Les cahiers d'Arnold Scherer
The Notebooks of Arnold Scherer
Charles Peguy
ARNOLD SCHERER
Arnold Scherer was born on August 17, 1853; he died in Menton on January 8, 1873. The journal extracts that follow were therefore written by a boy of seventeen. For anyone else, these dates would be an excuse. Here, they do nothing but underscore a precocious and, in a sense, disquieting maturity. It seems certain, indeed, that the emotions of the terrible year, which vibrated through this exalted child, brought on the illness that, two years later, carried him off. He was made to feel them in all their force and extent. Raised in an austere milieu where the only reigning passions were thought and study, he had prepared himself through history for the sense of public affairs. There was in him an orator, a poet, and a writer. He revealed these faculties during the invasion itself, before the children of the primary school at Versailles, whom he spoke to about Joan of Arc, and in a modest local paper where he made his debut as a journalist. The rest of his time was spent at the ambulances and in the street. He wrote, upon returning home, his impressions in these notes. Minutes of fever that ripen, that age more than years!
I am very ambitious, he writes in February 1872. Here is my whole thought (and I dare not contemplate the case where it might not be realized). I expect one day, around my fortieth year, to be an influential minister in my country. I shall be in power the representative of a broad and grandly conceived system, whose realization I shall pursue with vigor and perseverance. My idea is the extirpation, the gradual ruin of Catholicism. My program will be radical and complete. I shall stop before no boldness in the general conception, but I shall be full of caution in practice. I shall be just, but implacable, and I shall die at an advanced age, leaving a great work begun, even developed: the liberation of my country…
Beside this dream of power, I make another dream, that of a brief life, soon broken by a violent death. To die riddled with bullets on a battlefield in Alsace, to see while dying the spire of Strasbourg Cathedral, and a column of Prussians in retreat toward the Rhine — that is enviable… One or the other!
Is it not striking to find in these lines, in a form whose roughness the circumstances must excuse, the double thought that, in the eyes of history, will in all likelihood be the mark of the Third Republic? One or the other! We have accomplished, in truth, neither the one nor the other. Arnold Scherer, dying young, lost less than he thought. Would he have changed anything? The question may seem childish. Yet Bersot, at his grave, who did not speak lightly, said these moving words:
When one reflects on the gifts he received from nature, on the power of his work and of a direction such as that which he received, one asks, and it is the singular eulogy of this young man of nineteen, what the country too may perhaps have lost.
Such was this destiny, more touching for being so brief, like those broken marbles which, despite their mutilation, one feels animated by a beautiful rhythm. It evokes those lines of Sully-Prudhomme, those poignant verses of the man of study to the conscripts fallen on the battlefield:
We too shall fight, we who have remained, O sons of vainly thrifty peasants!… And perhaps we too shall have our wounded and our dead.
Of these dead was Arnold Scherer. He deserves that a pious hand engrave his name upon a small book, as upon a funeral urn.
Gabriel Trarieux
ADDRESS BY M. ERNEST BERSOT, DELIVERED AT THE GRAVE OF ARNOLD SCHERER, JANUARY 17, 1873, AT VERSAILLES
Arnold Scherer wished that a friend of the family say a few words at his grave; he named me; I come according to his wish. However painful this duty may be, I thank him for having thought that I would accept it, and that the twelve years in which we lived so familiarly together created between us an affection upon which, living or dead, he could count.
He was born on August 17, 1853; he was not yet twenty. Who did not know, in the town and at the Law School, this tall young man with the charming face, the frank and proud bearing, with eyes in which intelligence and wit blazed? What we know, we who knew him more closely, is that in this young man there was a man, capable of worthily bearing a fine name. He was made for political life: he had the instinct and the faculties for it; he was preparing himself through strong reading, for he did not intend to take it up in a mediocre way. He made his modest debut as an orator during the invasion, before the children of the primary school at Sevres, interrupted from time to time by the noise of nearby batteries; he spoke to them, and very well, of Joan of Arc, of those who, having faith in their country, succeeded in saving it.
Let no one think that politics would have taken him entirely; whatever vocation he had for it, there was room in this well-born young man for all the elevated tastes that suit so well that age: he was in love with literature and above all with poetry, whose brilliance dazzled him.
His soul blossomed without constraint; no one was raised more freely than Arnold. He had near him the best of masters, a respected and adored master, from whom he learned by what studies, by what sincerity, by what uprightness and firmness of character one acquires consideration and authority.
This ardent soul would have needed, at the moment when the dangerous work of physical growth was taking place, a regime of calm, of pacification, which events did not give it. In a few months there came the electoral struggles of 1869, the promises of January 2, the plebiscite, the war, the dispersal of families. Arnold asked and obtained to remain at Versailles; there he saw history close up with its poignant sorrows.
[The cahier continues with extracts from Arnold Scherer’s notebooks, written during the siege of Paris and the Franco-Prussian War, recording the impressions and reflections of this precocious young man as he witnessed the invasion, the fall of the Empire, and the beginnings of the Third Republic.]