not at that point. Our masters existed. And livingly. Our masters had a metaphysic. And why be silent about it. They were not silent about it. They have never been silent about it. The metaphysic of our masters was scholastic metaphysic, first. But it was next, it was above all the metaphysic of science, it was the metaphysic or at least a materialist metaphysic (these beings full of soul had a materialist metaphysic, but it is always so), (and at the same time idealist, deeply moralist and if you will Kantian), it was a positivist metaphysic, it was the celebrated metaphysic of progress. The metaphysic of the priests, mon Dieu, was precisely the theology and thus the metaphysic that is in the catechism.

Our masters and our priests, that would be a fairly good title for a novel. Our lay masters had a certain teaching, a certain metaphysic. Our priest-masters had, gave a teaching diametrically contrary, a metaphysic diametrically contrary. We did not perceive it, I do not need to say it and as well that is not what I want to say. What I want to say is graver.

I have said it, we believed integrally all that one told us. We were the little fellows serious and certainly grave. I had among them all and to the highest degree this malady. I have never been cured of it. Today still I believe all that one tells me. And I feel well that I shall never change. First one never changes. I have always taken everything seriously. That has led me far. We therefore believed integrally in the teachings of our masters, and equally integrally in the teachings of our priests. We absorbed integrally the metaphysics or the metaphysic of our masters, and equally integrally the metaphysic of our priests. Today I can say without offending anyone that the metaphysic of our masters no longer has for us and for no one any kind of existence and the metaphysic of the priests has taken possession of our beings to a depth that the priests themselves would have well refrained from suspecting. We no longer believe a word of what was taught, of the metaphysics that were taught by our masters. And we believe integrally what is in the catechism and it has become and it has remained our very flesh. But that is not yet what I want to say.

We no longer believe a word of what our lay masters taught us, and the whole metaphysic that was beneath them is for us less than a vain ash. We not only believe, we are integrally nourished by what the priests taught us, by what is in the catechism. Now our lay masters have kept all our heart and they have our entire confidence. And unfortunately we cannot say that our old priests have absolutely all our heart nor that they have ever had our confidence.

There is here a problem and I would even say a mystery extremely grave. Let us not dissimulate it. It is the very problem of the dechristianization of France. One will pardon this somewhat solemn expression. And this word so heavy. It is that the event I want to express, that I want to designate, is perhaps itself rather solemn. And a little heavy. It is not a matter here of denying; nor of masking the difficulties. It is not a matter of closing the eyes. That those who have the confession certainly have not the confidence, that is not an explanation, it is a fact, and the very center of the difficulty.

I do not believe that this is due to the very character of the priest. I take very good account of the fact that for several years I am binding myself more and more with young priests who come to see me at the cahiers two or three times a year. I feel there no embarrassment, no impediment. These beginnings of bond are made in entire openness of heart, in entire simplicity, in entire openness of language. Truly without any feeling of defense. How is it that we have never had, even with our old priests, even with those whom we loved the most, even with those whom we loved filially, but a somewhat reticent bond and a certain feeling of defense. That is one of those secrets of the heart where one would find the deepest explanations. We no longer believe a word of what our old masters said; and our masters have kept all our heart, a bearing, an entire opening of confidence. We entirely believe what our old priests said (I dare not say more than they themselves believed, because one must never say what one thinks), and our old priests certainly had our heart; they were such brave folk, so good, so devoted, but they never had from us that proper sort of entire opening of confidence which we gave de plano and so liberally to our lay masters. And which we have kept entirely for them.

It is not here the place to deepen this secret. There would have to be a dialogue, and even several, and I do not say I shall not write them. It is the very problem of the temporary dechristianization of France. There must be a reason for which, in the country of Saint Louis and of Joan of Arc, in the city of Saint Geneviève, when one begins to speak of Christianity, everyone understands that it is a matter of Mac-Mahon, and when one prepares to speak of the Christian order, that everyone understands that it is a matter of the Sixteenth of May.

Our masters were essentially and profoundly men of the ancient France. A man is not determined by what he does and still less by what he says. But in the deepest a being is determined uniquely by what he is. What does it matter for what I want to say that our masters had indeed a metaphysic that aimed at destroying the ancient France. Our masters were born in this house which they wanted to demolish. They were the direct sons of the house. They were of the stock, and that is everything. We know very well that it is not their metaphysic that brought the old house down. A house never perishes save from within. It is the defenders of the throne and of the altar who brought down the throne, and, as much as they could, the altar.

It is one of the most frequent confusions (and I do not want to say the most primary), to confuse precisely man, the being of man with these wretched personages we play. In this hodgepodge and in this haste of modern life one examines nothing; it suffices that anybody do anything whatever (or even pretend), for one to say (and even for one to believe) that that is his being. No error of reckoning is perhaps so false and perhaps so grave. Consequently no error is so commonly widespread. A man is of his extraction, a man is of what he is. He is not of what he does for others, for the successors. It will perhaps be the others, it will perhaps be the successors who will be of that. But he himself is not of it.

The father is not of himself, he is of his extraction; and it is his children perhaps who will be of him.

The men of the French Revolution were men of the old regime. They played the French Revolution. But they were of the old regime. And it is scarcely even if the men of ‘48 or we ourselves are of the French Revolution, that is to say of what they wanted to make of the French Revolution. And even there will perhaps never be any. Thus our good lay masters introduced, played new metaphysics. But they were men of the ancient France.

Inversely and likewise, by a contrary and perfectly analogous situation all those great holders of the old regime among us are like everyone else. They are essentially modern men and generally modernists. They are in no way, and even less than others, men of the ancient France. They are reactionaries, but they are infinitely less conservative than we are. They do not demolish the Republic, but they employ themselves as much as they can to demolish respect, which was the very foundation of the old regime. One can say literally that these partisans of the old regime have but one idea, which is to ruin all that we have preserved of beautiful and wholesome from the old regime, and which is still so considerable. They cut the figure of leaguers, they have made themselves a leaguer’s mentality, forgetting that the League was doubtless in no way an institution of royalty, but that it was on the contrary a malady of it, and the announcement and the beginning of future times, the beginning of intrigue and of the crowd and of delegation and of number and of suffrage and of one knows not already what parliamentary democracy.

It is always the same story, and the same slippage, and the same shifting, and the same gap. Because it is always the same haste, and the same superficial, and the same lack of work, and the same lack of attention. One does not look, one does not pay attention to what people do, to what they are, nor even to what they say. One pays attention to what they say they do, to what they say they are, to what they say they say. It is a misdeal entirely analogous to the one that constantly takes place in the famous great renaissant quarrel of the romantics and the classics. And of the ancients and the moderns. Provided a man speaks of the matter classic and however little he declares himself partisan of the classic, immediately it is understood that he is a classic. One does not pay attention to the fact that he thinks like a fanatic, without order, and that he writes like a man possessed, and like a frantic, without order and without reason, and that he speaks of the classic as a romantic, and that he defends and preaches the classic as a romantic, and that he is therefore a romantic, a romantic being. And we, who do not make such a fuss, it is we who are classical.

And the theoreticians of clarity make troubled books. Likewise, and again, as soon as an author works in Christian matter we make him Christian; were he to write in a deep disorder, we make of him the restorer of order; and were his stage mechanic exactly that of Marie Tudor and of Angelo, and that of Lucrèce Borgia, we are unwilling to see that in the theater he is a romantic. And a frenzied one.

Our old masters were not only men of the ancient France. They taught us, at bottom, the very morality and the being of the ancient France. I am going to astonish them: they taught us the same thing as the priests. And the priests taught us the same thing as they. All their metaphysical contrarieties were nothing in comparison with this deep community that they were of the same stock, of the same time, of the same France, of the same regime. Of the same discipline. Of the same world. What the priests said, at bottom the schoolmasters said too. What the schoolmasters said, at bottom the priests said too. For the one and the other together they said.

The one and the other and with them our parents and from before them our parents they told us, they taught us this stupid morality, which has made France, which still today prevents her from coming undone. This stupid morality in which we have so believed. To which, fools that we are, and unscientific, despite all the denials of fact, to which we cling desperately in the secret of our hearts. This fixed thought of our solitude, it is from all of them that we hold it. All three they taught us this morality, they told us that a man who works well and who has good conduct is always sure to lack nothing. What is strongest is that they believed it. And what is strongest, is that it was true.

The ones paternally, and maternally; the others scholastically, intellectually, secularly; the others devoutly, piously; all learnedly, all paternally, all with much heart they taught, they believed, they observed this stupid morality: (our only recourse; our secret spring): that a man who works as much as he can, and who has no great vice, who is neither a gambler, nor a drunkard, is always sure of never lacking anything and as my mother used to say that he will always have bread for his old days. They all believed this, with an ancient and rooted belief, with an ineradicable, uneradicated creed, that the reasonable and well-conducted man, that the laborious man was perfectly assured of never dying of hunger. And even that he was assured of being always able to feed his family. That he would always find work and that he would always earn his living.

All that ancient world was essentially the world of earning one’s living.

To speak more precisely they believed that the man who confines himself in poverty and who has, even moderately, the virtues of poverty, finds in it a little total security. Or to speak more profoundly they believed that the daily bread is assured, by purely temporal means, by the very play of economic balances, to every man who having the virtues of poverty consents (as moreover one ought) to keep himself within poverty. (Which moreover for them was at the same time and in that very thing not only the greatest happiness, but the only happiness even one could imagine). (To be well lodged in a little house of poverty).

One wonders where could be born, how could be born a belief so stupid (our deep secret, our last and our secret rule, our rule of life secretly caressed); one wonders where could be born, how could be born an opinion so unreasonable, a judgment on life so fully indefensible. Let one not search. This morality was not stupid. It was just then. And even it was the only just one. This belief was not absurd. It was founded in fact. And even it was the only one founded in fact. This opinion was not unreasonable, this judgment was not indefensible. It proceeded on the contrary from the deepest reality of that time.

One often wonders whence was born, how was born this old classical morality, this old traditional morality, this old morality of labor and of security in wages, of security in the recompense, provided one kept oneself within the limits of poverty, and consequently and in the end of security in happiness. But it is precisely what they saw; every day. We, it is what we never see, and we say to ourselves: Where had they invented that. And we believe (because they were schoolmasters, and priests, that is to say in a certain sense still schoolmasters), we believe that it was an invention, scholastic, intellectual. Not at all. No. It was that on the contrary which was reality itself. We have known a time, we have touched a time when that was what reality was. This morality, this view upon the world, this view of the world had on the contrary all the scientific sacraments. It was the one that was of usage, of experience, practical, empirical, experimental, of fact constantly accomplished. It was the one that knew. It was the one that had seen. And that is perhaps the deepest difference, the abyss that there was between all that great antique, pagan, Christian, French world, and our modern world, cut off as I have said, on the date I have said. And here we cross once more this old proposition of ours that the modern world, it alone and on its side, contraries itself at one blow with all the other worlds, with all the ancient worlds together en bloc and on their side. We have known, we have touched a world (as children we have participated in it) in which a man who kept himself within poverty was at least guaranteed in poverty. It was a sort of muffled contract between man and fate, and to this contract fate had never failed before the inauguration of modern times. It was understood that he who indulged in fantasy, in the arbitrary, that he who introduced a game, that he who wanted to escape from poverty risked everything. Since he was introducing the game, he could lose. But he who did not play could not lose. They could not suspect that a time was coming, and that it was already there, and it is precisely the modern time, in which he who did not play would lose all the time, and even more surely than he who plays.

They could not foresee that such a time was coming, that it was here, that already it was looming. They could not even suppose that there ever should be, that there should be such a time. In their system, which was the very system of reality, he who braved evidently risked all, but he who did not brave risked absolutely nothing. He who attempted, he who wanted to escape from poverty, he who played at escaping from poverty evidently risked falling back into the most extreme miseries. But he who did not play, he who kept himself within poverty, not playing, introducing no risk, ran no risk either of falling into any misery. The acceptance of poverty conferred a kind of patent, instituted a kind of contract. The man who resolutely kept himself within poverty was never hunted down in poverty. It was a redoubt. It was an asylum. And it was sacred. Our masters did not foresee, and how could they have suspected, how could they have imagined this purgatory, not to say this hell of the modern world where he who does not play loses, and loses always, where he who keeps himself within poverty is incessantly pursued into the very retreat of that poverty.

Our masters, our elders could not foresee, could not imagine that mechanic, that economic automatism of the modern world in which all of us feel ourselves from year to year more strangled by the same iron carcan that grips tighter at our neck. It was understood that he who wanted to come out of poverty risked falling into misery. That was his business. He was breaking the contract concluded with fate. But one had never seen that he who wanted to keep himself within poverty be condemned to fall back perpetually into misery. One had never seen that it was fate that broke the contract. They did not know, they could not foresee this monstrosity, modern, this cheating, new, this invention, this rupture of the game, that he who does not play loses continually.

(Given that we make from poverty to misery this difference by definition, this discrimination so deep and that goes so far that there is from one to the other, a determination I had begun to recognize, apropos the admirable novel of Lavergne, in a cahier entitled Jean Coste).

In the system of our good masters, priests and laics, and laicizers, and it was the same system of reality, he who wanted to come out of poverty from above risked coming out of it, being thrown out of it from below. He had nothing to say. He had denounced the pact. But poverty was sacred. He who did not play, who did not want to escape from it upward ran no risk of being thrown out of it downward. Fideli fidelis, to him who was faithful to her poverty was faithful. And to us it has been reserved to know a faithless poverty.

To us it has been reserved that poverty itself should be faithless to us. To say all in one word it has been reserved to us that the very marriage of poverty be an adulterous marriage.

In other terms they could not foresee, they could not imagine this monstrosity of the modern world (which already loomed); they had not to conceive this monster of a Paris such as is the modern Paris where the population is cut into two classes so perfectly separated that one had never seen so much money roll for pleasure, and money refuse itself to such a degree to work.

And so much money roll for luxury and money refuse itself to such a degree to poverty.

In other terms, in another term they could not foresee, they could not suspect this reign of money. They could foresee it all the less as their wisdom was antique wisdom itself. It came from afar. It dated from the deepest antiquity, by a temporal filiation, by a natural descent we shall try perhaps to deepen one day.

There have always been rich and poor, and there will always be poor among you, and the war of the rich and the poor makes up the greater half of Greek history and of many other histories and money has never ceased to exercise its power and it did not wait for the beginning of modern times to commit its crimes. It is no less true that the marriage of man with poverty had never been broken. And at the beginning of modern times it was not only broken, but man and poverty entered an eternal infidelity.

When one says the ancients, with regard to modern times, one must understand together both the ancient ancients and the ancient Christians. It was the very principle of antique wisdom that he who wanted to come out of his condition the gods unfailingly struck. But they struck much less generally him who did not seek to raise himself above his condition. It was reserved to us, it was reserved to modern times that man should be struck in his very condition.

With regard to modern times the antique and the Christian go together, are together: the two antiques, the Hebrew, the Greek. The Christian was formerly an antique. Up until 1880. Today it is necessary that he should be a modern. Such are the commandments of these temporal governments. Such are the holds of these seasons of the world. It is undeniable that Christian mores themselves have undergone this profound retortion. It was reserved to us to inaugurate this new state. In short Christendom had little by little extended to the temporal that word that he who is abased shall be exalted, and that he who is exalted shall be abased. So understood, in this temporal sense, it is not only the word of David, Deposuit potentes; et exaltavit; it is almost the antique word itself. The word of Hesiod and of Homer; and of Sophocles and of Aeschylus. It was reserved to us to inaugurate this regime in which he who does not raise himself up is abased all the same.

I had been for a year in this little primary school annexed to our École Normale Primaire when M. Naudy was appointed director of this École Normale, coming from another less important capital city where he had perhaps spent about ten years. It was, I think, in 1881. He was a man of deep culture, come out of secondary studies and who I well believe had done his law. Like many others he had so to speak thrown himself into primary instruction in the aftermath of the war, in that need of civic reconstruction to which in the final analysis we owe the re-establishment of France. Others had done as much, who through this movement made great temporal careers. M. Naudy was anxious to found, in no wise to make himself a temporal career. He had that temperament of a founder, which is so beautiful, which was so frequent in the beginnings of the Third Republic. I confess that it was a roughly beautiful thing, this École Normale of schoolmasters where we were like little wards, and that it was young, and that it beat new, and that it worked. The garden was clipped like a page of grammar and gave that perfect satisfaction that only a page of grammar can bring. The trees aligned themselves like young examples. (With, only, the few exceptions that are needed, the few exceptions to confirm the rule). (I have seen them again. One does not know how it has come about that these trees today have become forty-year-olds). We went back there from the lycée, when become young lycéens we maintained constant competitions in sports with the young normaliens. For sport had also just been invented, and the founding of that other foundation. But this would draw me into complexities.

Thus M. Naudy came to us like a super-director. Officially he directed only the École Normale. But his overflowing activity could not ignore, or neglect the affiliate. Shall I say that he singled me out. That would be to speak grossly. He soon made himself my master and my father. I said above that he was the man in the world to whom I owed the most: he made me enter the sixth form.

The son of bourgeoisie who enters the sixth form as he has maids and by the same movement cannot represent to himself what point of crossing it could be for me to enter or not to enter the sixth form; and this point of invention, of entering it. I was already off, I had already skidded onto the other track, I was lost when M. Naudy, with that obstinacy of a founder, with that kind of rough brutality which truly made of him a boss and a master, succeeded in seizing me again and in sending me back to the sixth form. After my certificat d’études I had naturally been placed, I mean I had been put into the École primaire supérieure of Orléans (so many schools, but one must indeed study) (which was then called the École professionnelle). M. Naudy caught me, if I may say so, by the scruff of the neck and with a municipal scholarship made me enter the sixth form at Easter, in the excellent sixth form of M. Guerrier. He must do Latin, he had said: it is the same strong word that today victoriously resounds in France again for some years. What this entrance into this sixth form at Easter was for me, the astonishment, the novelty before rosa, rosae, the opening of a whole world, wholly other, of a whole new world, that is what one would have to say, but that is what would draw me into tendernesses. The grammarian who for the first time opened the Latin grammar at the declension of rosa, rosae never knew on what flower-beds he was opening the soul of the child. I was to find almost throughout secondary instruction this great affectionate and paternal goodness, this piety of the patron and master which we had found in all our masters of primary instruction. Guerrier, Simore, Doret in sixth, in fifth, in fourth. And in third that altogether excellent man who arrived from the West Indies and whose name I must recover. He arrived properly from the islands. This great goodness, this great descending piety of guardian and father, this kind of constant warning, this long and patient and gentle paternal fidelity, one of the altogether most beautiful sentiments of man that there is in the world, I had found throughout this little primary school annexed to the École Normale of schoolmasters of Orléans. I found it again almost throughout the lycée of Orléans. I found it again at Lakanal, eminently in the person of père Édet, and there pushed so to speak in him to its point of perfection. I found it again at Sainte-Barbe. I found it again at Louis-le-Grand, notably in Bompard. I found it again at the École, notably in a man like Bédier, and in a man like Georges Lyon. It was necessary that I should come to the Sorbonne to know, to discover, with the stupor of a theatrical ingénu, what is a master who bears a grudge against his pupils, who dries up with envy and jealousy, and with the need of a tyrannical domination; precisely because he is their master and they are his pupils; it was necessary that I should come to the Sorbonne to know what is an embittered old man (the ugliest thing there is in the world), a master gaunt and acrid and unhappy, a face withered, faded, not only wrinkled; shifty eyes; an evil mouth; lips of automatic dispensers; and these wretches who bear a grudge against their pupils for everything, for being young, for being new, for being fresh, for being candid, for being beginners, for not being bent like them; and above all for the greatest crime: precisely for being their pupils. This dreadful sentiment of an old woman.

Who has not sat at the crossroad of two roads. I often wonder with a kind of retrospective anxiety, with a vertigo backward, where I was going, what was to become of me, if I had not gone to the sixth form, if M. Naudy had not fished me out just at that Easter vacation. I was twelve years and three months. It was time.

One will find in this cahier the results of an experience of thirty years, pushed, pursued in primary instruction by a man who was doubtless not originally of it, but who had given himself to it without reserve. By a man who had put himself entirely into it, without any restriction or mental reservation, by a man who had made of it his life. M. Naudy left the École Normale of Orléans, after ten or twelve good years of full exercise (which were really the twelve years of the founding of this school, and out of which it came forth like a fine constituted organism) only to take in Paris a primary inspectorship in which I think he remained scarcely less than twenty years. Once more, once after so many others we have this good fortune that it is going to be spoken to us of a trade (and of one of the foremost trades), by a man of this trade; who has done it thirty years; and more; not by a man who speaks of it on papers; but by a man who has practiced; thirty years; by a man of great good sense, of open spirit, of very great activity, who has operated in it thirty years, and in the greatest detail. And who was always particularly well placed to speak of it. When he is going to speak to us of normal schools and of inspectorships, it will not be a matter of papers and of bureau reports on normal schools and on inspectorships, it will be a matter of normal schools and of inspectorships themselves. The ideas that are beginning to circulate, and that figure today in a certain number of reports and of bills, he has had them, those that were needed, when they were needed, for a long time, drawn from a long experience.

I do not need to say that I have not changed a line of the copy of my old master. One will certainly find in it, how shall I say it, a force of youth and why should I not say all my thought a virtue of illusion that we no longer have. It is a great sadness when men of sixty have kept all their illusions and when men of forty no longer have them. And it is yet another sign of this time and of the advent of modern times and nothing of that had presented itself in any other time. It is a great misery when men of sixty are young and when men of forty are no longer so. We shall constantly have been a generation which will have passed through all the minima and sometimes through all the nothingnesses of contemporary history. That is what I had formerly called a sacrificed generation. But I do not know why I obstinately repeat it. Men of forty know it very well without one’s telling them. Those before and those after, men of sixty, by whom we have been sacrificed, and men of twenty, for whom we have sacrificed ourselves, do not care a bit; and even if they did care, they would never believe it; and even if they believed it, they will never know it, whatever one tells them about it. This is the very principle of the teaching of history.

It follows that one will find in this cahier this same ardor of laicization that fills the whole life of these men, that in some of them degenerated into an obstinate fury, but in others too kept itself like a simple ardor of combat, like a fine joyous ardor. It is an absolute rule since the beginning of these cahiers, it is our very principle and our fundamental statute and, I think, the best of our reason for being that the author is free in his cahier and that I am there only to assure the temporal government of this liberty.

This fundamental rule has never suffered any exception. It was not going to suffer one when the copy was brought to me by one of the men to whom I am most attached.

This fundamental rule, obstinately followed for fifteen years, and which shall be followed as long as the house shall stand, has cost us dear. It is to it, and to it almost solely, that we owe the fifteen years of poverty through which we have just passed. It is to it that we shall owe those that await us. And again, when I say that it is poverty, it is from decency and I myself fall a little short of my definitions. We know very well that there is money only for those who enter the parties and who play the game of the parties. And when they are not the political parties they must at least be the literary parties.

Such however are the mores of true liberty. To be liberal is precisely the contrary of being modernist and it is by an incredible abuse of language that one ordinarily relates these two words. And what they designate. But the least appropriate abuses of language are always those that succeed best. And it is here an incredible confusion. And I hate nothing so much as modernism. And I love nothing so much as liberty. (And in itself, and is it not the irrevocable condition of grace).

Let us say the words. Modernism is, modernism consists in not believing what one believes. Liberty consists in believing what one believes and in admitting (at bottom, in demanding) that the neighbor too should believe what he believes.

Modernism consists in not believing oneself in order not to wrong the adversary who also does not believe. It is a system of mutual declension. Liberty consists in believing. And in admitting, and in believing that the adversary believes.

Modernism is a system of complaisance. Liberty is a system of deference.

Modernism is a system of politeness. Liberty is a system of respect.

One ought not to say big words, but in the end modernism is a system of cowardice. Liberty is a system of courage.

Modernism is the virtue of people of the world. Liberty is the virtue of the poor.

I must render this justice to our subscribers that in this government of liberty they have remained admirably faithful to us. It is to their honor. And it is to ours. I have often reproached our subscribers with not being numerous enough. And this year I reproach them with it at least as much as ever. But I confess that it is a reproach that goes all the same a little more to him who is not one of them than to him who is. Those who are have perfectly understood, I mean that they knew in advance as well as we what are the mores of true liberty.

Yet another word that I do not like, but in the end life itself requires liberty. A review is alive only if it discontents each time a good fifth of its subscribers. Justice consists only in this that it not be always the same who are in the fifth. Otherwise, I mean when one applies oneself to discontenting no one, one falls into the system of those enormous reviews which lose millions, or which earn them, in order to say nothing. Or rather in order to say nothing.

Our subscribers have perfectly understood it, one must do them this honor. As much as we they have the taste, the respect of liberty. They have shown it to us by this fine fidelity of fifteen years. They are, as much as ever, too few in number. But those who are in it, stay in it.

By this hard method, by this unique system of recruitment is manifested in no way a common abasement founded upon an incessant exchange of mutual concessions, which one passes incessantly from one to another, but it is thus that our cahiers have little by little formed themselves as a common place for all those who do not cheat. We are here Catholics who do not cheat; Protestants who do not cheat; Jews who do not cheat; freethinkers who do not cheat. It is for that that we are so few Catholics; so few Protestants; so few Jews; so few freethinkers. And in all so few people. And we have against us the Catholics who cheat; the Protestants who cheat; the Jews who cheat; the freethinkers who cheat; the Lavisses of all parties; the Laudets of every side. And that makes many people. Besides which all cheaters have a sureness for recognizing each other among themselves and for supporting themselves; an infallible sureness; an invincible sureness; for sustaining each other; an inexpiable sureness. A sureness of instinct, a sureness of stock, the only instinct they have, which is comparable only to the deep sureness with which the mediocre recognize and support the mediocre. But at bottom is it not the same. And are they not the same. If only we honest folk were as faithful to honesty as mediocrity is faithful to mediocrity.

I do not understand that there is a question of the schoolmasters. First if they had remained schoolmasters none of this would have happened. Let them then keep school, there is nothing more beautiful in the world.

Let them not be mistaken about it, they have the most beautiful trade in the world. They alone have pupils. (They and the professors of secondary instruction). The others have disciples. The others, that is the professors of higher instruction. And it is, alas, the writer.

Let the experiment be made, the experiment is easy to make. Let each examine himself attentively. Let each look at his being and go back down a little into his memory. Who are we. Are we the innocent but as much abused student who scrupulously followed the courses of the Sorbonnards? No, we are not that misery and we are no longer that prey. Let every man past thirty-five look at himself and recognize himself. Let every man see what he is, who he is, descend into his own being. Into his deep being. We are not those pure young men, innocent and vexatiously enthusiastic, candid, blind, so naively pious toward their masters, whom their masters have deceived. We are those children of before twelve years old, those same children, as pure, perhaps purer; and we are those same adolescents of before sixteen. We are the men of our laborious childhood. We are the men of our laborious adolescence. We are in no way the men of our deceived youth. That is to say on the contrary that we have undergone the impregnation of our parents; and of our masters of the first degree; and of our masters of the second degree. But that we have undergone no impregnation from our masters of the third degree. Besides our masters of the third degree did not much care about filiation and about spiritual paternity and about reigning over hearts. Their sole care was, by a game of marriages, of appointments, of academic and university elections, of intrigues, of basenesses, of betrayals, of denunciations and of honors, to assure themselves, to perpetuate among themselves a temporal government of minds. They have what they wanted. And beyond what they hoped for. Let them not ask for more.

That is to say consequently that the most beautiful trade in the world, after the trade of parent (and besides it is the trade most akin to the trade of parent), is the trade of schoolmaster and it is the trade of lycée professor. Or if you prefer it is the trade of instituteur and it is the trade of professor of secondary instruction. But then let the schoolmasters be content with what is most beautiful. And let them not seek in their turn to explain, to invent, to exercise a spiritual government; and a temporal government of minds. That would be to aspire to descend. It is at this game precisely that the priests have lost France. It is perhaps not very fitting that by the same game the schoolmasters lose her in their turn. One must get used to this idea that we are a free people. If the priests had bound themselves, and limited themselves, to their ministry, the people of the parishes would still be pressed around them. As long as the schoolmasters teach our children the rule of three, and above all the proof by nine, they will be esteemed citizens.

Why above all establish or seek to establish this confusion that we see everywhere, in all their congresses, in their newspapers and reviews and claims. Why mix questions of money and questions of government. Would it be to honor questions of money, by mixing them with questions of government. But money is highly honorable, one cannot say it too often. When it is the price and the money of the daily bread. Money is more honorable than government, for one cannot live without money, and one can very well live without exercising a government. Money is in no way dishonorable, when it is the wage, and the remuneration and the pay, consequently when it is the salary. When it is poorly earned. It is dishonorable only when it is the money of people of the world. There is therefore, in other cases, I mean when it is not the money of people of the world, no shame in speaking of it. And in speaking of it as such. There is even only that which is honorable. And which is straight. And which is decent. One must always speak of money as money. That the schoolmasters have the right to live, like everyone, who denies it, and we shall contest it less than anyone, we who are not only with them, we who are of them, we who here first published the admirable novel of Lavergne. Jean Coste has the right to feed his wife and his children. There is no doubt of that. If he succeeds at it today rather badly, here again he does like everyone. He does like us. At least he does like all those who work. There is a little ease, in the modern world, only for those who do not work.

It is therefore here a very grave question. But what I want to say today, is that it is really a question of common law. It is a question of a certain common misfortune, of a great common misery. It is a question of the general life of the nation and of budgetary disposabilities. This first question has nothing in common with this other question of this spiritual government that some schoolmasters ask to exercise among us. For it is yet, this too is a claim.

That young schoolmasters, and even some of the older ones, go to work in the Faculties, that too is very well. I am assured that they furnish there excellent work, and that this collaboration gives in the provinces the best results. But it is not a secret either that in Paris the little clan of the Sorbonne had undertaken to lean upon the schoolmasters when it proposed to ruin in France secondary instruction and that a certain number of schoolmasters (a very small number) answered this call.

Here again I take the liberty of finding that it is not the schoolmasters who are in the wrong. It was not the schoolmasters who were the most guilty, nor even the true guilty. In every demagogy he who is the matter and the object and the inert instrument is less guilty than he who is the inventor and the author. And the prime mover. Great pontiffs, men in honors came to tell the schoolmasters that the lycée serves no purpose, that one learns nothing from the beginning of the sixth form to the end of philosophy. I do not lay it as a grievance against these schoolmasters that they believed it. I lay it as a grievance against these professors, who themselves have passed through the sixth form and philosophy, that they said it. It is not a matter of recruiting troops at any price. One ought all the same not to deceive the world too much.

This brings me to a singular question, and which I am astonished that no one has ever posed. Why do the schoolmasters not do studies. I remember very well how it went. I remember very well the path I followed when M. Naudy rather sharply pulled me from it. The young men who proposed to become schoolmasters, or rather the young men of whom one thought to make schoolmasters, in order to make them become schoolmasters first did three years at the École primaire supérieure, which was then named, I have said, the école professionnelle; first year, second year, third year; for three years they prepared for entrance into the École Normale primaire. Those who were admitted then spent three years in this École Normale primaire. One began again: first year; second year; third year. In all that made six years. With the time that could be lost between the two at the break that made sensibly precisely all the time it takes to do studies, from the beginning of the sixth form to the completion of philosophy. Now these children of peasants and these children of workers, already strongly sifted, who prepared themselves and were destined or whom one prepared and destined to become instituteurs were on the average at least as intelligent as the little bourgeois who undertook the lycée a bit confusedly. And they worked at least as much. And some worked very well. They gave themselves much more pains, they furnished much more work to pass the brevet simple than we to pass the end-of-fourth-form examination, which we did not pass, and to pass the brevet supérieur than we to pass the bachot. Then one wonders. And it is so simple to wonder: Then, at that rate, for that price, for that length of time, for so much work and for so much good conduct one wonders at that price why one does not make them do their studies. And why, instead of the brevet supérieur, which is nothing, one does not give them at least the bachot, which is not much. I do not see how knowing Latin and Greek would prevent them from teaching French, and even from teaching in French. I would make a good schoolmaster. One wonders whether it is not the French bourgeoisie that has done it on purpose, fearing competition, to have schoolmasters who had not done their studies. For after all it is at least as difficult and it takes at least as much work and as much labor to enter the École Normale of Saint-Cloud as to enter the École Normale of secondary instruction. (That is ours, my children).

Then why has it been so arranged that the baggage of the ones should be only a hodgepodge. If it is a calculation that the bourgeoisie has made, as is probable, it must be admitted that it is well rewarded for it today. By constantly finding against itself and beneath itself this muffled revolt of a primary instruction that precisely has not done its studies. And once more it must be observed that sabotage came from above, from the bourgeoisie. And that it is paid by an antagonistic sabotage.

All this cleared away, and addressing myself to the schoolmasters themselves, and no longer to their programs, which they undergo, and no longer to the conditions which the State has made for them, which they undergo, I shall take the liberty of telling them: (And I say it naturally only to the few who are evidently worked upon by this temptation), I say to them: Why do you wish to exercise a government of minds. And like all the others why do you wish to exercise a temporal government of minds. Why do you wish to have a politics, and to impose it. Why do you wish to have a metaphysic, and to impose it. Why do you wish to have a system whatever it may be, and to impose it.

You are made to teach to read, to write and to count. Teach them then to read, to write and to count. It is not only very useful. It is not only very honorable. It is the basis of everything. He knows his four rules, one used to say of someone when I was little. Let them teach us then our four rules. I do not wish to play upon words, but without speaking of writing it would already be a great progress (since we are in a system of progress) to have, to be a people who would know how to read and who would know how to count. And when in addition to that our schoolmasters would employ their activity to save this country from the two scourges that constantly threaten it, there is in that the life of a man and many men would like to be able to say as much. (These two pests I mean are naturally politics and alcoholism, and at bottom they make but one, and so long as the schoolmasters claim a base of support, an establishment against politics and the wine-merchants not only have they a hundred times the right to it, but they are a hundred times right both for themselves and for the country). But these rules of great hygiene, these practices of general hygiene go without saying; they can only be compromised, and perhaps completely masked, completely obliterated, completely annulled by a pretension to a government of minds.

To teach the elements, to teach children of good stock those old truths upon which everyone agrees: (and upon which the world is founded): that Paris is the capital of France; that Versailles is the chef-lieu of the department of Seine-et-Oise. For the wholly learned to push as far as the extraction of the square root; and perhaps of the cube root, what more enviable lot. And is it not infinitely more beautiful; and greater; and wiser than to harangue drunken men. To speak of the metric system, which is reason itself, and which is so perfect. To speak also of the solar system, which is a sort of metric system, with multiples and submultiples, and which is really so great, of planets, of satellites, of the Milky Way; for the most learned of rotation and revolution; in short all that we have learned at primary school; (all that we know). To be sure that all one says is true, that all one says carries, that it is well understood, that it stays, what a happy lot, and there is nothing above.

To make those fine logical and grammatical analyses, where everything fell back straight, where one knew everything, where one completely disarticulated, where one exhausted a sentence, where nothing was left, where everything fell back just. And those fine problems of arithmetic where one had so carefully to separate the calculations from the reasoning, by a vertical bar, and where there were always taps running to fill or to empty a basin (and often both), (to fill and empty together), (strange occupation), (after how many hours…); and there were always apartments to furnish. And one multiplied the upholsterer by the price of the running meter.

Charles Péguy

Langlois as one speaks him. — At the moment when I have just indicated, so badly, and so little, what we owe to our masters of primary instruction, and what we owe to our masters of secondary instruction, it will perhaps not be out of place to mark a little what we owe to our masters of higher instruction. In its number of 15 July 1911 (VIth Year, number 7, Second Series) (they too have series), (Price: 0.60), the Revue Critique des Livres Nouveaux published the following article:

REVIEWS

Charles Péguy. — Œuvres choisies, 1900-1910. — Paris, Bernard Grasset, in-12, 414 pages, 3 francs 50.

This volume of selected pieces has been composed to reveal to the general public a writer known only, until now, to a few faithful. It is, in a way, a prospectus.

There is, as a frontispiece, a portrait of the author by Pierre Laurens. I do not know if it is a likeness. But there emerges from the collection, formed by the interested party himself, a sufficiently precise physiognomy. Here it is, such as it appears to a simple reader like myself, who has on the other hand no means, and does not otherwise care, to verify whether it is exact.

The author who presents himself here to the public is a man of the people, with sap, a kind of violent fervor in the habit of his thinking, a certain greenness of expression, enough humor, little taste, no wit at all (here and there, jokes of an incredible heaviness). Nothing vulgar; but something very harsh and, at the same time, whining; and also, on occasion, sly. In short, a type in the genre of Michelet, due proportions kept.

Let us add: a quivering and boundless pride, which does not always appear pure of all alloy of envy — which is very “of the people” too. This pride affirms itself in the most naive fashion. Péguy’s Œuvres choisies begin with “portraits of men”; and these men are: Zola, Jaurès, Clemenceau, Renan, Bernard-Lazare, Péguy. They give strongly the impression, from one end to the other, that, for Péguy, what Péguy says is not nothing.

He expresses himself in a strange manner, which betrays at once in him the writer whom the benevolent long-suffering of a restricted public, specially recruited and chosen, has spoiled (in the sense in which one uses this word in speaking of children). It seems that he had, from the beginning, tendencies to watch: a propensity for discursive expositions, with neither head nor tail; I know not what shackles in the mechanism of thought; a taste for alliteration and litany, with symptoms of echolalia, and for typographical puerilities well known to psychiatrists. These infirmities are of those which can be attenuated when one recognizes them for what they are and when one imposes upon oneself to this effect an exact discipline. But it has been permitted to the editor of the Cahiers de la Quinzaine, by the indulgence of a little admiring, intimidated or pitying circle, to let himself go without check, and even to take his defects for qualities and his manias for gifts. He has, in consequence, cultivated them as his own originality. The result is seen nowhere more clearly than in the extravagant “Épître votive” to Ernest Psichari (number 35). However “one must try”, as the author says farther on (page 297), “to put ourselves back a little to speaking French”. It is also my opinion. Let us say therefore clearly, in French, that this Epistle and several of the pieces that precede it and that follow it are pure babbling.

Let us pass over the form. For the author considers himself above all, doubtless, as a philosopher, a moralist and a thinker. He was once a Dreyfusist with a deep ardor, thus, moreover, as were many of his contemporaries, young or old, who, although they too more or less suffered for this cause (some to the point of dying of it), have not made, since, so much fuss about it. He was a Dreyfusist; but he cannot console himself that the Dreyfus Affair did not bring about the reign of Cleanliness on earth, and, subsidiarily, the personal glorification of its best combatants. What, we were lifted up by such a wave of enthusiasm, we were so “great”, we were worth, “I say it as it is, the men of the Revolution and of the Empire”, we were worth “men who had the highest fortunes” (page 205); and there is what came of it: the ignominy of present days and obscurity for the just. The author is, with regard to triumphant Dreyfusism, in the state of mind of a Christian of the apostolic ages who would have seen accomplished in a few years, without associating himself with it, the evolution that the Church has traversed in several centuries: from the struggle for the Ideal to adaptation to the iniquities of this world and to the disdain of obstinate idealism. — There, if I am not mistaken, is the basis of M. Péguy’s philosophy. For he often speaks of “working” at something else; but he always comes back to that.

A Christian of the early ages, who would have seen Constantine and his retinue, would doubtless have taken refuge in a haughty metaphysic, the defense of the Greek classics and the cult of the ancient heroes. It is therefore natural that an intransigent, bitter and disappointed Dreyfusist should withdraw likewise into the templa serena of a Bergsonism inaccessible to the common run of “democrats”, break lances in honor of the traditional humanities against the barbarians of the day, and celebrate Joan of Arc under the benevolent eye of M. Maurice Barrès. All the more so as, in acting in this fashion, one is sure of not remaining isolated: one has in one’s favor, beforehand, the applause, the moral and, if need be, “temporal” support, of the party, always considerable, that is irreducibly opposed, for the same reasons as oneself, and for others, to the one that appears at the pinnacle. — There, it seems to me, is how it comes about that M. Péguy, who is, at bottom, so primary (by his persistent preoccupation with things of school, his stiffness and his half-culture, verbal and without substance), has adopted by instinct the attitude one sees him in; and that this attitude is beginning to earn him, with curiosity, the a priori sympathies of the fashionable world, ordinarily so grossly contemptuous toward those of his stock. The fashionable world, that is to say the people who, if they had been able, ten years ago, to suspect his existence, would not have been far, with their brutality without nuances toward all that exceeds the alignment, from holding him for a madman.

I have said enough, I believe, to invite a reading of this book. That was my design. The author has hardly come into contact for a long time except with faithful who let him do anything, and who attached themselves to him the more as he handled them more rudely without ado (formerly in the United States, the “prophet” Dowie — quester prophet, mystic, businessman, healer of souls, “persecuted” and willingly persecutor — used the same with his devotees). If Joan of Arc, who has already in our day, in a wholly other manner, made the fortune of M. Thalamas, puts him in fashion, he will henceforth have a public that will approve him without reading him. It is time that he should at last have — for he deserves it despite everything — a public that reads him without approving him, or rather while judging him. Let him then be pointed out to amateurs of exceptional personalities. In the field where they grow, there are individuals of all kinds, more or less agreeable or unpleasant. Notably has been discovered there, for fifteen years, the exquisite grace of Charles-Louis Philippe and the sparkling fancy of Bernard Shaw. Do not pass through, please, without casting an eye on the incoherent essays of Péguy.

Pons Daumelas.

The article one has just read is by M. Charles-Victor Langlois, professor at the Sorbonne, and I think director of the Pedagogical Museum and others. Today director of the National Archives. Pons d’Aumelas is a counselor of Philip the Fair to whom M. Langlois has devoted a little work (Bibliothèque de l’École des Chartes, tome LII, 1891). This article calls for some observations, but since one must be scientific I shall number my observations, and to be still more scientific I shall number them with letters. The numbers are only arithmetic. The letters are algebra. M. Langlois knows that. I shall even try to put in exponents, and coefficients, and indices. But I cannot answer for it. The fairest son in the world…

L. — a). — There is in this article of M. Langlois a part of literary criticism, if I may speak thus. Here nothing to say. Literary criticism is free in France, since the declaration of the Rights of Man. M. Langlois knows that. We other writers, our business is not to answer the critics. I do not know if we entirely belong to the critics; or if we do not belong to them at all. That would be a question. But we have not to answer them. Our business is to establish texts, not to comment on commentaries. Our business is to give works, not to criticize critics. Otherwise one would fall into fractions of fractions. M. Langlois certainly knows that, fractions of fractions.

L. — b). — There is in M. Langlois’s article something that goes beyond literary criticism. I do not say something that goes beyond it from above, I say something that goes beyond it. With a sly and acrid, and base obstinacy, with constant cowardices of writing, with a laborious hypocrisy, with a weary relentlessness, M. Langlois properly accuses me of venality. It is to make my literary fortune and to earn a fortune of money that I have publicly declared myself Catholic.

It is evident that when in the morning I sat down at my table to write the mystère de la charité de Jeanne d’Arc, or more recently to write the tapisserie de sainte Geneviève, or more recently to write the présentation de la Beauce à Notre Dame de Chartres I first asked myself how much that was going to bring me. One feels that throughout my text. And it is evident that the twenty years of pain and of production I have behind me have at least assured me a great situation of money.

L. — c). — Well on this point I am in a position to completely reassure M. Langlois. If M. Langlois knew a word of history he would know that since the world has been the world the Catholics have never supported their men. If the Catholics had supported their men the government of France would not have fallen into the hands of M. Langlois. Let M. Langlois permit me to tell him so, the Catholics are even remarkable for this need they have not to support their men. Be reassured, monsieur Langlois, the worldly Catholics will always go to M. Laudet. And the money of the worldly Catholics will always go to M. Laudet. To write Christian, in this century, is not to take out a patent of poverty. It is to take out a patent of misery.

L. — d). — Let M. Langlois permit me to tell him respectfully, insofar as a poor man still has the right to speak to a rich man, there is not only a sort of proper indecency and indiscretion, there is not only a lack of pertinence and a lack of taste, there is not only a discrepancy and a rupture of propriety, there is a sort of cold, and premeditated cruelty, there is a sort of base derision in the fact that a man who has the situation of fortune of M. Langlois should pick a quarrel of money with a man who has the situation of fortune that I have. M. Langlois has worked a great deal, that is understood. But it must indeed be known, it is in production that there is the most work, it is in the work itself that there is the most labor and there is more work in a tale of Tharaud and in four lines of Porché than in a whole life of erudition. M. Langlois has worked a great deal, that is understood. And he is perhaps still working. But after all the Republic pays him a good price for working. And we taxpayers pay him a good price. And in addition he is well of his own. He pushes luxury as far as having himself burglarized during the vacation in the châteaux he has in the provinces. Let M. Langlois permit me to hope so, or at least to feast on this vain imagining. If I had put into making a university career what I have put of activity into the cahiers, I should perhaps not be where I am with regard to the goods of fortune.

To sum myself up in a word that perhaps did not exist under Charles V, it is a grossness, when one has as much money as M. Langlois, to pick a quarrel of money with a man who has as little of it as I.

L. — e). — Furthermore, and M. Langlois will understand me without my insisting (for I do not want to be gross, myself): we demand that the university people who have married into the republican nobility leave us at least in peace, we who have married as we wished. We demand that the runners and even the amateurs of dowries respect at least our poverty. Is that understood, monsieur Langlois? and do you find now that I am sufficiently whining, and sufficiently sly?

L. — f). — Here I open a parenthesis, monsieur Langlois (you see that I have not lost the habit), and I in turn pick a particular quarrel with you. I want to speak of that grotesque ceremony that has been organized at the Sorbonne to celebrate the half-centenary of M. Lavisse’s entrance into the École Normale Supérieure. If the French people celebrated by extraordinary rejoicings the definitive exit of M. Lavisse from the École Normale Supérieure I would still understand that. This School could perhaps still recover from the treatment that M. Lavisse made it undergo. But to celebrate the entrance of M. Lavisse into the École Normale is to celebrate the entrance of the gravedigger into the house. So preposterous an idea could come only to M. Langlois.

I am very embarrassed to speak of M. Lavisse. He has done me too much harm for me to speak ill of him. The French language is so made that one can cumulate the height of impotence and the height of power, and that a man can be at once an enormous impotent and an enormous potentate. But it is not with M. Lavisse that I have a quarrel today, it is with M. Langlois; (or rather it is M. Langlois who has begun to have a quarrel with me). When one adores the idol, it is not the idol who is in the wrong, for being adored, it is the adorer who is in the wrong, for adoring. When M. Langlois makes the seven genuflexions before M. Lavisse and surrounds him with apparatus, it is not M. Lavisse who is in the wrong, it is M. Langlois. For I see your name, monsieur Langlois, in the organizing committee of the Lavisse ceremony. And then I ask: Who is being deceived?

If it is a matter of celebrating in M. Lavisse the organizer of victory, the Carnot of secondary instruction in France and of higher instruction, the man of the fourteen armies, the jest is good evidently but the moment is perhaps badly chosen. To say that the École Normale is on a good road, or that it is healthy, or that it is doing well would pass everywhere today for a hazardous affirmation. Everyone has ended by realizing that M. Lavisse was perhaps excellent for pronouncing prize-distribution speeches at Le Nouvion-en-Thiérache but that in Paris in France this man has never sown but ruins, as they say. And spread softenings of the spinal cord. From this first point of view to celebrate by a ceremony, and as solemn as that, at the Sorbonne, the half-centenary of M. Lavisse’s entrance into the École Normale Supérieure, was a veritable wager. It was to throw a veritable challenge to public opinion. Everyone knows that under the government of M. Lavisse the École Normale is finishing its collapse, that it lives in the greatest disorder, if it be permitted to call that living. That M. Lavisse has always been an organizer of disaster, and that to crown his career he has at last organized the disaster of the École Normale leaves no doubt for anyone and it is not that which is interesting and I should reproach myself for lingering over this commonplace.

It is the other point that is interesting, both in itself and because it is this point that interests M. Langlois directly. If one does not celebrate in M. Lavisse the administrator and the founder and the reformer and the governor and the regulator, the temporal man, it is therefore the historian one celebrates. And it is here that I ask M. Langlois: Who is being deceived? For it is here that there occurs a very singular reversal of situations. I would even say a very amusing reversal. But I am afraid M. Langlois may never consent to be amused with me.

It is in our system in fact that M. Lavisse can be a historian. He is good, he is bad, he is strong, he is weak, but in the end we, we can admit that M. Lavisse should be a historian. And it is M. Langlois on the contrary who has introduced into the world (one sees that I treat him as a great lord), and who is celebrated for having introduced into the world a system of thought, let us say a method, a system of method in which M. Lavisse cannot be a historian. For us M. Lavisse can still be a historian. For M. Langlois and for the methods of M. Langlois and for the disciples of M. Langlois and according to the methods of measurement of M. Langlois M. Lavisse can only be an insipid literary man, or littérateur, or man of letters. And then, when one sees M. Langlois ceremoniously and solemnly saluting M. Lavisse at the Sorbonne and enthroning him and patronizing him, one is led to wonder whether these great, these famous methods, these great sovereigns, these great imperious ones, these great mademoiselles, who do not bow before the saint and before the hero, would not sometimes bow before the temporal powers. And here I close my parenthesis.

L. — g). — And I must sum myself up. To accuse me of venality is a foolishness; and a grossness. (Of a double venality, of a venality of glory and of a venality of money). To accuse me of venality when one is rich is an indecency; and a grossness. To accuse me of venality in terms constantly tortuous and crafty and crawling is a baseness; and a cowardice. But to accuse me of venality and to sign Pons Daumelas when one is M. Charles-Victor Langlois, I do not know what that was called under Charles V, but I know that under Poincaré it is called a pusillanimity.

L. — h). — When I received this article in the face, since I could not reasonably take it out on a counselor of King Charles V (my well-known competence stops at the reign of Charles VII) (going back up), and since my well-known cowardice makes me unwilling to fall out with such a power as a counselor of the king, I did what I had to; I took it out on and I went back up directly to the director M. Rudler. It is the rule that the manager covers judicially and that the director covers for honor. And even for literature. Which do not always coincide. I therefore took it out on M. Rudler (it was in the Laudet), and addressed to him in writing a few words that were not without a certain severity. It is the rule that the director covers the pseudonyms, when they do not cover or uncover themselves. Not only did M. Langlois let M. Rudler pay for him. Not only did M. Langlois leave M. Rudler exposed to my well-known cruelty. But for the more than eighteen months that have passed since this took place M. Langlois has never asked to take his place back, he has never resubstituted himself for M. Rudler, he has never ceased to leave M. Rudler substituted for him. So that he is pusillanimous a first time with me; I mean toward me; and a second time with M. Rudler. M. Rudler is charged with receiving blows for his patrons. They will perhaps be repaid him in university advancements. But these badly-cut shares, but these transactions have only distant relations with the honest man.

L. — i). — M. Langlois reckoned that I would not know that it was he Pons Daumelas. In which this infallible historian was mistaken. And even completely. If M. Langlois knew a word of contemporary history he would know that my power is frightful. The serials of the Matin, Gill=X, Higgins and Co, give only a faint idea, monsieur Langlois, of the connections I have in every world.

L. — j). — The intrepidity of these fine cavaliers is admirable. Neither heroes nor saints intimidate them. Alexander and Caesar, David and Charlemagne do not make them tremble. But they tremble before M. Lavisse.

L. — k). — These impeccable historians do not want there to be a Christendom. But they are quite willing that there should be the Institut.

L. — l). — They do not want the mass to be said, but they are quite willing to celebrate the Lavisse ceremony.

L. — m). — They do not want there to be the spiritual life. But they are quite willing that there should be diplomas.

L. — n). — These redoubtable ones do not want there to be the communion of saints. But they are quite willing that there should be the promotions of the École Normale.

L. — o). — These terrible atheists do not want there to be a good God. But they are quite willing that there should be M. Lavisse.

L. — p). — It was a very great imprudence to celebrate with such fanfare the half-centenary of M. Lavisse’s entrance into the École Normale Supérieure. It was to invite a very simple comparison. It was to invite a comparison between the École Normale into which M. Lavisse entered and the École Normale from which M. Lavisse has not yet come out. The École Normale into which M. Lavisse entered was an École Normale Supérieure. Of the École Normale from which M. Lavisse has not yet come out it has been said that it was an inn. Those who know what goes on there know that one ought not to stop at this name of inn, but to go to a masculine word, slightly briefer, much more energetic.

L. — q). — One must go a little further and say a little word all the same on the substance of the article and confess that our masters are not clever. So long as they work in what we do not know, they appear to us as eagles. When they work in what we know they appear to us as asses. Then the most elementary prudence would advise them never to speak save of what we do not know. Thus they would always appear as eagles. It must be very agreeable, to be an eagle. Not that I want to say that if Charles V came back he would find that M. Charles-V. Langlois is an eagle. And not that I want to say that if M. Pons Daumelas came back and if he wanted to… to chew me out and if he wanted to appear an eagle he would take this pseudonym of Charles-V. Langlois. So as not to let himself be recognized. No, that is not what I want to say. I want to say that as long as Charles V and Pons Daumelas are not there, M. Langlois is an eagle in Charles V and in Pons Daumelas. What an idea then to take it out on someone living; and who is there. Let us remain an eagle, monsieur Langlois, as Victor Hugo said. And let us work among the dead, as M. Lavisse does.

L. — r). — This Charles V, this Pons Daumelas are much more accommodating. They do not come back to tell us if it is true, all that. It is a good matter. No confrontation to fear. Monsieur Langlois, stay in the matters where we believe you are an eagle.

L. — s). — Fortunately I myself am a good pupil of M. Langlois and I know how to treat a document. History is made with documents. For there remains a lack. To be explained. For there remains a margin, to be filled. (Let us say a lacuna). For there remains an angle, a gaping. A defect. For all our explanations are not exhausting of the reality of this document. There is a fault. And therefore there is a question, and although I am the humble matter of it I must indeed confess that it is a historical question. Let us take up again M. Langlois’s article, since it is our document. Neither the meanness natural to the most eminent of our good masters, nor the acridness, nor the fury, nor the rage, nor the acerbity suffice to explain all the tone of this article. They do not in particular suffice to explain a certain tone of ebriety that reigns all through this article and that manifests itself by a certain constant vacillation of thought, by an unaccustomed violence, by a sickly outrance, by a chronic exaggeration of the epithet. There is something. There must be a reason that a man as naturally weighed, as naturally balanced, as naturally measured as M. Langlois should have so constantly vacillated, if these two words can go together, all through this article. There must be a reason that this man should have to this point constantly staggered. And modern science wondered anxiously why this man this time had staggered. And it was a great historical problem. And I see well that M. Langlois himself today catches fire on this historical problem. And it is again I who am going to satisfy his curiosity. Yours, gentlemen. It is again I who have found the solution of this great historical problem. And yet I shall not make of it a work for the Bibliothèque de l’École des Chartes, nor even a communication to the Académie des Inscriptions. I am resolved to keep everything for the cahiers.

Whence came this ebriety. Fortunately I am a good pupil of M. Langlois. When I was little M. Langlois taught me that one must above all date a document. He has not wasted his time with me, M. Langlois. Eighteen months of research have permitted me to date the document we are examining. This document must be attributed to the date of 15 July 1911. By an amusing coincidence, but purely fortuitous, and at which a true savant would not stop, it is precisely the date that is and that everyone can see at the top right of the first page of the cover. But you can well think that it is not there that I went to get it. I am too clever. That would not be scientific.

Fifteenth of July 1911. I see your foreheads lighting up. Yes, you have understood. You now know whence came this ebriety. But how shall I dare apply to a man as highly honorable as M. Langlois the word that of itself comes to the tip of our pens. One must yet resolve to say it. It results from the eminent works of M. Langlois on the foundation of the Republic and on the last third of the nineteenth century (after Jesus Christ) that the Fourteenth of July is the day of the National Holiday. Consequently, how to say it, the next day, the Fifteenth, in the end one must indeed say it, the next day the fifteenth is the day of the national hangover. M. Langlois did not only send onto my august figure a hangover article, but this article was not of an ordinary hangover, and as M. Laudet says, hebdomadaire. M. Langlois sent me an article of national hangover.

Eighteen months of relentless research, of which a thesis could be made, have permitted me to reconstitute, even in the humblest detail, the preceding day. I know, minute by second, all that M. Langlois did during the day of 14 July 1911 and why his article of the 15th was so excited. The morning of the 14th M. Langlois, whose patriotic fury is well known, had violently excited himself in acclaiming our valiant little troops at the review of Longchamp. All the rest of the day M. Langlois, whose well-known joviality has equal only to the violence of his popular sentiments, M. Langlois spent his whole afternoon dancing with little maidservants at the street corners. And in the evening he lingered amicably at a few wine-shops of republican defense. And as true as I am ripe to go to Charenton, by an effect of that echolalia which has not even been vanquished, which has resisted even a graduated employment of Pink Pills, as truly M. Langlois in the evening was ripe plain and simple.

L. — t). — (Fortunately we are toward the end, for we are already at the letter t, the letters are going to run out, and when there are no more letters there is no more algebra, M. Langlois knows that). — t). — I ask finally what becomes of the method in all this. For after all there must be a method or there must not be one. When I was little the method consisted, and it was M. Langlois’s, the method taught us that one must not write a word on a question before having exhausted both the documentation and the literature of that question. It is not only M. Langlois’s method, it is the method. M. Langlois was not only the great-priest of it, he is the innovator of it, or an innovator, an introducer, an inventor. Then and here a question arises. When our masters invented the method, when they introduced it among us, was it understood that they reserved to themselves, they alone, the right not to follow it. The law is made for everyone. Was it understood that our masters were introducing the method so that we should be forced to follow it and so that they themselves should not be forced to follow it. Was this method an amusement to annoy us, or was it a method. That is to say a general discipline.

For here arises, here is placed, here presents itself a reversal of situations altogether comparable to the one that had just occurred for M. Lavisse, or rather it is the same reversal under another form. Just as for us M. Lavisse can be a historian but for M. Langlois he cannot be a historian, likewise for me I can be a negligible quantity, but for M. Langlois I cannot be one.

In my system I can be negligible, because I can consider myself as infinitesimal. In M. Langlois’s system no one can consider me as negligible, because in M. Langlois’s system nothing is infinitesimal.

In our system, which is a system of order, of hierarchy, a system of values, a system of culture and of humanity, in our system which is a system if I may so say of reality, in our system which is a system of several planes, in our system which admits, which recognizes saints and heroes, and God at the summit, and below sinners of the ordinary species, like us, in my system I can be despicable, in my system I can be negligible, in my system I can be infinitesimal. I cannot be it in M. Langlois’s system.

In my system I can be content with three quarters of a page and find that it is still much too much for me. In M. Langlois’s system I cannot be content with three quarters of a page, because in M. Langlois’s system nothing can be content with three quarters of a page.

M. Langlois’s system is a system of a single plane. From then on on this plane I must figure like everyone and on the same footing as everyone. Since it is a map, all the countries are on the map.

M. Langlois’s system is an egalitarian system. He cannot treat me unequally in this equality.

M. Langlois’s system is a democratic system. He has not the right to reject me from his people.

In M. Langlois’s system there are neither heroes nor saints nor God: everything is of equal value. Then I am worth as much as the others.

Our system is a system of dignity; (and of indignity); in my system I can declare myself unworthy; and there will always be poor among us.

But in M. Langlois’s system he has not the right that there should be poor among them. Everyone has a right to the same treatment. And I in everyone. Everyone has a right to the same dignity. And I in everyone.

M. Langlois can detest me, M. Langlois can persecute me, M. Langlois cannot neglect me.

M. Langlois can bear me a grudge more than anyone: as historian, in his system, he cannot treat me otherwise than everyone.

M. Langlois can hate me, he can despise me, but as object of his study he cannot despise me; as object of his contempt he cannot despise me; as having become his matter he cannot despise me, he cannot neglect me.

As soon as M. Langlois, historian, speaks of me, I become historical matter, I am vested with historical dignity.

M. Langlois’s method consists in submitting to a certain same treatment, which is the historical treatment, everyone equally, everyone without any exception. None can escape it from above (the saints, the heroes). But none can escape it either from below; as unworthy.

M. Langlois himself cannot accord a dispensation. In M. Langlois’s system everyone, everything is submitted to the historical method. If M. Langlois historian wrote on M. Langlois object of history, M. Langlois object of history would be submitted to the historical method. Would fall under the blow of the historical method. Our masters cannot accord, even to themselves, the dispensations they refuse us.

M. Langlois treats heroes and saints as badly as everyone, he is forced to treat me as well as everyone.

We others alas have the right to make pirouettes. Provided we succeed at them. M. Langlois has not the right, because he has a robe.

We will make him prisoner in his dignity.

M. Langlois’s method is a method, it is the method of the knowledge of indefinite historical matter by an exhaustion of an indefinite detail. In M. Langlois’s method one cannot treat a question, write a word on an object (of study) before having exhausted both the documentation and the literature on that question and on that object. What then is this air of fancy taken on by this Pons Daumelas and this cavalier manner and this manner of wit and this air of saying, speaking of my Œuvres choisies, and making the review in a Revue Critique: You know, I do not know this fellow. I am the simple reader, the gentleman who passes by. I speak of his book as an amateur. M. Langlois has not the right to be a passer-by, and an amateur. He must be an insister, and a historian.

If his historian’s cope weighs on him, it is not we who put it on him.

But let him take it off. Or let him keep it. Let him be Pons Daumelas. Or let him be M. Langlois. Let him not be the two together and at the same time. Let him not play, together and at the same time, the clothed and the unclothed.

As long as he is M. Langlois I claim my documentation and my literature. I mean that I require that he speak of me only after having exhausted the documentation and the literature on me. Why make in my honor, in my favor this exception, of wanting to treat me, me alone, by a direct method. No, no, let him remain faithful to his methods, even in me. I refuse this excess of honor. I refuse this dignity of indignity. I have a right to my documentation and to my literature. I am nothing. But I object of M. Langlois, I historical object, I historical matter am as much as the others. It is not even we who shall make M. Langlois prisoner. M. Langlois is prisoner of M. Langlois. He cannot make himself free, even toward this infinitesimal object, that I am.

L. — u). — (Let us hurry, my children, we have only five letters left, not counting this one), u). — This duplicity of M. Langlois (I take this word in its etymological sense), this duplicity to which M. Langlois is reduced, this duplicity to which M. Langlois is constrained bursts forth, as always, in the typography. For in this same number of this same Revue Critique where M. Langlois, under the name of Pons Daumelas, settles me, in this same number, on the cover of this same number M. Langlois figures as patron and as guarantor under his title of professor at the Sorbonne in the little apartment of principal editors. I name little apartment of principal editors this large rectangular square (he is going to quarrel with me again about this rectangular square), closed by four bars, where the Revue Critique des Livres Nouveaux gives us on the 15th of each month, August and September excepted, on the first page of its cover, previously enclosed, the list of its principal collaborators. And then let us speak weightily. When a review is called Revue Critique des Livres Nouveaux, when it puts, when it constantly presents on the first page of its cover the bundle of names that the Revue Critique presents to us, let it not be denied, it is in order to give by these names a guarantee, to bind a sheaf of scientific authority. So that M. Langlois, well known as scientific, and as critic, and as author and patron of the scientific method, and as governor of the scientific method, so that M. Langlois, who cannot lie to himself, who cannot evade the reputation he has, who cannot refuse himself to the reputation he has, to the reputation he has so justly, to the reputation he has acquired; so that M. Langlois on the cover authenticates Pons Daumelas inside; M. Langlois on the cover guarantees the scientific method of Pons Daumelas inside; and the pamphleteer Pons Daumelas inside enjoys the scientific guarantee and the authority of M. Langlois on the cover. Pons Daumelas pamphleteer is vested with the historical dignity of M. Langlois, he is covered by the historical dignity (and by the university dignity, and by the State dignity), of M. Langlois, without one’s knowing that it is the same man. And yet it is the same man. It is this cumulation that I name a duplicity. And even it is not a simple duplicity, if I may say so. It is several duplicities. For it is a literary duplicity, and against it a scientific duplicity; and a social duplicity; and a State duplicity; and a university duplicity. On one side, as Pons Daumelas, he is always pamphleteer. On the other side, he is together both a scientific; and a dynast; and a powerful; and a high (or a great) university man (as you wish); and a high or a great functionary; and a powerful man in the State; and a man who has a situation of fortune.

That our masters should make themselves pamphleteers, it is their right; they are free; and I see for my part no inconvenience in it. But that, as pamphleteers, they should no longer be vested with magisterial authority. Let them be men like us. Free men. Free of their authority itself. Let them be simple citizens in the pamphlet. And as old Aristotle already said let them not be together and under the same relation professors and pamphleteers.

L. — v). — (Let us hurry, my children). — In other terms I want to know if, when I find myself in the presence of M. Pons Daumelas, pamphleteer, and he gets in my way I should treat him as a fellow pamphleteer or call him Monsieur le Professeur. And monsieur le Directeur. And I want to know if I can distinguish between the contempt I can have for this Pons Daumelas and the respect I should have for M. Langlois.

L. — w). — In a word we do not want our masters to play with both hands, and at once on both tables. We want each man to play once.

L. — x). — All the more so since M. Langlois, under his own name, knows very well how to have a literary opinion. Which makes almost three roles, and no longer only two. M. Langlois historian, M. Langlois literary critic, and Pons Daumelas (M. Langlois) pamphleteer. That only increases the confusion.

For M. Langlois himself and under his own name has almost discovered a great writer. Or he has almost discovered a great writer. This almost-great-writer is a man named Babut, who has made a book evidently enormous on Saint Martin (the one of Tours). In this same Revue Critique, number of 15 January 1913, M. Langlois writes:

The demonstrations of which this book is woven…

This book is M. Babut’s book.

The demonstrations of which this book is woven are of a rare vigor and elegance. That some, here and there, are a little forced, is possible; but it is not here the place to set forth a few scruples on details of no gravity. It is better to observe, to finish, the unmixed pleasure given, from one end to the other, by the simple, discreet, strong and full style which contributes to making M. Babut one of the best historians of the new generation.

Ch.-V. Langlois.

One sees that M. Langlois knows how to praise. It would be an error to believe that M. Langlois does not know how to praise. M. Langlois is not always cantankerous. I do not know whether the Babut he speaks of here is the one we knew at the École Normale. The one we knew at the École Normale was a great serious bird, moralist, binocular. Nothing is secretly sly like these stiff ones. This one was already a great protector. This one has demonstrated clear as the day that Saint Martin was a sort of dubious and detestable boor. Fortunately again that M. Babut has not demonstrated to us that Saint Martin did not exist. This demonstration would have been just as easy. But, less refined, it would perhaps have carried less of the suffrage of M. Langlois. Work, as is known, consists in demonstrating that heroes and saints do not exist. If I had demonstrated that Joan of Arc is a hussy, M. Langlois would find that I am a great writer.

Charles Péguy

1. Tyrant of Padua.
2. Of which he is conscious: “This… peasant harshness…” (page 59). — (Note from the Revue Critique).
3. There is indeed: “and of the Empire”. — (Note from the Revue Critique).