L'argent
Money
Charles Péguy
SIXTH CAHIER OF THE FOURTEENTH SERIES
CAHIERS DE LA QUINZAINE, periodical appearing every other Sunday, PARIS, 8, rue de la Sorbonne, ground floor.
Money. — The author of this cahier — of the cahier that follows, the cahier of which this is only the foreword — is the man to whom I owe the most. I was a little boy of eight, lost in an excellent primary school, when M. Naudy was appointed director of the Ecole Normale of the Loiret.
Nothing is so mysterious as those silent preparations that await a man at the threshold of every life. Everything is decided before we are twelve. Twenty years, thirty years of relentless labor, a whole lifetime of toil will neither make nor unmake what was made, what was unmade once and for all, before us, without us, for us, against us.
In every life there are a few of these crossroads; every life is governed by a very small number of such certain crossroads; nothing is done without them; nothing is done except through them; and the first of all governs all the others, both directly and through them, all the rest.
It was the time of the school-building follies. The reactionaries called school-building follies, in those days, quite honest constructions in brick or cut stone where children were taught to read. These school-building follies were committed by the State, by the departments, by the communes, and sometimes by a generous donor. They were generally quite decent houses, and in any case were worth much more for children than the mud of the gutter. And than the gutter of the street. It must be admitted that in those days these school buildings did indeed have a slightly insolent air about them. Not because they were sumptuous. The newspapers said they were sumptuous. They were simply clean; and decent. But because they were a bit too conspicuous. They had sprung up a bit too much everywhere at once. And perhaps a bit too quickly. They had been put up too many at the same time. And the ones you saw, you saw too much of. They were too white, too red, too new. Forty years have passed over these corners of the earth. A simple trip to Orleans would easily convince you that today all these school buildings are like us: they are not too conspicuous.
By what crossroads did it happen that it was in the old suburb, three or four hundred meters from my mother’s house, perhaps less, for I had short legs, that they had just finished building that school palace which was then the Ecole Normale for teachers of the Loiret. At seven I was sent to school. I was not about to leave it. But it was not entirely my fault. And the consequences were no doubt not entirely my fault either.
I was sent to the Ecole Normale. It was not to be the last time. This meant, that time, that I was enrolled in the pretty little annex school that resided in a corner of the first courtyard of the Ecole Normale, on the right as you entered, like a kind of rectangular, administrative, solemn, and gentle nest. This little annex school naturally had its own director, whom one had to be careful not to confuse with the director of the Ecole Normale itself. My director was M. Fautras. I can still see him from here. It was a great government. He had been a prisoner in Germany during the war. He had come from far away. That conferred on him a severe luster, a grandeur of which we no longer have any idea. It was in this same school that I was to encounter some 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 enterprises begun by every hand leave us the space to set down in writing a world that we have known, I shall try to represent a little what the admirable world of primary education was like around 1880. More generally, I shall try to represent what that whole admirable world of workers and peasants was like then; let us say it in a word: that whole admirable people.
It was strictly the old France, and the people of the old France. It was a world to which, when applied, that fine name, that fine word people received its full, its ancient meaning. When one says the people today, one is making literature, and even one of the lowest kinds — electoral, political, parliamentary literature. There is no longer a people. Everyone is bourgeois. Since everyone reads his newspaper. The little that remained of the old or rather of the old aristocracies has become a low bourgeoisie. The old aristocracy has become, like the others, a bourgeoisie of money. The old bourgeoisie has become a low bourgeoisie, a bourgeoisie of money. As for the workers, they have only one idea left, which is to become bourgeois. That is even what they call becoming socialist. Only the peasants have remained deeply peasant.
We were raised in a wholly different world. One may say, in the strictest sense of the terms, that a child raised in a city like Orleans between 1873 and 1880 literally touched the old France, the old people, the people, simply put; that he literally participated in the old France, in the people. One may even say that he participated in it entirely, for the old France was still whole, and intact. The collapse happened, if I may say so, all of a piece, and in fewer than a few years.
We shall try to say it: We knew, we touched the old France, and we knew it intact. We were children of it. We knew a people, we touched it, we were of the people, when there was one. The last worker of that time was a man of the old France, and today the most insufferable of the disciples of M. Maurras is not for one atom a man of the old France.
We shall try, if we can, to represent this. A very intelligent woman, who is cheerfully making her way toward her seventy-odd years, was saying: The world has changed less in my first sixty years than it has changed in the last ten. One must go further. One must say, with her and beyond her: The world has changed less since Jesus Christ than it has changed in the last thirty years. There was the ancient age (and the biblical). There was the Christian age. There is the modern age. A farm in the Beauce region, even after the war, was infinitely closer to a Gallo-Roman farm, or rather to the same Gallo-Roman farm, in its customs, its status, its seriousness, its gravity, its very structure and institution, its dignity (and even, at bottom, to a farm of Xenophon’s), than today it resembles itself. We shall try to say it. We knew a time when a good woman said a word, it was her very race, her being, her people that spoke. That came forth. And when a worker lit his cigarette, what he was about 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 of 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 the fifth or the eighth — than to a parish of today.
That is why one is liable to be extremely unjust toward Michelet and all those of his race, and what is perhaps even more serious, to be extremely unhearing of Michelet and all those of his race. To be unintelligent of them. When today one says the people, indeed one strikes a pose, and even a rather poor pose, and even an entirely vain pose — I mean a pose in which one can put nothing at all. And moreover a political pose, and a parliamentary pose. But when Michelet and those of his race spoke of the people, it was they who were in reality itself, it was they who spoke of a being and who had known that being. Now that being, that people, is the one that we too have known, the one in which we were raised. The one we still knew in its full functioning, in all its life, in all its race, in all its beautiful free play. And nothing gave warning; and it seemed that it would never end. Ten years later there was nothing left. The people had set about destroying the people, almost instantaneously, destroying the very being of the people, somewhat as the House of Orleans, somewhat less instantaneously perhaps, set about destroying the king. Besides, everything from which we suffer is at bottom an Orleanism; Orleanism of religion; Orleanism of the republic. That is what should be marked in Confessions. And one should try to make it visible. And try to make it heard. All the more exactly, all the more preciously, and if we can, all the more uniquely because one will never see this again. There are innocences that are never recovered. There are forms of ignorance that fall absolutely. There are irreversible things in the life of peoples as in the life of men. Rome never became straw huts again. Not only is everything, on the whole, irreversible. But there are ages, particular irreversible things.
Will it be believed? We were nourished in a cheerful people. In that time, a worksite was a place on earth where men were happy. Today a worksite is a place on earth where men grumble, resent one another, fight, kill one another.
In my time everyone sang. (Except me, but I was already unworthy of belonging to that time.) In most of the trades, people sang. Today people grumble. In that time, one earned practically nothing. Wages were of a lowness of which one has no idea. And yet everyone had plenty to eat. In the humblest homes there was a kind of ease that has been forgotten. At bottom, no one counted. And there was no need to count. And one could raise children. And children were raised. There was not that kind of dreadful economic strangulation that now, year after year, gives us one more turn. One earned nothing; one spent nothing; and everyone lived.
There was not this economic strangling of today, this scientific, cold, rectangular, regular, clean, neat, flawless, implacable, wise, common, constant, convenient strangulation like a virtue, about which there is nothing to say, and where the one being strangled is so obviously in the wrong.
No one will ever know how far the decency and justness of soul of this people went; such fineness, such deep culture will never be found again. Nor such fineness and care in speech. These people would have blushed at our best tone of today, which is the bourgeois tone. And today everyone is bourgeois.
Will it be believed? And this comes down to the same thing again: we knew workers who wanted to work. One thought only of working. We knew workers who in the morning thought only of working. They got up in the morning, and at what hour, and they sang at the thought of going off to work. At eleven they sang on the way to the soup. In short it is always Hugo, and it is always to Hugo that one must return: They went, they sang.
Working was their very joy, and the deep root of their being. And the reason for their being. There was an incredible honor in work, the finest of all honors, the most Christian, the only one perhaps that stands upright. It is for this, for example, that I say that a freethinker of that time was more Christian than a devout of our day. Because a devout of our day is necessarily a bourgeois. And today everyone is bourgeois.
We knew an honor of work exactly the same as the one that in the Middle Ages governed hand and heart. It was the same, preserved intact below. We knew this care carried to perfection, equal in the whole, equal in the most minute detail. We knew this reverence for the well-made thing, carried, maintained to its most extreme demands. Throughout my childhood I saw chairs recaned in exactly the same spirit and the same heart, and by the same hand, with which this same people had carved its cathedrals.
What remains of all this today? How was it done, that of the most laborious people on earth, and perhaps the only laborious people on earth, the only people perhaps who loved work for work’s sake, and for honor, and for the sake of working, this people of saboteurs was made? How could they be turned into this people who on a worksite puts all its study into not doing a lick of work? It will be one of the greatest victories in history, and no doubt the only one, of bourgeois intellectual demagogy. But one must admit that it counts. That victory.
There was the Christian revolution. And there was the modern revolution. Those are the two that must be counted.
An artisan of my time was an artisan of any Christian time. And doubtless perhaps of any ancient time. An artisan of today is no longer an artisan.
In this fine honor of craft converged all the finest, all the noblest sentiments. A dignity. A pride. Never ask anyone for anything, they would say. Those were the ideas in which we were raised. For asking for work was not asking. It was the most normal, the most natural thing in the world to claim, not even to claim. It was to take one’s place in a workshop. It was, in an industrious city, to settle quietly into the place of work that awaited you. A worker of that time did not know what begging was. It is the bourgeoisie that begs. It is the bourgeoisie that, by making them bourgeois, taught them to beg. Today, in this very insolence and this brutality, in this kind of incoherence that they bring to their demands, it is very easy to feel that secret shame of being forced to ask, of having been led, by the course of economic history, to beg. Ah yes, they ask something of someone now. 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 proper to an honor. A chair rung had to be well made. That was understood. That was primary. It must not be well made for the wages or in return for the wages. It must not be well made for the boss, nor for the connoisseurs, nor for the boss’s clients. It had to be well made in itself, for itself, in its very being. A tradition, sprung from, risen from the deepest depths of the race, a history, an absolute, an honor demanded that this chair rung be well made. Every part of the chair that could not be seen was exactly as perfectly made as what could be seen. That is the very principle of cathedrals.
And I am the one who searches at such length, I the degenerate. For them, in their world, there was not the shadow of a reflection. The work was there. One did it well. It was not a matter of being seen or not seen. It was the very being of the work that had to be well done.
And an incredibly deep feeling for what we today call sportsmanship, but in that time spread everywhere. Not only the idea of doing one’s best, but the idea, within the best, within the good, of doing the most. Not only competing for who would do the best, but for who would do the most; it was a fine perpetual sport that belonged to every hour, with which life itself was permeated. Woven through. A bottomless disgust for work badly done. A more than lordly contempt for anyone who might have worked badly. But the very idea never even occurred to them.
All honors converged in this honor. A decency, and a fineness of speech. A respect for 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 very often merged with the workshop, and the honor of the hearth and the honor of the workshop were the same honor. It was the honor of the same place. It was the honor of the same fire. What has become of all this? Everything was a rhythm and a rite and a ceremony from the moment of rising. Everything was an event; sacred. Everything was a tradition, a teaching, everything was bequeathed, everything was the most sacred habit. Everything was an elevation, inward, and a prayer, all day long — sleep and waking, work and the little rest, the bed and the table, the soup and the beef, the house and the garden, the door and the street, the courtyard and the doorstep, and the plates on the table.
They would say laughingly, and to annoy the priests, that to work is to pray, and they did not know how right they were.
So much was their work a prayer. And the workshop was an oratory.
Everything was the long event of a beautiful rite. How surprised those workers would have been, and what would have been — not even their disgust — their incredulity, how they would have thought someone was joking, if they had been told 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 it a great victory. Such an idea, for them, supposing they could have conceived it, would have been to strike a direct blow at themselves, at their being; it would have been to doubt their capacity, since it would have been to suppose that they would not produce 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 a different victory. What a same and what a different one. A victory of every hour of the day, every day of life. An honor equal to any military honor. The very sentiments of the Imperial Guard.
And consequently or together all the fine attendant or connected sentiments, all the fine derived and filial sentiments. A respect for the old; for parents, for relatives. An admirable respect for children. Naturally a respect for women. (And it must indeed be said, since today this is what is so lacking: a respect of women for women themselves.) A respect for the family, a respect for the hearth. And above all a proper taste and respect for respect itself. A respect for the tool, and for the hand, that supreme tool. — I am losing my hand from working, the old ones would say. And that was the end of all things. The idea that one might deliberately damage one’s tools would not even have seemed to them the worst sacrilege. It would not even have seemed the worst madness. It would not even have seemed 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 their hand. The tool was only a longer, or harder hand (steel fingernails), or one more particularly suited to this or that. A hand one had made for oneself expressly for this or that.
A worker damaging a tool, for them that would have been, in this war, the conscript who cuts off his thumb.
One earned nothing, one lived on nothing, one was happy. There is no point getting into sociological arithmetic about this. It is a fact, one of the few facts we know, that we have been able to embrace, one of the few facts to which we can bear witness, one of the few facts that is incontestable.
Note that today, at bottom, they do not enjoy doing nothing on worksites. They would rather work. They are not in vain of this laborious race. They hear this call of the race. The hand that itches, that wants to work. The arm that is bored with doing nothing. The blood that runs in the veins. The head that works and that by a kind of anticipated desire, a kind of pre-emption, by a genuine anticipation seizes the finished work in advance. Like their fathers they hear that muffled call of work that wants to be done. And at bottom they are disgusted with themselves for damaging tools. But that is it: very fine gentlemen, scholars, bourgeois explained to them that this was socialism, and that this was revolution.
For one cannot say it often enough. All the evil came from the bourgeoisie. All the aberration, all the crime. It was the capitalist bourgeoisie that infected the people. And it infected them precisely with the bourgeois and capitalist spirit.
I say expressly the capitalist bourgeoisie and the big bourgeoisie. The laboring bourgeoisie, on the contrary, the petty bourgeoisie has become the most unfortunate of all social classes, the only one today that really works, the only one that has consequently kept intact the working-class virtues, and for its reward the only one that truly lives in misery. It alone has held out, one wonders by what miracle, it alone still holds out, and if there is to be any recovery, it is because it will have preserved the status.
Thus the workers have not preserved the working-class virtues; and it is the petty bourgeoisie that has preserved them.
The capitalist bourgeoisie, on the other hand, has infected everything. It infected itself and it infected the people with the same infection. It infected the people doubly: both remaining itself; and through the fugitive portions of itself that it inoculated into the people.
It infected the people as an antagonist; and as a teacher.
It infected the people in itself, by 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 would have asked only to remain what it had always been, the economic source of the value that is sold.
One cannot say it often enough: it was the bourgeoisie that started the sabotage, and all sabotage originated in the bourgeoisie. It was because the bourgeoisie began to treat the labor of man as a stock-exchange value that the worker also began to treat his own labor as a stock-exchange value. It was because the bourgeoisie began to perpetually speculate on the labor of man that the worker too, by imitation, by collusion and counter-action, and one might almost say by agreement, began to continually speculate on his own labor. It was because the bourgeoisie began to practice perpetual blackmail on the labor of man that we live under this regime of perpetual speculation and blackmail that are, notably, the strikes. Thus disappeared that notion of the just price, at which our bourgeois intellectuals today scoff, but which was nonetheless the lasting foundation of an entire world.
For, and here is the second and no less formidable infection: at the same time that the bourgeoisie was introducing and practicing sabotage on a grand scale on its own account, at the same time it was introducing into the working-class world the licensed theorists of sabotage. At the same time that, on the opposite side, it was giving the example and the model, at the same time, inside, it was giving the teaching. The socialist political party is entirely composed of bourgeois intellectuals. It was they who invented sabotage and the double desertion — the desertion of work, the desertion of the tool. Not to mention here military desertion, which is a particular case of the great desertion, just as military glory was a particular case of the great glory. It was they who made the people believe that this was socialism and that this was revolution.
CHARLES PEGUY
Langlois as People Speak of Him
Charles Péguy
At the moment when I have just indicated, so poorly and so inadequately, what we owe to our masters of primary education, and what we owe to our masters of secondary education, it will perhaps not be out of place to note a little what we owe to our masters of higher education. In its issue of July 15, 1911 (Seventh Year, Number 7, Second Series) (they too have series), (Price: 0.60), the Revue Critique des Livres Nouveaux published the following article:
REVIEWS
CHARLES PEGUY. — Selected Works, 1900-1910. — Paris, Bernard Grasset, 12mo, 414 pages, 3 francs 50.
This volume of selected pieces was composed to reveal to the general public a writer known until now only to a few faithful readers. It is, so to speak, 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, assembled by the author himself, a fairly precise physiognomy. Here it is, as it appears to a simple reader like me, who has no other means, and does not particularly care, to verify whether it is accurate.
The author who presents himself here to the public is a man of the people, with vigor, a kind of violent fervor in his habitual thought, a certain bluntness of expression, a good deal of humor, little taste, no wit at all (here and there, jokes of incredible heaviness). Nothing vulgar; but something very harsh and, at the same time, whining; and also, on occasion, cunning. In short, a type in the manner of Michelet, proportions being kept.
Let us add: a quivering, boundless pride, which does not always appear free of every alloy of envy — which is very “of the people” too. This pride declares itself in the most naive fashion. The Selected Works of Peguy begin with “portraits of men”; and these men are: Zola, Jaures, Clemenceau, Renan, Bernard-Lazare, Peguy. They strongly give the impression, from one end to the other, that for Peguy, what Peguy says is not nothing.
He expresses himself in a strange manner, which immediately reveals the writer whom the long-suffering kindness of a restricted, specially recruited and chosen public has spoiled (in the sense in which one uses this word speaking of children). It seems that he had, from the beginning, tendencies to watch: a propensity for discursive expositions, without head or tail; some sort of impediment 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 the kind that can be attenuated when one recognizes them for what they are and imposes on oneself an exact discipline for this purpose. But the editor of the Cahiers de la Quinzaine has been allowed, by the indulgence of a small admiring circle, intimidated or sympathetic, to let himself go without control, even to take his defects for qualities and his manias for gifts. He has consequently cultivated them as his own originality. The result is nowhere more clearly visible than in the extravagant “Votive Epistle” to Ernest Psichari (number 33). However, “one must try,” as the author says further on (page 297), “to get back a little to speaking French.” That is also my view. Let us therefore say plainly, in French, that this Epistle and several of the pieces that precede and follow it are pure bafflegab.
Let us pass over the form. For the author considers himself above all, no doubt, a philosopher, a moralist, and a thinker. He was once a Dreyfusist with deep ardor, as indeed were many of his contemporaries, young or old, who, though they also more or less suffered for this cause (some to the point of dying for it), have not since made such a 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 noblest combatants…
PONS DAUMELAS.
The article just read is by M. Charles-Victor Langlois, professor at the Sorbonne, and I believe director of the Musee Pedagogique and other things. Today director of the National Archives. Pons d’Aumelas is a counselor of Philippe le Bel to whom M. Langlois devoted a short study (Library of the Ecole des Chartes, volume LII, 1891). This article calls for a few observations, but as one must be scientific I shall number my observations, and to be still more scientific I shall number them with letters. Numbers are mere arithmetic. Letters are algebra. M. Langlois knows that. I shall even try to put in exponents, and coefficients, and indices. But I cannot promise. The finest lad in the world…
L. — a). — There is in this article by M. Langlois a part of literary criticism, if I may speak thus. Here there is nothing to say. Literary criticism is free in France, since the Declaration of the Rights of Man. M. Langlois knows that. We writers — our trade is not to reply to critics. I do not know whether we belong entirely to critics; or whether we do not belong to them at all. That would be a question. But we do not have to answer them. Our trade is to establish texts, not to comment on commentaries. Our trade is to produce works, not to criticize critics.
L. — b). — There is in M. Langlois’s article something that goes beyond literary criticism. I do not say something that surpasses it from above; I say something that goes beyond it. With a sly, bitter, base obstinacy, with constant cowardices of writing, with laborious hypocrisy, with 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.
L. — c). — Well, on this point I am able to reassure M. Langlois completely. If M. Langlois knew a word of history he would know that since the world began, Catholics have never supported their own. If Catholics had supported their own, the government of France would not have fallen into the hands of M. Langlois.
L. — d). — Let M. Langlois permit me to say to him respectfully, insofar as a poor man still has the right to speak to a rich man: there is not only a kind of proper indecency and indiscretion, there is not only a want of relevance and a want of taste, there is not only a dissonance and a breach of propriety; there is a kind of cold, premeditated cruelty, there is a kind of base derision in the fact that a man who has M. Langlois’s financial situation should pick a quarrel about money with a man who has the financial situation I have.
L. — e). — Moreover, and M. Langlois will understand me without my insisting (for I do not wish to be coarse, myself): we ask that the academics who married into the republican nobility at least leave us in peace, we who married as we wished. We ask that the dowry hunters at least respect our poverty. Is that understood, M. Langlois?
L. — f). — Here I open a parenthesis, M. Langlois (you see I have not lost the habit), and I pick with you in turn a particular quarrel. I mean that grotesque ceremony organized at the Sorbonne to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of M. Lavisse’s entry to the Ecole Normale Superieure. If the French people celebrated with extraordinary rejoicings the definitive departure of M. Lavisse from the Ecole Normale Superieure, I could still understand that. But to celebrate the entry of M. Lavisse to the Ecole Normale is to celebrate the entry of the gravedigger into the house.
L. — g). — And I must sum up. To accuse me of venality is a stupidity and a grossness. To accuse me of venality when one is rich is an indecency and a grossness. To accuse me of venality in constantly tortuous, cautious, and groveling terms is a baseness and a cowardice. But to accuse me of venality and sign it 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 Poincare it is called a piece of cowardice.
L. — h). — When I received this article full in the face, as I could not reasonably take it out on a counselor of King Charles V, and as my well-known cowardice meant I did not want to get on bad terms with such a power as a king’s counselor, I did what I had to: I went straight to the director, M. Rudler. It is the rule that the manager covers judicially and that the director covers for honor. I therefore took it out on M. Rudler and addressed to him in writing some words not devoid of a certain severity. Not only did M. Langlois let M. Rudler pay for him. Not only did M. Langlois leave M. Rudler exposed to my celebrated cruelty. But in the more than eighteen months since this happened, M. Langlois has never asked to take back his place. So that he is a coward a first time toward me, and a second time toward M. Rudler.
L. — i). — M. Langlois was counting on the fact that I would not know that he was Pons Daumelas. In which this infallible historian was wrong. And completely wrong at that. If M. Langlois knew a word of contemporary history, he would know that my power is fearsome.
L. — j). — The intrepidity of these fine cavaliers is admirable. Neither heroes nor saints impress 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 willing to have the Institut.
L. — l). — They do not want Mass to be said, but they are willing to celebrate the Lavisse ceremony.
L. — m). — They do not want there to be spiritual life. But they are willing to have diplomas.
L. — n). — These formidable men do not want there to be the communion of saints. But they are willing to have the promotions of the Ecole Normale.
L. — o). — These terrible atheists do not want there to be a good God. But they are willing to have M. Lavisse.
L. — p). — It was a great imprudence to celebrate with such fanfare the fiftieth anniversary of M. Lavisse’s entry to the Ecole Normale Superieure. It was an invitation to a very simple comparison. It was an invitation to compare the Ecole Normale that M. Lavisse entered and the Ecole Normale from which M. Lavisse has not yet departed. The Ecole Normale that M. Lavisse entered was an Ecole Normale Superieure. Of the Ecole Normale from which M. Lavisse has not yet departed, it has been said that it was an inn. Those who know what goes on there know that one should not stop at this word inn, but go on to a masculine word, slightly shorter, much more energetic.
L. — q). — One must go a little further and say a small word about the substance of the article, and admit that our masters are not clever. As long as they work in what we do not know, they seem to us like eagles. When they work in what we do know, they seem to us like donkeys. So the most elementary prudence should advise them never to speak except of what we do not know.
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 gap to explain. There remains a question, and though I am its humble subject matter I must admit that it is a historical question. Neither the natural malice of the most eminent of our good masters, nor the bitterness, nor the fury, nor the rage, nor the acrimony suffice to explain the entire tone of this article. They do not suffice in particular to explain a certain tone of inebriation that reigns throughout this article. There must be a reason. July 15, 1911. I see your brows clearing. Yes, you have understood. You know now whence this inebriation came. July 14 is the day of the National Holiday. Consequently, how shall I say it, the next day, the fifteenth — well, it must be said — the next day the fifteenth is the day of the national hangover. M. Langlois sent me not just a hangover article, but this article was not an ordinary, weekly hangover, as M. Laudet would say. M. Langlois sent me a national-hangover article.
L. — t). — (Let us hurry, children, we are already at the letter t, the letters are going to run out on us, and when there are no more letters there is no more algebra. M. Langlois knows that.) I ask finally: what becomes of the method in all this? For there must be a method or there must not. When I was little, the method consisted, and it was M. Langlois’s method, the method taught us that one must not write a word on a question before having exhausted both the documentation and the literature on that question. When our masters invented the method, when they introduced it among us, was it understood that they reserved for themselves alone the right not to follow it?
L. — u). — (Let us hurry, children, we have only five letters left, not counting this one.) This duplicity of M. Langlois (I take this word in its etymological sense), this duplicity to which M. Langlois is reduced, bursts out, as always, in the typography. For in this same issue of this same Revue Critique where M. Langlois, under the name of Pons Daumelas, settles my account, in this same issue, on the cover of this same issue, M. Langlois appears as patron and guarantor under his title of professor at the Sorbonne. M. Langlois on the cover guarantees the scientific method of Pons Daumelas on the inside; and the pamphleteer Pons Daumelas on the inside enjoys the scientific guarantee and authority of M. Langlois on the cover. It is this accumulation that I call a duplicity.
Let our masters become pamphleteers — that is their right; they are free; and I personally see no objection. But let them, as pamphleteers, no longer be clothed in magisterial authority. Let them be men like us. Free men. Free of their very authority. Let them be simple citizens in the pamphlet. And as old Aristotle already said, let them not be simultaneously and in the same respect professors and pamphleteers.
L. — x). — In other words, 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 may have for this Pons Daumelas and the respect I must have for M. Langlois.
If M. Langlois had devoted to his research on me a hundredth part of the thoroughness that his method requires, he would have found, in the documentation and literature about me, that I have never done anything for money, and never will. If M. Langlois will permit me to hope it, or at least to feed on this vain imagining: if I had put into making a university career what I have put of activity into the cahiers, I might not be where I am in terms of worldly goods.
To sum 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 money quarrel with a man who has as little as I.
If J had demonstrated that Joan of Arc was a hussy, M. Langlois would consider me a great writer.
Charles Peguy