Complete Works of Emile Zola (1673 page)

The sun was sinking below the horizon, a bright, beautiful summer sun, which had lit up the whole city, and still shone into the chamber of death, which seemed touched up with gold. Luc, in this splendor, seated in his easy-chair, remained long without speaking, his eyes fixed upon the wide horizon. There was deep silence. Josine and Sœurette did not speak; they knelt, one on each side of his chair, while Suzanne, seated beside him, seemed like him to be in a deep reverie. He spoke at last, in a slow voice, which seemed as if it came from afar:

“Yes, our city is yonder. Beauclair regenerated sparkles in the sunshine and has a pure atmosphere; I know, too, that neighboring places — Brias, Magnolles, Formeries, and Saint-Cron — have followed our example and have been rebuilt and reorganized. But yonder, beyond the Monts Bleuses, there are other places, and farther still, beyond the termination of the great plain of Roumagne, there lies a vast world, in the provinces and countries of which nations are engaged in a fierce struggle as they march onward towards the happy city.”

He was again silent and absorbed in thought. He very well knew that the changes he had inaugurated at La Crêcherie and Beauclair were going on in other places everywhere with increased rapidity. The movement begun in manufacturing towns soon spread to the provinces, then to the whole nation, then to neighboring countries. There were no more frontiers, no more chains of mountains, no more impassable oceans; deliverance was flying from one continent to another, sweeping away superstition, and drawing all peoples together.

Finally Luc again spoke, in a weak voice:

“Ah, yes; would that I could know before giving up my work how far its great end has by this time been accomplished! I think that I should sleep better and should take with me into the grave more certainty and hope.”

There was another silence. Josine, Sœurette, and Suzanne sat, as he did, looking, as it were, into the future.

At last Josine spoke:

“I have heard something. A traveller has told me that in a great republic the collectivists have become the masters of power. They have for years been fighting bloody political battles to gain possession of the legislative assembly and of the government. Legally, they could not succeed, but had to make a
coup d’etat,
after they felt that they were strong enough, and were certain of a strong support in the people. As soon as the revolution succeeded they made laws according to their own theoretical programme, or put forth decrees. All private property was confiscated, all the wealth of individuals became the property of the nation, and all tools and machinery were given over to the laborers. There were no more landowners, no capitalists, no owners of factories. The state reigned master of all, and sole owner and capitalist. It regulated all social life, and distributed benefits to whom it would. But this immense revolution, this universal overthrow, these sudden radical changes, did not, of course, take place without a dreadful struggle. Classes do not let themselves be despoiled, even though their wealth may have been ill-gotten. Dreadful outbreaks took place all over the country. Land-owners preferred to be killed on their own door-steps rather than surrender their land. Some destroyed their own wealth, flooded their mines, broke up the railroads, and blew up their factories; while investors burned up their bonds and certificates, and flung their gold and silver into the sea. Some houses had to be besieged; whole cities had to be taken by storm. There was for years a frightful civil war, during which the streets were red with blood and corpses were carried off by the rivers. After that the sovereign state encountered all kinds of difficulties before it could set the new state of things on foot. Values were regulated by the worth of each hour of man’s labor, and the system of
bons de travail
was adopted. At first they appointed a committee to superintend production, and to divide its profits pro rata, according to the work of each man. Afterwards they found that they must have other bureaus of control, and a complicated organization was created which impeded the wheels of the new system. They fell back on the old plan of quartering men in barracks, and no system ever bore more hard on men, or left them less freedom. And yet the change was in the end accomplished; it was one step onward on the way to justice. Labor had become honorable, and wealth daily increased and was more equitably distributed. So at last the wage-earning system violently disappeared, together with capital, money, and commerce. My traveller told me that the collectivist state, once overwhelmed by so many catastrophes and watered by so much blood, is now finally becoming peaceful, and is entering on a period of solidarity and fraternity, with a population industrious and free.”

Josine ended, and looked again thoughtfully into the horizon. Luc gently remarked:

“Yes, that is one of the ways of blood, with which I would never take any part. But now, what matters the shedding of blood, since it has led man to harmony and peace?”

Then, after a silence, Sœurette spoke, her large eyes looking out on the scene before her across the gigantic ridges of the Monts Bleuses:

“I, too, have learned something,” said she; “people who were eye-witnesses have told me frightful things. There is a great empire not far from here, where anarchists have succeeded in blowing up the old structure by bombs and dynamite. The people had suffered long; so they joined the anarchists, and completed the liberating work of destruction. They swept away the very fragments of the old rotten social system. For a long time towns flamed every night like torches, and in them perished the wicked old councillors who refused to give in. Then came that deluge of blood of which the prophets of anarchy had long spoken as a necessity. After that new times came. The watchword was no longer, ‘Give to each man according to his work,’ but ‘All men have a right to life and shelter, food and clothing.’ At first they put all the wealth into one mass, and afterwards began to divide it, not giving anything to any one until they were certain that there was enough for all. Men went to work, and nature, by aid of science, was made so productive that it furnished enormous wealth. They enjoyed great prosperity. There was enough to satisfy the appetites of all even had there been a tenfold larger population. When thievish and parasitical society has disappeared, and money, the source of all crime, has been abolished, with all our savage laws of repression and restriction, which are also responsible for much iniquity, peace will reign in a liberated community where the happiness of each should be the happiness of all. There will be no more authority of any kind, no more laws will be wanted, no more government. If the nihilists availed themselves of fire and sword to make a first extermination, it was because they knew that they could not otherwise destroy completely the old hereditary belief in monarchy and religion, and crush authority forever, root and branch, without this brutal cauterization of the world’s sore. They thought it necessary to cut with one blow the links of hereditary belief in the old errors of the past, and make an end of despotism. They did this thoroughly, hoping that the links they cut apart might never again be united. All politics, they held, were bad and poisoned because they were made up of compromises and concessions — bargains of which the weaker party always got the worst. And on the ruins of the old world, when they had been swept away, they thought the pure and noble dream of anarchy would at length be realized. It was the largest, most ideal conception of a state of peace and happiness for man — man free under a free social system, every creature free from every bond, free to follow his own instincts, to enlarge all his faculties, and to be happy in the possession of his own part of the general wealth.”

Sœurette ceased to speak, and stood thoughtful and silent, with her elbow leaning on the back of Luc’s chair. After a few moments Luc spoke again, though his voice was slower and weaker:

“Yes, in those last days, on the borders of the promised land, the anarchists will rejoin the disciples of Fourier, even as the collectivists themselves will join with others. Their roads may have been different, but their end will be the same — the happiness of all under justice and liberty.”

Then, after musing for a few moments, he resumed:

“How many tears, how much bloodshed, what abominable wars there have been to conquer the fraternal peace desired equally by all! How many centuries of fratricide have there been when the main question was merely who should pass to the right and who to the left, in order to reach first the bourn of final happiness.”

Suzanne, who till then had sat silent, gazing like the rest into the horizon, spoke at last, but her vision had filled her heart with a great thrill of pity:

“Ah! the last war,” said she, “the world’s last battle! It will be so terrible that men forever will break their swords and spike their cannon. At first it was great social crises that were to reconstruct the world, and I have heard fearful accounts from men who came near losing their senses by reason of the fearful shock these things produced in the world. In the mad struggle, when nations were big with projects for a future social system, half Europe arrayed itself on land against the other half, and whole continents engaged in strife; whole squadrons put to sea to establish the authority of their people over the whole earth. No nation had been able to resist the impulse; they were drawn into it by others; they drew up in line, two great armies burning with race hatreds, resolved to annihilate each other, as if in their empty and uncultivated fields where there were two men at work there was one too many. And two great armies of brothers turned to foes met somewhere in the centre of Europe upon vast plains where millions of human beings conveniently could slay each other. The troops spread out over miles and miles, followed by their reserves, such a torrent of men that the fighting lasted for a month. Every day more human flesh was food for bullets and bombs. They even did not have time to carry off the dead. Heaps of bodies served as walls, behind which fresh regiments fought and were killed. Night did not stay the carnage; they killed each other in the darkness. The sun, as it rose each day, shone upon pools of blood, on a field of carnage covered with stacks of dead. There was a roar like thunder everywhere, and whole regiments seemed to disappear in a flash. The men who fought had no need to draw near each other, since cannon threw their shells for miles, and each of such shells swept bare an acre of the earth, poisoning and asphyxiating the very heavens. Balloons, too, sent down balls and bombs to set fire to the cities. Science had invented fresh explosives, murderous engines able to carry death to enormous distances, or to swallow many people at once, like an earthquake. And what a monstrous massacre took place on the last night of that tremendous battle! Never had such a human sacrifice smoked under heaven. More than a million of men lay there in the great devastated fields, beside the rivers, and scattered over the meadows. A man could have walked for hours, seeing everywhere was a harvest of dead bodies, lying with staring eyes and open mouths, seeming to reproach men for their madness. This was the world’s last battle, so completely had its horrors impressed mankind. People woke up from their mad intoxication, and all felt the certainty that war was no longer possible, for science that was meant to make life prosperous was not to be employed in the work of death.”

Suzanne was once more silent, but was trembling, and her eyes were bright. She was dreaming of peace in the future. Luc spoke once more, though he could not raise his voice above a breath:

“Yes, war,” he said, “is dead. The world has reached its last stage. Brothers may now give each other the fraternal kiss; they are in port after their long, rough voyage. My day is done, and now I may go to sleep.” He spoke no more, and Josine, Sœurette, and Suzanne, without moving, waited for his last sigh. They were not sad. They watched with tender fervor in the death chamber, that was so calm and cheerful, so full of sunshine and of flowers. Below the window the happy children were joyously romping. They could hear the voices of the babes and the laughter of the older ones; it was a foretaste of the future happiness of the race upon its march to joy in the future. The great blue sky was over them, and the kindly sun, the father and fertilizer, whose fire had been captured and turned to domestic uses, was shining in the horizon. And under the gleam of its rays of glory sparkled the roofs of Beauclair triumphant, at this time of the day a bee-hive of active workers whom regenerated labor had made happy because there was a just division of wealth among them. And beyond the plain of Roumagne, beyond the Monts Bleuses, a federation of nations was in progress, so that all might be at last one brotherly people, and so the human race should fulfil its destiny of love and truth and peace.

Then Luc, with one last look, took in the town, the horizon, and the fields, where the reform that he had begun was going on so prosperously. His work was done. He had founded his city. And so he died, passing into the unmeasured flood of universal love and life eternal.

THE END

TRUTH