Le Socialisme et les intellectuels
Rectifications
Charles Péguy
Comrade Émile Boivin has severely pointed out to us that I mentioned him twice in an article of eight pages; he told me coldly that he therefore had, according to ordinary justice, the right to give me a reply, and that, according to bourgeois justice, he could give me a double reply, that is to say force me to insert in the same place an article of sixteen pages in eight. But, as he judiciously pointed out to us, the cares he gives to the Newspapers for All did not leave him the leisure to institute an article so long. He therefore appealed to my natural, and well-known, loyalty. It will not fail him. Let it therefore be and remain well understood that in all socialist galas, and in particular in the great gala organized for Friday April at the Théâtre de la Porte-Saint-Martin by the Civic Theater and the Petite République, the citizen stewards reserve for themselves only the folding seats, as is at once just and indispensable. Thus citizen Boivin, when he occupied an orchestra seat, was keeping it momentarily for its true holder, a friend common to him and to me.
la lumière 2
Jérome et Jean THARAUD
Jérôme and Jean THARAUD
To our Master Villiers de l’Isle-Adam
He who loses his eyes loses the beauty of the Universe and remains like a man who would be enclosed alive in a sepulchre where there would be movement and life.
— Leonardo da Vinci
A carriage drawn by three horses in tandem, and sheltered against the sun by an awning of raw canvas in red and white, carried Clément and his mother from the humid and unhealthy coast of Timor into the mountains. The horses, small and energetic, did not stop trotting on the hills, which were long and steep. The journey lasted two days. Clément’s brothers were robust young men, without culture and religious. They led the ordinary life of planters. In the hot hours of the day they took their siesta. Morning and evening they supervised the work of the negroes in the rice paddies, in the tea and coffee plantations. Every month they received from a neighboring planter a review which they passed on, after having read it, to another neighbor. On Sunday, they went to mass twenty kilometers from their house. They welcomed their new brother amicably. But they were disappointed by the meager development of his body. Clément was astonished at the smallness of the circle in which turned the thoughts of these big boys who spoke only of the fields, of the servants. His father, in this solitude, had become pious again.
A little girl, the last born of the house, at once, was very close to his heart. Élisabeth loved, as soon as she saw him, this strange brother fallen from Heaven. She led him by the hand, faithful as his shadow. The house was without book and without music. Outside the sun burned. The forest was very near, with its vegetation of monstrous trees.
Clément wrote to Majorel: “Master, who will tell you how much I miss you? Why did I have the cowardice to leave? I should have resisted my mother and told her: Leave me to the charms of these human landscapes that I understand. — Throughout the crossing, I heard named countries of dream: Egypt, Arabia, India of the millions of Gods. The passengers marveled at the beauty of the skies, the lands and the seas. At night, phosphorescent streaks — what are phosphorescent streaks? — followed the boat; and it was said that the water opened by the prow was bloody, seen through the transparency of the hull painted red. Timor is a marvelous island. The road that brought us here was covered by the shade of trees. Water streamed everywhere; natives passed us, goading oxen that pulled carts with solid wheels. In a forest, three peacocks that were walking on the road before us flew away; and my mother, moved by the beauty of the spectacle and forgetful, said to me: Look at their spread tails! — My teeth clenched, and I held back from weeping. My brothers despise me for my weakness; my father is a decrepit intelligence. Master, I should not have come here; I am dying of boredom. The festival of this nature that is around me, and that is not for me!”
Élisabeth half-opened the door. So light was the sound, it woke Clément from his sleep. At the same time a bird sang. — An oriole!
Élisabeth began to laugh: — Is an oriole so very surprising then? You had not yet heard one here? But there are many around the house. The first colonists brought them with them. They are very old emigrants.
Clément dressed and went out to hear the bird more closely. Élisabeth accompanied him. At their approach the bird flew away and from tree to tree it led them to the forest where it was lost. They remained a few minutes on the watch. They heard nothing more.
— This forest strangles the song of birds in their throats. It is odious to me.
Élisabeth asked: — What are the forests like over there, then?
— In our true country there are no forests, little sister; there are only woods where grow smaller and less crowded trees, whose leaves let pass the rays of a gentler sun. The lianas do not intertwine in inextricable folds. One passes freely between the trunks. Man trims the branches, fells the trees: he is the master. Here we are strangers. The forest hates us, it prefers the great beasts.
— You are joking. In the fields that are there, trees formerly grew. They were set on fire; the roots were dug up. And where the plows have passed, the forest has not returned.
— The woods over there are full of birds — of every kind of bird — of orioles, titmice, blackcaps, nightingales, warblers, blackbirds, starlings.
— Is it then because you do not hear bird songs that you are sad to have come to us?
— You are too curious! And first of all if I had not come here, I would not have been able to embrace you.
— However you are not happy to be with us. You are always dreaming of distant things.
Élisabeth defended Clément against his brothers. She told them: — Do not be irritated against him. And do not believe that his absent air is an air of contempt: if he likes to remain alone in his room and if he does not accompany you outside, it is that this nature is dead for him. He let me understand it. The forest without birds is without charm. But one day he will end by finding his joy in the buzzing of insects. Already the springs are infiltrating into his heart the sentiment of the beauty of this land.
— Sister, you are too indulgent. Ah! if it were only this country that Clément did not love; but it is us that he does not love. He lived too long without knowing us. We grew up here like young trees, young animals, young savages. He, he loves an exquisite civilization, that neither my brothers nor I can suspect. He finds us barbarians, he misses the nature and even more the men of Western Europe.
The six boys repeated together: — That is it indeed, he misses the men of Western Europe.
Élisabeth: — Say better: he misses his friends.
— And us? Are we not his friends then?
— Not yet; but you will be able to become so. You are finer than all of us, Élisabeth, but we think you will not be right; that one is not of our race.
Stretched out under the veranda, beyond the green hills, Clément could have seen a diamantine sea. A marine telescope was oriented toward the Mediterranean of the East Indies. Élisabeth watched for the passage of the steamers that ran the service from Timor to Java and to Batavia. She alerted her brother and named the boats to him. At regular intervals, a servant struck the hours by hitting with a mallet a wooden cylinder suspended from the branches of a tree, in the courtyard. At night, he was awakened by the brushing of a bat’s wing, entered through the open window, or by the plaintive cry of lizards chasing each other under the furniture; sometimes also by the roar of a prowling tiger or by the rumbling of an erupting volcano. His father reproached himself for having once abandoned him. He said to his wife: — Forgive me; you were more clear-sighted. We should never have separated from him. It is a stranger who has returned among us. Ah! Majorel, how powerful you are over souls!
Madame Saint-Adjutory replied to him: — Yes, Majorel. But Clément has undergone an influence more powerful still.
— And which one?
— He has been in love.
— You know it?
— I suspect it.
— Have you never asked him?
— Never, I dare not.
She encouraged her husband to this boldness. Clément explained himself before his father: — No truly, I have never been in love.
— Then why, with us, do you drag about such great boredom? why so much missing Europe?
— I am cruel to sadden you thus, you who love me; I would like to see Majorel again. You have known him, this divine spirit! He gave me the illusion that I was a man like any other, he opened for me the doors of the visible world. He was an enchanter, a magician, a sorcerer of words. He walked me through the past, the present, the future, he exalted my life.
— I remember and I understand! You are right to say it, Majorel is a divine spirit. I was under his spell, formerly, like you. Does he still love the fifth century of Greece?
— Always.
— I remember his enthusiasm when he spoke to me of that time when the life of some men was so beautiful. And does he still detest Socrates?
— Always.
— He reproached him for having disdained beauty, all beauty — the beauty of Aspasia, the beauty of Alcibiades, the beauty of the world, the beauty of life.
— And for having despised truth.
— Doubtless because he disgusted his disciples with the researches of the Ionians?
— He said that his doctrine announced the times when the concern for the somber kingdom of the dead would occupy all minds.
— And the Emperor Julian? does he still love him?
— Always: he hated the Christian spirit.
— Legions of stars were rising above our heads, when, walking back and forth on the dike, we conversed about Christ. He represented him to me in Judea.
Madame Saint-Adjutory, listening, heard these words. Majorel’s influence had been so profound, that her husband still felt it! She cried out: — Do not finish; you would speak of Christ as if he were a man. Adrift on your memories, you would become again the blasphemer you were. You, Clément, think of your father. He is no longer the despairing disciple of anyone. With belief, he has found again, on this land that you curse, human joy. Let yourself be penetrated by the simplicity of the life we lead here; by this nature whose beauty you will divine with time. The season is unbearable for you. The atmosphere is too hot, too humid, charged with storm; but soon gentler months will come. And you will taste the sweetness of the air one breathes in this forest, on the slopes of this ancient volcano. Nights will come, so calm, that you will feel their peace brush your face.
— This pitiless sun is killing me. Man cannot reflect here. He must live like a beast, like a plant. I know that in the distance, before us, there is the prestige of the sea and that one can see, in the offing, glorious islands rising. Around us, in clear weather, from the summit of this mountain one can see the smoke of twenty volcanoes! I know that the skies here have the hardness of metal; that the mystery of these nights is haunted by the most brilliant stars of the universe! But what do the sea, the islands, the volcanoes, the stars matter to me, who cannot see them? I miss Europe. Over there, I had ideas, music, fresh air where thought is free.
— You are sick with pride, sick with regret and sick with love.
— What does it matter that I am sick with pride, with regret or with love if I am unhappy?
Majorel wrote to Clément: “Your desolation afflicts me. You should never have stayed in my house or stayed there always. Since in the infinity of time and space, in the innumerable combinations of the possible, we had had the truly marvelous chance of meeting, it is sad that our friendship prepared by series of events unknown to us, and tied by our will, should be at the mercy of forgotten beings, strangers in sum: your father and your mother. Compared to spiritual unions, unions by blood are nothing. You were my true son. I had delivered you from divine terror. I blew upon the decrepit formulas of good and evil and I made their prestige vanish at your feet. You have become a free man. The climate you are enduring enervates and makes one cowardly. Your father was an emancipated one, too, and see: the Spirits of evening and the Spirits of morning, the childish and senile ideas have drawn him into the circle of their rounds. He struggled and at dusk he drowned in the fountain.”
Clément’s brothers laid on his extended arms the body of a large bird, still living. It was a kind of gull with gigantic wings that had let itself fall into the courtyard. It convulsively beat its wings before stiffening in death. Clément lowered the eyelids over its eyes, and as he had believed he recognized in it an exile from the seas of Europe lost in the East Indies, helped by Élisabeth, he carried it into the forest and buried it at the foot of a giant fig tree. The vanished sun still reddened the sky. Night was setting sail for a new voyage.
— Élisabeth, the life of this bird is enviable! It traveled the world on its broad wings. It knew all weathers: days of bright sun and mists. Its belly grazed the crests of the waves, and its strong carcass resisted tempests like that of a steamer! The fellow snapped up fish from the sea, and it burst, no doubt, with its beak, more than one corpse of a drowned man floating between two waters. By what strange adventure did it come to run aground here, the old Viking? It knew the intoxication of liberty, of strength and of joy! It slept on the promontories. It launched itself into space at the first rays of the sun; it wheeled in the air; or else, folding its wings, it abandoned itself to the Atlantic swell, which cradled it on its lengthened waves. It was able to see in the nocturnal sky what the greatest of poets could not imagine, if he were blind: Cassiopeia, the Swan, the Lizard, the Great Bear, Andromeda awaiting her lover at the edge of the triumphal Way!
— How you exalt yourself for a miserable bird disabled by the squall.
— I envy all beings that see, I envy the plants themselves. I have never missed so much! The earth moves silently in space; it seems to me that no one in the world would have enjoyed more seeing the diverse aspects of its eternal revolution.
— Brother, in saddening yourself thus you do us injury. There is so much love around you that happiness should invincibly be born from it.
— Do not hold it against me.
— I do not hold it against you, but be wiser. Majorel knew how to lift you out of yourself and heal you of despair. We are less learned than he and we do not know the balms of oblivion; but we all here make you the gift of our hearts. Do not disdain it.
Clément tried to dissimulate his boredom. He took pleasure, in the evening, in hearing the music of the natives, returned from the fields. He stayed there very late into the night, listening without tiring to stories accompanied by flutes, citharas, a European violin. Beatings of gongs rhythmed incomprehensible melodies that numbed Clément’s thought. Harmonies, heard under other skies, rushed from the depths of his memory. When the songs and instruments fell silent, suddenly awakened, and returned to the real world, he spread his hands around him, touched the head, the shoulders or the legs of one of his brothers stretched out near him. — What are you dreaming of?
And he never dared answer frankly: — I am dreaming that these musics are no less distant from me than your souls.
He feared that Élisabeth would ask him: — In what then are you so dissimilar from us?
Was it because he believed neither in God nor in the future life — or because he had a more ancient culture, a newer sensibility? He felt himself of another time, of another civilization, almost of another kingdom.
In the forest there was a large rectangular space called the Field of flagstones, disjoined by the effort of an irrepressible vegetation. All the religions that had landed on this island — the fetishes, Brahma, Buddha, Mohammed — had created in this holy place temples and symbols. The earthquakes had toppled the sanctuaries; the foliage of the trees shaded only ruins. — A statue of Shiva, ten feet high, sunk to the navel in the trachytes poured out from the upper volcano, dominated this massacre. The vault that protected its head against rain and sun, in its fall, chipped its tiara, broke two of its four arms, shattered its fly-whisk. It kept in one of its hands a lotus flower. At its feet, its wife Durga, the pure virgin, lay in two pieces, dismounted from her bull Nandi. Flows of lava had traced among these debris sterile paths, followed at certain feasts of the year by processions of pilgrims who crawled under the brush to kiss the wooden idols, the phallic emblems, the misshapen gods with animal heads and androgynous bodies, the elephantine Ganesh, goddess of Wisdom, Guru, the hermit, with his long beard, his water jug, his rosary and his trident, the pot-bellied Buddhas with dreaming eyes, or to invoke Allah in the chaotic enclosure of a mosque without a dome. At the northwest corner of this dead city, a Christian chapel assembled each Sunday the colonists of the surroundings. Clément had agreed to accompany his family there, but it was a scandal to see, standing in the church, this young man who made no gesture of prayer.
Clément no longer received letters from Majorel. His master no longer remembered him already? He wrote supplicating letters. — Master, the news I have of you and the stories you tell me are my greatest joy. Why are you abandoning me? Have you ceased to love me? Would I have involuntarily wounded you? Perhaps you think I have not resisted grief enough. You hate weakness.
Majorel, too, awaited in vain letters from Clément. Madame Saint-Adjutory intercepted all the messages; her husband would not resign himself to this maneuver. — One must deceive no one; never has Clément been sadder. You are exasperating his regrets. — The salvation of his soul is worth a lie: they will end by forgetting each other.
The mails succeeded one another: Clément had no suspicion of being betrayed. His mother affirmed having learned from Reims that Majorel was ill. One day she said: Majorel is dead.
Majorel is dead. — Clément had never imagined that his Master could die. The man who had taught him the history of the old human civilizations in the sacred plains of the Euphrates, the Ganges and the Nile was the contemporary of those distant ages, and as his birth was lost in the Mysterious Past, his end was reserved for an incalculable future. — He withdrew to weep for him at the edge of a forest pond. He crouched in the midst of the ferns, so motionless, that deer and stags, near him, came to drink. The meal bell rang, he did not hear it. His brothers went in search, brought him back to the house. Heedless of familial tenderness, he pursued his reveries on ancient tales of Majorel. — The magi of Chaldea studying the stars from the summit of their tower. The shepherds driving their beasts on the slopes of Iran. The herds of slaves driven back with whips into Assur. The raids of the Phoenician pirates.
Élisabeth discovered by chance her mother’s lie. — He is already so unhappy. He was never able to see Majorel. He was violently separated from him. Now they are killing his friend. Clément was coming along an avenue. His hands called to the trees, caressed the trunks. — What would become of him, if the trees fled, if nature were treacherous? You who see neither lies nor traps, you have a right to the truth.
When Clément arrived near her, she told him: — No, Majorel is not dead.
— You have deceived me. I want to leave.
Madame Saint-Adjutory replied with pride: — If I lied to you, it is because I love you. I believed you would give us the tenderness that could no longer go to another.
— You have played with my sorrow. I want to leave. When I am far from you I shall forgive you your lie.
Madame Saint-Adjutory revolted against the filial hardness. — Why do you speak to me thus? Have you then never lied? Leave. Carry off to your friend your inhuman heart. I wish you to suffer from no one as I suffer from you.
Élisabeth chose a moment when she was alone with her brother to bid him farewell. — I shall wait for you. You will come back to us less troubled.
— Élisabeth, I carry away the imprint of your face in my hands.
In the empty hours of the crossing Clément had regrets for the life he had left. He felt that he was leaving behind him much love. Now that they were far, he discovered the familiar charm of the discussions on the extent of the woods, the cultivation of the rice paddies, the measuring of the fields. He even wondered with interest if the cotton harvest would go by the English route? The question was not yet resolved at his departure.
An old habit of his childhood tormented him. With his fingers he pushed back his elastic eyes into their sockets. Leaning on the railing, he crossed the Bay of Bengal with a thumb in each of his eyes.
At Ceylon a very beautiful girl embarked. At her passage the negro and Hindu stevedores held, motionless at the end of their arms, the bales they were carrying, in offering to her beauty. She was twirling between two fingers of her right hand a red parasol with an ivory handle. She was fragrant with an odor of tea and island woods. Chance made her at lunches the neighbor of Clément. She was long in perceiving that this singular stranger was blind. Clément amused himself with her mistake: he turned his head toward the objects she pointed out. Why did he never seem moved by the spectacle of things?
— You are beautiful, by the childlike grace of your features; but your eyes — your strange eyes?
Clément thought: “She is going to discover the mystery.” And he trembled that her grace for him might be diminished by it. He replied: — You do not see? Look well. It must however be clear — clear as day — clear as night.
The brightness of the sun that penetrated his eyelids animated them with an artificial brightness. Her parasol, which she changed shoulders, cast shadow on Clément’s face. The light that played at the bottom of his eyes was extinguished.
— Your eyes are dead! Would you be blind?
She was the daughter of an English consul. She disembarked at Aden.
Egypt and Arabia ran along the flanks of the ship. When they had left Suez the northern breezes fanned the faces, bringing clear thoughts, and chasing from brains the memories of the troubled East. Clément saluted Alexandria with the joy of the Hellene who returns from the barbarian countries to his homeland. Near Malta a passenger told him a story that embellished the end of the voyage. Saint Louis, having set out for the crusade, experienced a violent tempest; his knights, people of the Île-de-France, of Champagne and of Picardy, believed their last day had come and were seized with fright. The king remained calm in their midst. And as they marveled at his intrepidity, the saint replied: “Let us have no fear; at this hour, the monks of Cîteaux are ringing the bells and singing for us.”
Reims was alone waiting for Clément.
— Majorel?
— We are going to his house. A fishing boat had run aground at the end of the jetty, disabled by the great tides of these last days. Some men of the crew were clinging to the timbers that shored up the planks of the pier; the sea covered them at every instant. Majorel wanted to rescue them: he had torn open his belly on a stake.
Majorel did not stir when they entered. The guard signaled to them that he was sleeping. In the middle of the night, he awoke and distinguished beings in the glow of the night-light. Clément approached him. He recognized him.
— Is that you, Clément? I knew you were arriving today. Light a candle. You entered without my hearing you. Tell me, before I die: For what do you thank me most?
— Master, you taught me to love life and not to miss too much!
— That is it indeed. I taught you to love life. Reims will tell you that I exposed myself to death from a sense of duty or from love of men. Do not believe it. I wanted to run a fine risk. Never have I lived so much as at the moment when the wave threw me on that shattered post.
The eternal shadows began to weigh upon the eyes of the dying man, who waved his arms outside his bed to hold back a thing that was fleeing. He murmured: — The light! the light!
Reims approached him. Majorel divined his thought:
— I shall not confess. In my life I did neither good nor evil. I expect, after my death, neither punishment nor reward.
The still distant day made the candle and the stars pale. Majorel opened his eyes to contemplate through the blanched and curtainless windows the ceremonial of the dawn — his last dawn. He saw Venus die, but he did not see the Sun rise.
Clément asked the abbé to leave him alone with the corpse. He sat at the head of the bed and mused: “He who wanted to put the world in my hands is as blind as I. He who enjoyed the universal beauty will never enjoy anything again. He who loved so much the strength and agility of his body is inert. He has been dead for scarcely five minutes, his body is still warm, and he is as dead as Alcibiades or as Darius.”
Zachée was waiting for Reims in the street. The priest said: “Majorel is no more. Will Clément find again his former faith?”
Zachée replied in a voice come from the depths of Time: — Flights of Elohim are swirling around his head. David will not always be so proud. His reason will be tamed. He will prostrate himself before the Eternal before the silver cord is loosed, the golden bowl is broken, the pitcher is shattered at the fountain and the wheel is crushed at the cistern.
Rome — Paris
March 1898 — August 1899