第 31 页

but which would never perhaps come.

Very few visits drew the brothers from their solitude. Bertheroy came

less frequently now that Guillaume's wrist was healing. The most

assiduous caller was certainly Theophile Morin, whose discreet ring was

heard every other day at the same hour. Though he did not share the ideas

of Barthes he worshipped him as a martyr; and would always go upstairs to

spend an hour with him. However, they must have exchanged few words, for

not a sound came from the room. Whenever Morin sat down for a moment in

the laboratory with the brothers, Pierre was struck by his seeming

weariness, his ashen grey hair and beard and dismal countenance, all the

life of which appeared to have been effaced by long years spent in the

teaching profession. Indeed, it was only when the priest mentioned Italy

that he saw his companion's resigned eyes blaze up like live coals. One

day when he spoke of the great patriot Orlando Prada, Morin's companion

of victory in Garibaldi's days, he was amazed by the sudden flare of

enthusiasm which lighted up the other's lifeless features. However, these

were but transient flashes: the old professor soon reappeared, and all

that one found in Morin was the friend of Proudhon and the subsequent

disciple of Auguste Comte. Of his Proudhonian principles he had retained

all a pauper's hatred of wealth, and a desire for a more equitable

partition of fortune. But the new times dismayed him, and neither

principle nor temperament allowed him to follow Revolutionism to its

utmost limits. Comte had imparted unshakable convictions to him in the

sphere of intellectual questions, and he contented himself with the clear

and decisive logic of Positivism, rejecting all metaphysical hypotheses

as useless, persuaded as he was that the whole human question, whether

social or religious, would be solved by science alone. This faith, firm

as it had remained, was, however, coupled with secret bitterness, for

nothing seemed to advance in a sensible manner towards its goal. Comte

himself had ended in the most cloudy mysticism; great _savants_ recoiled

from truth in terror; and now barbarians were threatening the world with

fresh night; all of which made Morin almost a reactionist in politics,

already resigned to the advent of a dictator, who would set things

somewhat in order, so that humanity might be able to complete its

education.

Other visitors who occasionally called to see Guillaume were Bache and

Janzen, who invariably came together and at night-time. Every now and

then they would linger chatting with Guillaume in the spacious study

until two o'clock in the morning. Bache, who was fat and had a fatherly

air, with his little eyes gently beaming amidst all the snowy whiteness

of his hair and beard, would talk on slowly, unctuously and interminably,

as soon as he had begun to explain his views. He would address merely a

polite bow to Saint-Simon, the initiator, the first to lay down the law

that work was a necessity for one and all according to their capacities;

but on coming to Fourier his voice softened and he confessed his whole

religion. To his thinking, Fourier had been the real messiah of modern

times, the saviour of genius, who had sown the good seed of the future

world, by regulating society such as it would certainly be organised

to-morrow. The law of harmony had been promulgated; human passions,

liberated and utilised in healthy fashion, would become the requisite

machinery; and work, rendered pleasant and attractive, would prove the

very function of life. Nothing could discourage Bache; if merely one

parish began by transforming itself into a _phalansterium_, the whole

department would soon follow, then the adjacent departments, and finally

all France. Moreover, Bache even favoured the schemes of Cabet, whose

Icaria, said he, had in no wise been such a foolish idea. Further, he

recalled a motion he had made, when member of the Commune in 1871, to

apply Fourier's ideas to the French Republic; and he was apparently

convinced that the troops of Versailles had delayed the triumph of

Communism for half a century. Whenever people nowadays talked of

table-turning he pretended to laugh, but at bottom he had remained an

impenitent "spiritist." Since he had been a municipal councillor he had

been travelling from one socialist sect to another, according as their

ideas offered points of resemblance to his old faith. And he was fairly

consumed by his need of faith, his perplexity as to the Divine, which he

was now occasionally inclined to find in the legs of some piece of

furniture, after denying its presence in the churches.

Janzen, for his part, was as taciturn as his friend Bache was garrulous.

Such remarks as he made were brief, but they were as galling as lashes,

as cutting as sabre-strokes. At the same time his ideas and theories

remained somewhat obscure, partly by reason of this brevity of his, and

partly on account of the difficulty he experienced in expressing himself

in French. He was from over yonder, from some far-away land--Russia,

Poland, Austria or Germany, nobody exactly knew; and it mattered little,

for he certainly acknowledged no country, but wandered far and wide with

his dream of blood-shedding fraternity. Whenever, with his wonted

frigidity, he gave utterance to one of those terrible remarks of his

which, like a scythe in a meadow, cut away all before him, little less

than the necessity of thus mowing down nations, in order to sow the earth

afresh with a young and better community, became apparent. At each

proposition unfolded by Bache, such as labour rendered agreeable by

police regulations, _phalansteria_ organised like barracks, religion

transformed into pantheist or spiritist deism, he gently shrugged his

shoulders. What could be the use of such childishness, such hypocritical

repairing, when the house was falling and the only honest course was to

throw it to the ground, and build up the substantial edifice of to-morrow

with entirely new materials? On the subject of propaganda by deeds,

bomb-throwing and so forth, he remained silent, though his gestures were

expressive of infinite hope. He evidently approved that course. The

legend which made him one of the perpetrators of the crime of Barcelona

set a gleam of horrible glory in his mysterious past. One day when Bache,

while speaking to him of his friend Bergaz, the shadowy Bourse jobber who

had already been compromised in some piece of thieving, plainly declared

that the aforesaid Bergaz was a bandit, Janzen contented himself with

smiling, and replying quietly that theft was merely forced restitution.

Briefly, in this man of culture and refinement, in whose own mysterious

life one might perhaps have found various crimes but not a single act of

base improbity, one could divine an implacable, obstinate theoretician,

who was resolved to set the world ablaze for the triumph of his ideas.

On certain evenings when a visit from Theophile Morin coincided with one

from Bache and Janzen, and they and Guillaume lingered chatting until far

into the night, Pierre would listen to them in despair from the shadowy

corner where he remained motionless, never once joining in the

discussions. Distracted, by his own unbelief and thirst for truth, he had

at the outset taken a passionate interest in these debates, desirous as

he was of drawing up a balance-sheet of the century's ideas, so as to

form some notion of the distance that had been travelled, and the profits

that had accrued. But he recoiled from all this in fresh despair, on

hearing the others argue, each from his own standpoint and without

possibility of concession and agreement. After the repulses he had

encountered at Lourdes and Rome, he well realised that in this fresh

experiment which he was making with Paris, the whole brain of the century

was in question, the new truths, the expected gospel which was to change

the face of the world. And, burning with inconsiderate zeal, he went from

one belief to another, which other he soon rejected in order to adopt a

third. If he had first felt himself to be a Positivist with Morin, an

Evolutionist and Determinist with Guillaume, he had afterwards been

touched by the fraternal dream of a new golden age which he had found in

Bache's humanitarian Communism. And indeed even Janzen had momentarily

shaken him by his fierce confidence in the theory of liberative

Individualism. But afterwards he had found himself out of his depth; and

each and every theory had seemed to him but part of the chaotic

contradictions and incoherences of humanity on its march. It was all a

continuous piling up of dross, amidst which he lost himself. Although

Fourier had sprung from Saint-Simon he denied him in part; and if

Saint-Simon's doctrine ended in a kind of mystical sensuality, the

other's conducted to an unacceptable regimenting of society. Proudhon,

for his part, demolished without rebuilding anything. Comte, who created

method and declared science to be the one and only sovereign, had not

even suspected the advent of the social crisis which now threatened to

sweep all away, and had finished personally as a mere worshipper of love,

overpowered by woman. Nevertheless, these two, Comte and Proudhon,

entered the lists and fought against the others, Fourier and Saint-Simon;

the combat between them or their disciples becoming so bitter and so

blind that the truths common to them all were obscured and disfigured

beyond recognition. Thence came the extraordinary muddle of the present

hour; Bache with Saint-Simon and Fourier, and Morin with Proudhon and

Comte, utterly failing to understand Mege, the Collectivist deputy, whom

they held up to execration, him and his State Collectivism, in the same

way, moreover, as they thundered against all the other present-time

Socialist sects, without realising that these also, whatever their

nature, had more or less sprung from the same masters as themselves. And

all this seemingly indicated that Janzen was right when he declared that

the house was past repair, fast crumbling amidst rottenness and insanity,

and that it ought to be levelled to the ground.

One night, after the three visitors had gone, Pierre, who had remained

with Guillaume, saw him grow very gloomy as he slowly walked to and fro.

He, in his turn, had doubtless felt that all was crumbling. And though

his brother alone was there to hear him, he went on speaking. He

expressed all his horror of the Collectivist State as imagined by Mege, a

Dictator-State re-establishing ancient servitude on yet closer lines. The

error of all the Socialist sects was their arbitrary organisation of

Labour, which enslaved the individual for the profit of the community.

And, forced to conciliate the two great currents, the rights of society

and the rights of the individual, Guillaume had ended by placing his

whole faith in free Communism, an anarchical state in which he dreamt of

seeing the individual freed, moving and developing without restraint, for

the benefit both of himself and of all others. Was not this, said he, the

one truly scientific theory, unities creating worlds, atoms producing

life by force of attraction, free and ardent love? All oppressive

minorities would disappear; and the faculties and energies of one and all

would by free play arrive at harmony amidst the equilibrium--which

changed according to needs--of the active forces of advancing humanity.

In this wise he pictured a nation, saved from State tutelage, without a

master, almost without laws, a happy nation, each citizen of which,

completely developed by the exercise of liberty, would, of his free will,

come to an understanding with his neighbours with regard to the thousand

necessities of life. And thence would spring society, free association,

hundreds of associations which would regulate social life; though at the

same time they would remain variable, in fact often opposed and hostile

to one another. For progress is but the fruit of conflict and struggle;

the world has only been created by the battle of opposing forces. And

that was all; there would be no more oppressors, no more rich, no more

poor; the domain of the earth with its natural treasures and its

implements of labour would be restored to the people, its legitimate

owners, who would know how to enjoy it with justice and logic, when

nothing abnormal would impede their expansion. And then only would the

law of love make its action felt; then would human solidarity, which,

among mankind, is the living form of universal attraction, acquire all

its power, bringing men closer and closer together, and uniting them in

one sole family. A splendid dream it was--the noble and pure dream of

absolute freedom--free man in free society. And thither a _savant's_

superior mind was fated to come after passing on the road the many

Socialist sects which one and all bore the stigma of tyranny. And,

assuredly, as thus indulged, the Anarchist idea is the loftiest, the

proudest, of all ideas. And how delightful to yield to the hope of

harmony in life--life which restored to the full exercise of its natural

powers would of itself create happiness!

When Guillaume ceased speaking, he seemed to be emerging from a dream;

and he glanced at Pierre with some dismay, for he feared that he might

have said too much and have hurt his feelings. Pierre--moved though he

was, for a moment in fact almost won over--had just seen the terrible

practical objection, which destroyed all hope, arise before his mind's

eye. Why had not harmony asserted itself in the first days of the world's

existence, at the time when societies were formed? How was it that

tyranny had triumphed, delivering nations over to oppressors? And

supposing that the apparently insolvable problem of destroying

everything, and beginning everything afresh, should ever be solved, who

could promise that mankind, obedient to the same laws, would not again

follow the same paths as formerly? After all, mankind, nowadays, is

simply what life has made it; and nothing proves that life would again

make it other than it is. To begin afresh, ah, yes! but to attain another