Complete Works of Emile Zola (1618 page)

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Don’t talk to me of your God, who has led men to nothing but error and ruin!... If I get no results out of my pupils, it is, in the first place, because they are taken away from me too soon, and are put into the factory; and, in the second place, because discipline is more and more relaxed, so that the master has lost nearly all his authority. On my word! if I were allowed to give them a few thrashings it is my belief it would stir up their brains.”

And as Sœurette cried out at this, he explained. He thought that there was but one means of safety in the midst of general corruption, and that was to make children bend to discipline in a system of liberty, to make them true republicans, by force if necessary, so that they might never be anything else. His dream was to make every school-boy a servant of the State, to make him sacrifice to the State his whole individuality. He saw nothing better than one lesson to be learned by all in the same way, and to the same end — namely, to serve the community. Such was his hard, sad religion of a democracy set free from the past, kept in order by fear of punishment, condemned once more to forced labor, and its happiness dependent on the ferule of a master.

“Apart from Catholicism men wander in darkness,” repeated the Abbé, persistently.

“Oh! that’s too much!” cried Hermeline. “Admit that, and we should have to build our social system over again.”

Of course, the priest was well aware of the great fight that was taking place between Catholicism and science, the victory of the latter becoming more complete year by year. But he would not recognize it, nor would he admit that his church was becoming more empty day by day.

“Catholicism!” he replied its structure is so solid, so eternal, so divine, that you are yourselves trying to copy it when you are endeavouring to construct your kind of an atheistic State in which God is to be replaced by some kind of a machine intended to instruct men and govern the world.”

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A machine! And why not?” cried Hermeline, exasperated by what he felt to be truth in the priest’s attack. “Rome has never been anything but a great press which has squeezed all the blood out of the world.”

When this discussion threatened to become violent, Dr. Novarre interposed, saying, with his conciliatory, smiling air:

“Come, come; don’t excite yourselves. You were just about to come to an agreement, since you were both accusing each other of copying the other’s religion.”

The doctor, short and slim, with a delicate nose and bright, eager eyes, was a tolerant man, very kindly, but a little ironical, who, having given himself heart and soul to science, did not choose to let himself be too much excited over social and political questions. He said, like his great friend, Jordan, that he never espoused any truth until it had been scientifically demonstrated. Very modest, somewhat timid, and without ambition, he was only desirous to take the best possible care of his patients. He had no especial passion except for the cultivation of roses, in his little walled garden, where he lived by himself in peace and happiness.

Up to this point Luc had been satisfied to listen. Then what he had read during the night came back to him, and he began to speak.

“The most terrible thing in our schools,” he said, “is that they start on the idea that man is vile, that he begins life naturally inclined to insubordination and to idleness, and that nothing but a system of rewards and punishments will bring good out of him. In this way the acquisition of knowledge has been made a torture; our brains have been worked as mercilessly over books as manual labor has overtaxed the workman. Our professors have been changed into such men as in old days stood over the galley-slaves with scourges; their mission is to cramp the intelligence of our children by running them all into the same mould, with no regard to their different individualities. They thus become murderers of originality; they crush out the spirit of criticism, of private judgment; they hinder any awakening of personal talent; they smother it under a mass of ready-made ideas of officially accepted truths. And the worst part of the system is that the character of the pupil suffers as much as his intelligence, and that this kind of instruction will turn out incapables and hypocrites.”

Hermeline felt himself personally attacked. He broke in by saying, sharply:

“But how would you like us to proceed, monsieur? Come and take possession of my place, and you will soon see how many pupils you will get if you do not bring them under the same discipline, and make them look on you as one who to them is the incarnation of authority.”

“The school-master,” said Luc, dreamily, “should have no task before him except to awaken the energies of his scholars. He is a professor to teach them individual energy; his mission is only to discover a child’s aptitude, by asking him questions and by developing his personality. Men have an insatiable desire to learn and to know, which ought to be the only spur to study, not punishments or rewards; and it is evident that we ought to facilitate for every one the study he is most inclined to. It should be made attractive to him; he should be induced to engage in it and to go on with it by the force of his own comprehension, and with the pleasure that may arise from continual discoveries. To make men by training them to be men — is not that the problem of instruction? Will not the question of education be thus solved?”

The Abbe Merle, who was finishing his cup of coffee, shrugged his broad shoulders, and said, with priestly dogmatism:

“Man is sinful; he can be saved only by penitence. Idleness, one of the capital sins, can only be cast out by labor. Labor was the punishment God inflicted on the first man after the Fall.”

“But that is a mistake, abbé,” said Dr. Novarre, very quietly. “Laziness is a malady when it is real laziness — I mean when the body refuses to work, or cannot bear the least fatigue. You may be sure, then, that this invincible inertia is the sign of great internal troubles. What other cases have you ever seen of positive idleness? There is no such thing as men idle by race, by habit, or by preference. Is a society woman who dances all night idle? Does she not wear out her eyes, does she not expend her muscular strength far more than a seamstress who sits nailed to her little table doing embroidery all day long? Your men of pleasure who are always attending parties and balls, don’t they work as hard as laborers at their workbench? And then remember how, when we have finished some distasteful task, with what pleasure we fling ourselves into recreation — violent recreation it may be, which strains all our muscles. This shows that work — or physical fatigue — is not repugnant to human beings, unless they do not like the kind of labor. And if men could have only such work as they like imposed on them, there would never be any man who was lazy.”

Here Hermeline shrugged his shoulders.

“Ask a child which he likes best — grammar or arithmetic. He will tell you that he does not like either. We know by experience that a child is like a young tree that must be trained and pruned.”

“And he can only be corrected,” said the priest, for once agreeing with the school-master, “by crushing out all that original sin has planted within him — all that is ignoble and devilish.”

There was silence. Sœurette had been listening attentively to the discussion, while Jordan, with his eyes fixed on something out of the window, sat dreamily looking at the great trees. And Luc realized that this pessimistic conception of Catholicism had been adopted by the apostles of progress, who had founded their ideas of the State on a basis of authority. Both held man to be worthy of damnation — lost by the Fall, then redeemed, and ready to be lost once more. A jealous God, an angry God, seemed always to treat man like a disobedient child. All his passions, bad or good, for ages it had been thought proper to suppress. Men had endeavored to kill the man within the man. Fourier again came into Luc’s mind, with what he said of vehement inclinations utilized, ennobled, and brought back to be necessary creative energies; of man set free from being crushed by unreal religions, which are a species of social police to maintain the usurpation of the rich and the powerful — all came back to him.

Then, in his reverie, Luc said to himself, as if he were speaking aloud:

“It would suffice if we could convince all men of the truth — that the greatest happiness of each is in the greatest happiness of the greatest number.”

But Hermeline and the abbé began to laugh.

“That would be a grand thing, indeed,” said the schoolmaster, ironically. “To awaken a man’s energies, you would begin by destroying all rewards. Tell me, should men work to benefit others and not themselves, what lever would you have to stimulate them to action? Personal interest is the fire under the pot; you may see it in the inception of everything. And you would annihilate it, you would begin by depriving man of his instinct of self-preservation, you, who stand up for his instincts.... I suppose you count upon his conscience, on his notions of honor and of duty?”

“I do not need to count upon them,” said Luc, very quietly. “Love of self, as we have hitherto understood it, has given us a horrible society, so full of hatreds and of sufferings that we may well think we have a right to try some other motive power. But, I repeat, I accept the love of self, if you mean by it the legitimate desire, the need that we all feel to gain what will make us happy. Far from destroying man’s interest in himself, I would increase it; I would reinforce it by making it what it ought to be, by making him a member of a happy community, where the happiness of all should increase all others’ happiness. We have only to be convinced that to work for others is working for ourselves. Social injustice, like eternal hatred, is a concentration of individual suffering; and that is why an understanding among ourselves is necessary, a reorganization of labor based on the sure truth that our highest happiness will be realized on the day when all are happy alike and all men are our neighbors.” Hermeline laughed; and the Abbé Merle again interposed:

“To love our neighbors as ourselves is the teaching of our Divine Master. But He also told us that happiness was not of this world; and that it is folly — worse than folly — to expect to realize on this earth the kingdom of God, which is only to be found in heaven.”

“But it will be realized upon the earth some day,” said Luc. “All the efforts of humanity in the way of progress, all science, and the future community of which I spoke, will realize it.”

But the school-master, who was no longer listening to him, turned on the priest.

“Ah, no, abbé; don’t tell us any more about paradise, that promise with which you deceive poor dupes. The Jesus of whom you speak was one of us. He was a revolutionist in his own day — a free-thinker.”

The battle here began again. Once more Dr. Novarre had to separate them; agreeing first with one, then with the other. As always happens in such cases, the questions they debated remained unsettled, for no positive solution was ever offered. Coffee had been long over when Jordan, the dreamer, spoke the last word:

“The only truth is to be found in labor. This world will some day be just what labor has made of it.”

Sœurette, who had earnestly and excitedly listened to Luc, without joining in the conversation, now spoke of a plan she had for establishing a place where women employed in the factories might leave their little children. Then the priest, the doctor, and the teacher became all of one mind; their conversation was friendly, carried on in low tones, as they talked over plans by which this asylum might be conducted so as to avoid the abuses that had crept into similar establishments. In the park the shadows of the great trees grew longer on the grass, while the wood-pigeons hopped about the lawns in the soft sunshine of September.

It was quite four o’clock before the three guests left La Crêcherie. For the sake of exercise, Jordan and Luc walked with them as far as the first houses of the town. Then, as they both strolled back over the stony moors that Jordan left uncultivated, he wanted to turn a little aside so as to pass where Lange, the potter, lived. He had let him build himself a little place in one corner of his property, below the blast-furnace, but had asked no rent from him. Lange, as well as Morfain, had made his dwelling in a rocky hollow, worn away by former torrents, at the foot of the Monts Bleuses, alongside of the great cliff which terminated the mountain promontory. And, finally, he had built three kilns near the place where he dug his clay, and there he lived without either God or master, free and independent, alone with his pottery.

“He is, without doubt, an extremist,” said Jordan, whom Luc was questioning concerning this man, in whom he took an interest. “And what you tell me passed the other evening in the Rue de Brias does not surprise me. He has had the luck to be liberated, or the affair might have turned out badly for him; he was pretty well compromised. But you have no idea how intelligent he is, and what a sense of art he shows in his earthen pots, although he has never had any instruction. He was born here. His father and mother were poor; he was left an orphan when he was ten years old, and got employment with some masons; afterwards he was apprenticed to a potter, and he became his own master, as he said, laughing, when I allowed him to build his little place up here.... I take an especial interest in his experiments with fire-clay, for, as you know, I am trying to discover what will resist the terrible heat of our electric furnaces.”

Luc, raising his eyes, saw among shrubs and furze bushes, surrounded by a little wall of rough stones, the abode of Lange, which was like the hut of some savage. And, as on the threshold a tall, handsome, dark girl was standing, Luc asked:

“Is he married?”

“No; but he lives here with this girl, who is at once his wife and slave.... It is quite a little story. Five years ago, when she was barely fifteen, he found her ill and dying in a ditch, abandoned probably by some band of gypsies. No one ever knew precisely where she came from. She will not answer when she is asked questions. She had no shoes on her feet when he picked her up. Even now she scarcely ever puts any on except when she goes to town, and so all the country, and Lange himself, calls her nothing but Barefoot. He has no other operative. Barefoot is his assistant, and helps him drag his little cart when he takes his pottery from fair to fair. It is his way of disposing of his products, and they are well known in all this part of the country.”