情色书屋

THE BURNING BUSH004
书名： 约翰克里斯朵夫第三卷终结卷 作者： （法）罗曼·罗兰 本章字数： 40323 更新时间： 2024-06-13 16:24:00

But sometimes they would begin to talk, like their elders, of politics and religion. Then they would become as stupid as their elders. It put an end to their sympathy and understanding. She would talk of miracles and the nine days’ devotion, or of pious images tricked out with paper lace, and of days of indulgence. He used to tell her that it was all folly and mummery, as he had heard his grandfather say. But when he in turn tried to tell her about the public meetings to which the old man had taken him, and the speeches he had heard, she would stop him contemptuously and tell him that all such folk were drunken sots. Bitterness would creep into their talk. They would get talking about their relations: they would recount the insulting things that her mother and his grandfather had said of each other respectively. Then they would talk about themselves. They tried to say disagreeable things to each other. They managed that without much difficulty. They indulged in coarse gibes. But she was always the more malicious of the two. Then he would go away: and when he returned he would tell her that he had been with other girls, and how pretty they were, and how they had joked and laughed, and how they were going to meet again next Sunday. She would say nothing to that: she used to pretend to despise what he said: and then, suddenly, she would grow angry, and throw her crochet-work at his head, and shout at him to go, and declare that she loathed him: and she would hide her face in her hands. He would leave her on that, not at all proud of his victory. He longed to pull her thin little hands away from her face and to tell her that it was not true. But his pride would not suffer him to return.

One day Rainette had her revenge.—He was with some of the other boys at the works. They did not like him because he used to hold as much aloof from them as possible and never spoke, or talked too well, in a na?vely pretentious way, like a book, or rather like a newspaper article—(he was stuffed with newspaper articles).—That day they had begun to talk of the revolution and the days to come. He waxed enthusiastic and made a fool of himself. One of his comrades brought him up sharp with these brutal words:

“To begin with, you won’t be wanted, you’re too ugly. In the society of the future, there won’t be any hunchbacks. They’ll be drowned at birth.”

That brought him toppling down from his lofty eloquence. He stopped short, dumfounded. The others roared with laughter. All that afternoon he went about with clenched teeth. In the evening he was going home, hurrying back to hide away in a corner alone with his suffering. Olivier met him: he was struck by his downcast expression: he guessed that he was suffering.

“You are hurt. Why?”

Emmanuel refused to answer. Olivier pressed him kindly. The boy persisted in his silence: but his jaw trembled as though he were on the point of weeping. Olivier took his arm and led him back to his rooms. Although he too had the cruel and instinctive feeling of repulsion from ugliness and disease that is in all who are not born with the souls of sisters of charity, he did not let it appear.

“Some one has hurt you?”

“Yes.”

“What did they do?”

The boy laid bare his heart. He said that he was ugly. He said that his comrades had told him that their revolution was not for him.

“It is not for them, either, my boy, nor for us. It is not a single day’s affair. It is all for those who will come after us.”

The boy was taken aback by the thought that it would be so long deferred.

“Don’t you like to think that people are working to give happiness to thousands of boys like yourself, to millions of human beings?”

Emmanuel sighed and said:

“But it would be good to have a little happiness oneself.”

“My dear boy, you mustn’t be ungrateful. You live in the most beautiful city, in an age that is most rich in marvels; you are not a fool, and you have eyes to see. Think of all the things there are to be seen and loved all around you.”

He pointed out a few things.

The boy listened, nodded his head, and said:

“Yes, but I’ve got to face the fact that I shall always have to live in this body of mine!”

“Not at all. You will quit it.”

“And that will be the end.”

“How do you know that?”

The boy was aghast. Materialism was part and parcel of his grandfather’s creed: he thought that it was only the priest-ridden prigs who believed in an eternal life. He knew that his friend was not such a one: and he wondered if Olivier could be speaking seriously. But Olivier held his hand and expounded at length his idealistic faith, and the unity of boundless life, that has neither beginning nor end, in which all the millions of creatures and all the million million moments of time are but rays of the sun, the sole source of it all. But he did not put it to him in such an abstract form. Instinctively, when he talked to the boy, he adapted himself to his mode of thought;—ancient legends, the material and profound fancies of old cosmogonies were called to mind: half in fun, half in earnest, he spoke of metempsychosis and the succession of countless forms through which the soul passes and flows, like a spring passing from pool to pool. All this was interspersed with reminiscences of Christianity and images taken from the summer evening, the light of which was cast upon them both. He was sitting by the open window, and the boy was standing by his side, and their hands were clasped. It was a Saturday evening. The bells were ringing. The earliest swallows, only just returned, were skimming the walls of the houses. The dim sky was smiling above the city, which was wrapped in shadow. The boy held his breath and listened to the fairy-tale his man friend was telling him. And Olivier, warmed by the eagerness of his young hearer, was caught up by the interest of his own stories.

There are decisive moments in life when, just as the electric lights suddenly flash out in the darkness of a great city, so the eternal fires flare up in the darkness of the soul. A spark darting from another soul is enough to transmit the Promethean fire to the waiting soul. On that spring evening Olivier’s calm words kindled the light that never dies in the mind hidden in the boy’s deformed body, as in a battered lantern. He understood none of Olivier’s arguments: he hardly heard them. But the legends and images which were only beautiful stories and parables to Olivier, took living shape and form in his mind, and were most real. The fairy-tale lived, moved, and breathed all around him. And the view framed in the window of the room, the people passing in the street, rich and poor, the swallows skimming the walls, the jaded horses dragging their loads along, the stones of the houses drinking in the cool shadow of the twilight, and the pale heavens where the light was dying—all the outside world was softly imprinted on his mind, softly as a kiss. It was but the flash of a moment. Then the light died down. He thought of Rainette, and said;

“But the people who go to Mass, the people who believe in God, are all cracked, aren’t they?”

Olivier smiled.

“They believe,” he said, “as we do. We all believe the same thing. Only their belief is less than ours. They are people who have to shut all the shutters and light the lamp before they can see the light. They see God in the shape of a man. We have keener eyes. But the light that we love is the same.”

The boy went home through the dark streets in which the gas-lamps were not yet lit. Olivier’s words were ringing in his head. He thought that it was as cruel to laugh at people because they had weak eyes as because they were hunchbacked. And he thought that Rainette had very pretty eyes: and he thought that he had brought tears into them. He could not bear that. He turned and went across to the stationer’s. The window was still a little open: and he thrust his head inside and called in a whisper:

“Rainette.”

She did not reply.

“Rainette. I beg your pardon.”

From the darkness came Rainette’s voice, saying:

“Beast! I hate you.”

“I’m sorry,” he said.

He stopped. Then, on a sudden impulse, he said in an even softer whisper, uneasily, rather shamefacedly:

“You know, Rainette, I believe in God just as you do.”

“Really?”

“Really.”

He said it only out of generosity. But, as soon as he had said it, he began to believe it.

They stayed still and did not speak. They could not see each other.

Outside the night was so fair, so sweet!… The little cripple murmured:

“How good it will be when one is dead!”

He could hear Rainette’s soft breathing.

He said:

“Good-night, little one.”

Tenderly came Rainette’s voice:

“Good-night.”

He went away comforted. He was glad that Rainette had forgiven him. And, in his inmost soul, the little sufferer was not sorry to think that he had been the cause of suffering to the girl.

*　*　*　*　*

Olivier had gone into retirement once more. It was not long before Christophe rejoined him. It was very certain that their place was not with the syndicalist movement: Olivier could not throw in his lot with such people. And Christophe would not. Olivier flung away from them in the name of the weak and the oppressed; Christophe in the name of the strong and the independent. But though they had withdrawn, one to the bows, the other to the stern, they were still traveling in the vessel which was carrying the army of the working-classes and the whole of society. Free and self-confident, Christophe watched with tingling interest the coalition of the proletarians: he needed every now and then to plunge into the vat of the people: it relaxed him: he always issued from it fresher and jollier. He kept up his relation with Coquard, and he went on taking his meals from time to time at Amélie’s. When he was there he lost all self-control, and would whole-heartedly indulge his fantastic humor: he was not afraid of paradox: and he took a malicious delight in pushing his companions to the extreme consequences of their absurd and wild principles. They never knew whether he was speaking in jest or in earnest: for he always grew warm as he talked, and always in the end lost sight of the paradoxical point of view with which he had begun. The artist in him was carried away by the intoxication of the rest. In one such moment of esthetic emotion in Amélie’s back-shop, he improvised a revolutionary song, which was at once tried, repeated, and on the very next day spread to every group of the workingclasses. He compromised himself. He was marked by the police. Manousse, who was in touch with the innermost chambers of authority, was warned by one of his friends, Xavier Bernard, a young official in the police department, who dabbled in literature and expressed a violent admiration for Christophe’s music:—(for dilettantism and the spirit of anarchy had spread even to the watchdogs of the Third Republic).

“That Krafft of yours is making himself a nuisance,” said Bernard to Manousse. “He’s playing the braggart. We know what it means: but I tell you that those in high places would be not at all sorry to catch a foreigner—what’s more, a German—in a revolutionary plot: it is the regular method of discrediting the party and casting suspicion upon its doings. If the idiot doesn’t look out we shall be obliged to arrest him. It’s a bore. You’d better warn him.”

Manousse did warn Christophe: Olivier begged him to be careful.

Christophe did not take their advice seriously.

“Bah!” he said. “Everybody knows there’s no harm in me. I’ve a perfect right to amuse myself. I like these people. They work as I do, and they have faith, and so have I. As a matter of fact, it isn’t the same faith; we don’t belong to the same camp…. Very well! We’ll fight. Not that I don’t like fighting. What would you? I can’t do as you do, and stay curled up in my shell. I must breathe. I’m stifled by the comfortable classes.”

Olivier, whose lungs were not so exacting, was quite at his ease in his small rooms with the tranquil society of his two women friends, though one of them, Madame Arnaud, had flung herself into charitable work, and the other, Cécile, was entirely taken up with looking after the baby, to such an extent that she could talk of nothing else and to nobody else, in that twittering, beatific tone which is an attempt to emulate the note of a little bird, and to mold its formless song into human speech.

His excursion into working-class circles had left him with two acquaintances. Two men of independent views, like himself. One of them, Guérin, was an upholsterer. He worked when he felt so disposed, capriciously, though he was very skilful. He loved his trade. He had a natural taste for artistic things, and had developed it by observation, work, and visits to museums. Olivier had commissioned him to repair an old piece of furniture: it was a difficult job, and the upholsterer had done it with great skill: he had taken a lot of time and trouble over it: he sent in a very modest bill to Olivier because he was so delighted with his success. Olivier became interested in him, questioned him about his life, and tried to find out what he thought of the working-class movement. Guérin had no thought about it: he never worried about it. At bottom he did not belong to the working-class, or to any class. He read very little. All his intellectual development had come about through his senses, eyes, hands, and the taste innate in the true Parisian. He was a happy man. The type is by no means rare among the working people of the lower middle-class, who are one of the most intelligent classes in the nation: for they realize a fine balance between manual labor and healthy mental activity.

Olivier’s other acquaintance was a man of a more original kind. He was a postman, named Hurteloup. He was a tall, handsome creature, with bright eyes, a little fair beard and mustache, and an open, merry expression. One day he came with a registered letter, and walked into Olivier’s room. While Olivier was signing the receipt, he wandered round, looking at the books, with his nose thrust close up to their backs:

“Ha! Ha!” he said. “You have the classics….”

He added:

“I collect books on history. Especially books about Burgundy.”

“You are a Burgundian?” asked Olivier.

“Bourguignon salé,

L’épée au c?té,

La barbe au menton,

Sante Bourguignon,”

replied the postman with a laugh. “I come from the Avallon country. I have family papers going back to 1200 and something….”

Olivier was intrigued, and tried to find out more about him. Hurteloup asked nothing better than to be allowed to talk. He belonged, in fact, to one of the oldest families in Burgundy. One of his ancestors had been on crusade with Philippe Auguste: another had been secretary of State under Henri II. The family had begun to decay in the seventeenth century. At the time of the Revolution, ruined and despairing, they had taken the plunge into the ocean of the people. Now they were coming to the surface again as the result of honest work and the physical and moral vigor of Hurteloup the postman, and his fidelity to his race. His greatest hobby had been collecting historical and genealogical documents relating to his family and their native country. In off hours he used to go to the Archives and copy out old papers. Whenever he did not understand them he would go and ask one of the people on his beat, a Chartist or a student at the Sorbonne, to explain. His illustrious ancestry did not turn his head: he would speak of it laughingly, with never a shade of embarrassment or of indignation at the hardness of fate. His careless sturdy gaiety was a delightful thing to see. And when Olivier looked at him he thought of the mysterious ebb and flow of the life of human families, which for centuries flows burningly, for centuries disappears under the ground, and then comes bubbling forth again, having gathered fresh energy from the depths of the earth. And the people seemed to him to be an immense reservoir into which the rivers of the past plunge, while the rivers of the future spring forth again, and, though they bear a new name, are sometimes the same as those of old.

He was in sympathy with both Guérin and Hurteloup: but it is obvious that they could not be company for him: between him and them there was no great possibility of conversation. The boy Emmanuel took up more of his time: he came now almost every evening. Since their magical talk together a revolution had taken place in the boy. He had plunged into reading with a fierce desire for knowledge. He would come back from his books bewildered and stupefied. Sometimes he seemed even less intelligent than before: he would hardly speak: Olivier could only get him to answer in monosyllables: the boy would make fatuous replies to his questions. Olivier would lose heart: he would try not to let it be seen: but he thought he had made a mistake, and that the boy was thoroughly stupid. He could not see the frightful fevered travail in incubation that was going on in the inner depths of the boy’s soul. Besides, he was a bad teacher, and was more fitted to sow the good seed at random in the fields than to weed the soil and plow the furrows. Christophe’s presence only served to increase the difficulty. Olivier felt a certain awkwardness in showing his young protégé to his friend: he was ashamed of Emmanuel’s stupidity, which was raised to alarming proportions when Jean-Christophe was in the room. Then the boy would withdraw into bashful sullenness. He hated Christophe because Olivier loved him: he could not bear any one else to have a place in his master’s heart. Neither Christophe nor Olivier had any idea of the love and jealousy tugging at the boy’s heart. And yet Christophe had been through it himself in old days. But he was unable to see himself in the boy who was fashioned of such different metal from that of which he himself was made. In the strange obscure combination of inherited taints, everything, love, hate, and latent genius, gave out an entirely different sound.

*　*　*　*　*

The First of May was approaching. A sinister rumor ran through Paris. The blustering leaders of the C.G.T. were doing their best to spread it. Their papers were announcing the coming of the great day, mobilizing the forces of the working-classes, and directing the word of terror upon the point in which the comfortable classes were mostly sensitive—namely, upon the stomach…. Feri ventrem…. They were threatening them with a general strike. The scared Parisians were leaving for the country or laying in provisions as against a siege. Christophe had met Canet, in his motor, carrying two hams and a sack of potatoes: he was beside himself: he did not in the least know to which party he belonged: he was in turn an old Republican, a royalist, and a revolutionary. His cult of violence was like a compass gone wrong, with the needle darting from north to south and from south to north. In public he still played the part of chorus to the wild speeches of his friends: but he would have taken in petto the first dictator who came along and swept away the red spectre.

Christophe was tickled to death by such universal cowardice. He was convinced that nothing would come of it all. Olivier was not so sure. His birth into the burgess-class had given him something of the inevitable and everlasting tremulation which the comfortable classes always feel upon the recollection or the expectation of Revolution.

“That’s all right!” said Christophe. “You can sleep in peace. Your Revolution isn’t going to happen tomorrow. You’re all afraid. Afraid of being hurt. That sort of fear is everywhere. In the upper-classes, in the people, in every nation, in all the nations of the West. There’s not enough blood in the whole lot of them: they’re afraid of spilling a little. For the last forty years all the fighting has been done in words, in newspaper articles. Just look at your old Dreyfus Affair. You shouted loud enough: ‘Death! Blood! Slaughter!’… Oh! you Gascons! Spittle and ink! But how many drops of blood?”

“Don’t you be so sure,” said Olivier. “The fear of blood is a secret instinctive feeling that on the first shedding of it the beast in man will see red, and the brute will appear again under the crust of civilization: and God knows how it will ever be muzzled! Everybody hesitates to declare war: but when the war does come it will be a frightful thing.”

Christophe shrugged his shoulders and said that it was not for nothing that the heroes of the age were lying heroes, Cyrano the braggart and the swaggering cock, Chantecler.

Olivier nodded. He knew that in France bragging is the beginning of action. However, he had no more faith than Christophe in an immediate movement: it had been too loudly proclaimed, and the Government was on its guard. There was reason to believe that the syndicalist strategists would postpone the fight for a more favorable opportunity.

During the latter half of April Olivier had an attack of influenza: he used to get it every winter about the same time, and it always used to develop into his old enemy, bronchitis. Christophe stayed with him for a few days. The attack was only a slight one, and soon passed. But, as usual, it left Olivier morally and physically worn out, and he was in this condition for some time after the fever had subsided. He stayed in bed, lying still for hours without any desire to get up or even to move: he lay there watching Christophe, who was sitting at his desk, working, with his back towards him.

Christophe was absorbed in his work. Sometimes, when he was tired of writing, he would suddenly get up and walk over to the piano: he would play, not what he had written, but just whatever came into his mind. Then there came to pass a very strange thing. While the music he had written was conceived in a style which recalled that of his earlier work, what he played was like that of another man. It was music of a world raucous and uncontrolled. There were in it a disorder and a violence, and incoherence which had no resemblance at all to the powerful order and logic which were everywhere present in his other music. These unconsidered improvizations, escaping the scrutiny of his artistic conscience, sprang, like the cry of an animal, from the flesh rather than from the mind; and seemed to reveal a disturbance of the balance of his soul, a storm brewing in the depths of the future. Christophe was quite unconscious of it: but Olivier would listen, look at Christophe, and feel vaguely uneasy. In his weak condition he had a singular power of penetration, a far-seeing eye: he saw things that no other man could perceive.

Christophe thumped out a final chord and stopped all in a sweat, and looking rather haggard: he looked at Olivier, and there was still a troubled expression in his eyes; then he began to laugh, and went back to his desk. Olivier asked him:

“What was that, Christophe?”

“Nothing,” replied Christophe. “I’m stirring the water to attract my fish.”

“Are you going to write that?”

“That? What do you mean?”

“What you’ve just said.”

“What did I say? I don’t remember.”

“What were you thinking of?”

“I don’t know,” said Christophe, drawing his hand across his forehead.

He went on writing. Silence once mere filled the room. Olivier went on looking at Christophe. Christophe felt that he was looking, and turned. Olivier’s eyes were upon him with such a hunger of affection!

“Lazy brute!” he said gaily.

Olivier sighed.

“What’s the matter?” asked Christophe.

“Oh! Christophe! To think there are so many things in you, sitting there, close at hand, treasures that you will give to others, and I shall never be able to share!…”

“Are you mad? What’s come to you?”

“I wonder what your life will be. I wonder what peril and sorrow you have still to go through…. I would like to follow you. I would like to be with you…. But I shan’t see anything of it all. I shall be left stuck stupidly by the wayside.”

“Stupid? You are that. Do you think that I would leave you behind even if you wanted to be left?”

“You will forget me,” said Olivier.

Christophe got up and went and sat on the bed by Olivier’s side: he took his wrists, which were wet with a clammy sweat of weakness. His nightshirt was open at the neck, showing his weak chest, his too transparent skin, which was stretched and thin like a sail blown out by a puff of wind to rending point. Christophe’s strong fingers fumbled as he buttoned the neckband of Olivier’s nightshirt. Olivier suffered him.

“Dear Christophe!” he said tenderly. “Yet I have had one great happiness in my life!”

“Oh! what on earth are you thinking of?” said Christophe. “You’re as well as I am.”

“Yes,” said Olivier.

“Then why talk nonsense?”

“I was wrong,” said Olivier, ashamed and smiling. “Influenza is so depressing.”

“Pull yourself together, though! Get up.”

“Not now. Later on.”

He stayed in bed, dreaming. Next day he got up. But he was only able to sit musing by the fireside. It was a mild and misty April. Through the soft veil of silvery mist the little green leaves were unfolding their cocoons, and invisible birds were singing the song of the hidden sun. Olivier wound the skein of his memories. He saw himself once more as a child, in the train carrying him away from his native town, through the mist, with his mother weeping. Antoinette was sitting by herself at the other end of the carriage…. Delicate shapes, fine landscapes, were drawn in his mind’s eye. Lovely verses came of their own accord, with every syllable and charming rhythm in due order. He was near his desk: he had only to reach out his hand to take his pen and write down his poetic visions. But his will failed him: he was tired: he knew that the perfume of his dreams would evaporate so soon as he tried to catch and hold them. It was always so: the best of himself could never find expression: his mind was like a little valley full of flowers: but hardly a soul had access to it: and as soon as they were picked the flowers faded. No more than just a few had been able languidly to survive, a few delicate little tales, a few pieces of verse, which all gave out a fragrant, fading scent. His artistic impotence had for a long time been one of Olivier’s greatest griefs. It was so hard to feel so much life in himself and to be able to save none of it!…—Now he was resigned. Flowers do not need to be seen to blossom. They are only the more beautiful in the fields where no hand can pluck them. Happy, happy fields with flowers dreaming in the sun!—Here in the little valley there was hardly any sun; but Olivier’s dreams flowered all the better for it. What stories he wove for his own delight in those days, stories sad and tender and fantastic! They came he knew not whence, sailing like white clouds in a summer sky, melted into thin air, and others followed them: he was full of them. Sometimes the sky was clear: in the light of it Olivier would sit drowsily until once more, with all sail set, there would come gliding the silent ships of dreams.

In the evening the little hunchback would come in. Olivier was so full of stories that he told him one, smiling, eager and engrossed in the tale. Often he would go on talking to himself, with the boy breathing never a word. In the end he would altogether forget his presence…. Christophe arrived in the middle of the story, and was struck by its beauty, and asked Olivier to begin all over again. Olivier refused:

“I am in the same position as yourself,” he said. “I don’t know anything about it.”

“That is not true,” said Christophe. “You’re a regular Frenchman, and you always know exactly what you are doing and saying. You never forget anything.”

“Alas!” said Olivier.

“Begin again, then.”

“I’m too tired. What’s the good?”

Christophe was annoyed.

“That’s all wrong,” he said. “What’s the good of your having ideas? You throw away what you have. It’s an utter waste.” “Nothing is ever lost,” said Olivier.

The little hunchback started from the stillness he had maintained during Olivier’s story—sitting with his face towards the window, with eyes blankly staring, and a frown on his face and a fierce expression so that it was impossible to tell what he was thinking. He got up and said:

“It will be fine to-morrow.”

“I bet,” said Christophe to Olivier, “that he didn’t even listen.”

“To-morrow, the First of May,” Emmanuel went on, while his morose expression lighted up.

“That is his story,” said Olivier. “You shall tell it me tomorrow.”

“Nonsense!” said Christophe.

Next day Christophe called for Olivier to take him for a walk in Paris. Olivier was better: but he still had the same strange feeling of exhaustion: he did not want to go out, he had a vague fear, he did not like mixing with the crowd. His heart and mind were brave: but the flesh was weak. He was afraid of a crush, an affray, brutality of all sorts: he knew only too well that he was fated to be a victim, that he could not, even would not, defend himself: for he had as great a horror of giving pain as of suffering it himself. Men who are sick in body shudder away from physical suffering more readily than others, because they are more familiar with it, because they have less power to resist, and because it is presented more immediately and more poignantly to their heated imagination. Olivier was ashamed of this physical cowardice of his which was in entire contradiction to the stoicism of his will: and he tried hard to fight it down. But this morning the thought of human contact of any sort was painful to him, and he would gladly have remained indoors all day long. Christophe scolded him, rallied him, absolutely insisted on his going out and throwing off his stupor: for quite ten days he had not had a breath of air. Olivier pretended not to pay any attention. Christophe said:

“Very well. I’ll go without you. I want to see their First of May. If I don’t come back to-night, you will know that I have been locked up.”

He went out. Olivier caught him up on the stairs. He would not leave

Christophe to go alone.

There were very few people in the streets. A few little work-girls wearing sprays of lily-of-the-valley. Working-people in their Sunday clothes were walking about rather listlessly. At the street corners, and near the Métro stations were groups of policemen in plain clothes. The gates of the Luxembourg were closed. The weather was still foggy and damp. It was a long, long time since the sun had shown himself!… The friends walked arm in arm. They spoke but little, but they were very glad of each other. A few words were enough to call up all their tender memories of the intimate past. They stopped in front of a mairie to look at the barometer, which had an upward tendency.

“To-morrow,” said Olivier, “I shall see the sun.”

They were quite near the house where Cécile lived. They thought of going in and giving the baby a hug.

“No. We can do it when we come back.”

On the other side of the river they began to fall in with more people. Just ordinary peaceful people taking a walk, wearing their Sunday clothes and faces; poor people with their babies: workmen loafing. A few here and there wore the red eglantine in their buttonholes: they looked quite inoffensive: they were revolutionaries by dint of self-persuasion: they were obviously quite benevolent and optimistic at heart, well satisfied with the smallest opportunities for happiness: whether it were fine or merely passable for their holiday, they were grateful for it … they did not know exactly to whom … to everything and everybody about them. They walked along without any hurry, expansively admiring the new leaves of the trees and the pretty dresses of the little girls who went by: they said proudly:

“Only in Paris can you see children so well dressed as that.”

Christophe made fun of the famous upheaval that had been predicted…. Such nice people!… He was quite fond of them, although a little contemptuous.

As they got farther along the crowd thickened. Men with pale hangdog faces and horrible mouths slipped into the stream of people, all on the alert, waiting for the time to pounce on their prey. The mud was stirred up. With every inch the river grew more and more turbid. Now it flowed slowly thick, opaque, and heavy. Like air-bubbles rising from the depths to the greasy surface, there came up calling voices, shrill whistles, the cries of the newsboys, piercing the dull roar of the multitude, and made it possible to take the measure of its strata. At the end of a street, near Amélie’s restaurant, there was a noise like that of a mill-race. The crowd was stemmed up against several ranks of police and soldiers. In front of the obstacles a serried mass was formed, howling, whistling, singing, laughing, and eddying this way and that…. The laughter of the people is the only means they have of expressing a thousand obscure and yet deep feelings which cannot find an outlet in words!…

The multitude was not hostile. The people did not know what they wanted. Until they did know they were content to amuse themselves—after their own nervous, brutal fashion, still without malice—to amuse themselves with pushing and being pushed, insulting the police and each other. But little by little, they lost their ardor. Those who came up from behind got tired of being able to see nothing, and were the more provocative inasmuch as they ran little risk behind the shelter of the human barricade in front of them. Those in front, being crushed between those who were pushing and those who were offering resistance, grew more and more exasperated as their position became more and more intolerable: the force of the current pushing them on increased their own force an hundredfold. And all of them, as they were squeezed closer and closer together, like cattle, felt the warmth of the whole herd creeping through their breasts and their loins: and it seemed to them then that they formed a solid block: and each was all, each was a giant with the arms of Briareus. Every now and then a wave of blood would surge to the heart of the thousand-headed monster: eyes would dart hatred, murderous cries would go up. Men cowering away in the third and fourth row began to throw stones. Whole families were looking down from the windows of the houses: it was like being at the play: they excited the mob and waited with a little thrill of agonized impatience for the troops to charge.

Christophe forced his way through the dense throng with elbows and knees, like a wedge. Olivier followed him. The living mass parted for a moment to let them pass and closed again at once behind them. Christophe was in fine fettle. He had entirely forgotten that only five minutes ago he had denied the possibility of an upheaval of the people. Hardly had he set foot inside the stream than he was swept along: though he was a foreigner in this crowd of Frenchmen and a stranger to their demands, yet he was suddenly engulfed by them: little he cared what they wanted: he wanted it too: little he cared whither they were going: he was going too, drinking in the breath of their madness.

Olivier was dragged along after him, but it was no joy to him; he saw clearly, he never lost his selfconsciousness, and was a thousand times more a stranger to the passions of these people who were his people than Christophe, and yet he was carried away by them like a piece of wreckage. His illness, which had weakened him, had also relaxed everything that bound him to life. How far removed he felt from these people!… Being free from the delirium that was in them and having all his wits at liberty, his mind took in the minutest details. It gave him pleasure to gaze at the bust of a girl standing in front of him and at her pretty, white neck. And at the same time he was disgusted by the sickly, thick smell that was given off from the close-packed heap of bodies.

“Christophe!” he begged.

Christophe did not hear him.

“Christophe!”

“Eh?”

“Let’s go home.”

“You’re afraid?” said Christophe.

He pushed on. Olivier followed him with a sad smile.

A few rows in front of them, in the danger zone where the people were so huddled together as to form a solid barricade, he saw his friend the little hunchback perched on the roof of a newspaper kiosk. He was clinging with both hands, and crouching in a most uncomfortable position, and laughing as he looked over the wall of soldiers: and then he would turn again and look back at the crowd with an air of triumph. He saw Olivier and beamed at him: then once more he began to peer across the soldiers, over the square, with his eyes wide staring in hope and expectation … of what?—Of the thing which was to come to pass…. He was not alone. There were many, many others all around him waiting for the miracle! And Olivier, looking at Christophe, saw that he too was expecting it.

He called to the boy and shouted to him to come down. Emmanuel pretended not to hear and looked away. He had seen Christophe. He was glad to be in a position of peril in the turmoil, partly to show his courage to Olivier, partly to punish him for being with Christophe.

Meanwhile they had come across some of their friends in the crowd,—Coquard, with his golden beard, who expected nothing more than a little jostling and crushing, and with the eye of an expert was watching for the moment when the vessel would overflow. Farther on they met the fair Berthe, who was slanging the people about her and getting roughly mauled. She had succeeded in wriggling through to the front row, and she was hurling insults at the police. Coquard came up to Christophe. When Christophe saw him he began to chaff him:

“What did I tell you? Nothing is going to happen.”

“That remains to be seen!” said Coquard. “Don’t you be too sure. It won’t be long before the fun begins.”

“Rot!” said Christophe.

At that very moment the cuirassiers, getting tired of having stones flung at them, marched forward to clear the entrances to the square: the central body came forward at a double. Immediately the stampede began. As the Gospel has it, the first were last. But they took good care not to be last for long. By way of covering their confusion the runaways yelled at the soldiers following them and screamed: “Assassins!” long before a single blow had been struck. Berthe wriggled through the crowd like an eel, shrieking at the top of her voice. She rejoined her friends; and taking shelter behind Coquard’s broad back, she recovered her breath, pressed close up against Christophe, gripped his arm, in fear or for some other reason, ogled Olivier, and shook her fist at the enemy, and screeched. Coquard took Christophe’s arm and said:

“Let’s go to Amélie’s,”

They had very little way to go. Berthe had preceded them with Graillot and a few workmen. Christophe was on the point of entering followed by Olivier. The street had a shelving ridge. The pavement, by the creamery, was five or six steps higher than the roadway. Olivier stopped to take a long breath after his escape from the crowd. He disliked the idea of being in the poisoned air of the restaurant and the clamorous voices of these fanatics. He said to Christopher:

“I’m going home.”

“Very well, then, old fellow,” said Christophe. “I’ll rejoin you in an hour from now.”

“Don’t run any risks, Christophe!”

“Coward!” said Christophe, laughing.

He turned into the creamery.

Olivier walked along to the corner of the shop. A few steps more and he would be in a little by-street which would take him out of the uproar. The thought of his little protege crossed his mind. He turned to look for him. He saw him at the very moment when Emmanuel had slipped down from his coign of vantage and was rolling on the ground being trampled underfoot by the rabble: the fugitives were running over his body: the police were just reaching the spot. Olivier did not stop to think: he rushed down the steps and ran to his aid. A navvy saw the danger, the soldiers with drawn sabers. Olivier holding out his hand to the boy to help him up, the savage rush of the police knocked them both over. He shouted out, and in his turn rushed in. Some of his comrades followed at a run. Others rushed down from the threshold of the restaurant, and, on their cries, came those who had already entered. The two bodies of men hurled themselves at each other’s throats like dogs. And the women, standing at the top of the steps, screamed and yelled.—So Olivier, the aristocrat, the essentially middle-class nature, released the spring of the battle, which no man desired less than he.

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