Complete Works of Emile Zola (1701 page)

But, in Geneviève, Marc found a valuable, an admirable helpmate. She renewed the exploits she had accomplished at Jonville, she managed to provide for all the requirements of the home, without allowing much of its penury to be seen. She had to attend to everything — cooking, washing, and mending — and Louise was ever all smiles and smartness in her light-hued little frocks. If Mignot, according to usage, had taken his meals with his principal, the money paid for his board might have helped Geneviève slightly. But the young bachelor, who had his own quarters on the other side of the landing, preferred to patronise a neighbouring eating-house, perhaps in order to mark his hostility and to avoid compromising himself by any companionship with a man for whom Mademoiselle Rouzaire predicted the worst catastrophes. He, Mignot, with his paltry monthly salary of seventy-one francs and twenty-five centimes, led the usual wretched life of a young assistant-master, ill clad and ill fed, with no other diversion within his reach than that of fishing on Thursdays and Sundays. This rendered him all the more ill-tempered and distrustful, as though indeed it were Marc’s fault if he partook of such sorry messes at the eating-house. Yet Geneviève displayed solicitude for his welfare. She offered to mend his linen, and one evening, when he was suffering from a cold, she hastened to make him some herb-drink. As she and her husband said, the young fellow was not bad-hearted, he was badly advised. Perhaps, by showing him some kindness and equity, they might at last win him over to better sentiments.

That which Geneviève dared not say, for fear of grieving Marc, was that the home suffered particularly from the quarrel with Madame Duparque. In former days the grandmother had provided Louise with clothes, made presents, and rendered assistance at difficult times. Now that the young people were at Maillebois, only a few doors distant from the old lady, she might often have helped them. Under the circumstances it was very embarrassing to live so near, and to be obliged to turn one’s head aside every time one met her. On two occasions little Louise, who, being only three years of age, could not understand the situation, held out her arms and called when the old lady passed, in such wise that the fated reconciliation ended by taking place. Geneviève, on returning home one day, in a state of great emotion, related that she had yielded to circumstances and had embraced her grandmother and mother on meeting them on the Place des Capucins, where Louise, in all innocence, had run forward and cast herself into their arms.

At this confession Marc, in his turn, kissed his wife, saying with a good-natured smile: ‘But that is all right, my darling. For your sake and Louise’s I am well pleased with the reconciliation. It was bound to come, and if I am on bad terms with those ladies you surely don’t imagine that I am such a barbarian as to demand the same of you.’

‘No, my friend,’ Geneviève replied, ‘only it is very embarrassing in a family when the wife visits a place where her husband cannot go.’

‘Why should it be embarrassing? For the sake of peace it is best that I should not call on your grandmother again, for I cannot possibly agree with her. But there is nothing to prevent you and the little one from visiting her and your mother also, from time to time.’

Geneviève had become grave, her eyes fell, and while she reflected she quivered.

I should have preferred not to go to grandmother’s without you,’ she said.  ‘feel firmer when we are together.

... But you are right, I understand that it would be painful for you to accompany me, and, on the other hand, it is difficult for me to break off now.’

Thus the question was settled. At first Geneviève went but once a week to the little house on the Place des Capucins, taking Louise with her, and spending an hour there during the school work of Marc, who contented himself with bowing to the ladies when he met them.

And now, for a period of two years, with infinite patience and good nature, Marc prosecuted the conquest of his pupils amid hostile surroundings and innumerable worries. He was a born teacher, one who knew how to become a child again in order that children might understand him. And, in particular, he strove to be gay; he willingly joined in his pupils’ play, behaving as if he were simply a companion, an elder brother. And in the school work his strength lay in his power to cast his science aside, to place himself within the reach of young and imperfectly awakened minds, by finding easy explanatory words suited to each occasion. It was as if he himself were still somewhat ignorant, and participated in the delight of learning. Heavily laden as the curriculum might be, what with reading, writing, grammar, orthography, composition, arithmetic, history, geography, elementary science, singing, gymnastics, notions of agriculture, manual work, morals and civic instruction, he passed nothing by until the lads had understood it. All his first efforts indeed were concentrated on method, in order that nothing taught might be lost, but that everything might be positively and fully assimilated.

Ah! how fervently did Marc devote himself to that sowing and cultivation of truth! He strove to plan things in such wise that truth might impose itself on his pupils by its own power, nourish their expanding minds, and become both their flesh and their brains. And what truth it was! It so happens that every error claims to be truth. Does not even the Roman Catholic Church, though based on absurd dogmas, pretend that it is the sole truth? Thus Marc began by teaching that there is no truth outside the pale of reason, logic, and particularly experiment. When the son of a peasant or a workman is told by his schoolmaster that the world is round and revolves in space, he accepts the statement upon trust just as he accepts the statements made to him by the priest on matters of religion at the Catechism class. In order that he may appreciate the difference, experiment must show him the scientific certainty of the former statement. All so-called revealed truth is falsehood; experimental truth alone is accurate — one, entire, eternal. Marc therefore at the outset found it necessary to rebut the Catholic catechism by the scientific catechism. He took the world and mankind as they were explained by science, and set them forth in their living reality and their march towards a continual and ever more and more perfect future. There was no possibility of real amelioration, liberation, and happiness otherwise than by truth — that is, by knowledge of the conditions in which mankind exists and progresses. All the craving for knowledge as a means for rapid attainment to health and peace bore within itself its method of free expansion, science ceasing to be a dead letter, and becoming a source of life, an excitant of temperament and character.

Marc, as far as possible, left books upon one side, in order to compel his pupils to judge things for themselves. They only knew things well when they had seen or touched them. He never asked them to believe in a phenomenon until he had proved its reality by experiment. The whole domain of unproven facts was set aside, in reserve, for future investigation. But he demonstrated that with the help of the acquired truths mankind might already rear for itself a large and splendid home of security and brotherliness. To see things for oneself, to convince oneself of what one ought to believe, to develop one’s reasoning powers and one’s individuality in accordance with the reasons of existence and action, such were the principles which governed Marc’s teaching method, the only one by which true men might be created.

But knowledge was not sufficient — a social bond, a spiritual link of perpetual solidarity was required. And this Marc found in Justice. He had often noticed with what a flash of rebellion a boy, molested in his rights, would exclaim: ‘That isn’t fair!’ Indeed, any act of injustice raises a tempest in the depths of those young minds, and brings them frightful suffering. This is because the idea of justice in them is absolute. Mark turned to good use the candour of equity, the innate need of truth and justice, that one finds in children when life has not yet inclined them to mendacious and iniquitous compromises. By way of Truth towards Justice — such was the road along which he strove to direct his pupils, as often as possible requiring them to judge themselves when they happened to be in fault. If they had told a falsehood, he made them admit the wrong they had done both to their schoolfellows and to themselves. If they were disorderly and delayed lessons, he showed them that they were the first to suffer. At times a culprit spontaneously admitted his offence, thus earning forgiveness. Emulation in equity ended by animating those young people; they learnt to rival one another in frankness. At times, of course, there was trouble, conflict, catastrophe, for all this was only a beginning, and several generations of schoolboys would be needed for schools to become the real abodes of healthy and happy life. Marc, however, rejoiced over the slightest results that he obtained, convinced as he was that if knowledge were primarily essential for all progress, nothing definitive with respect to the happiness of mankind could be achieved without the assistance of the spirit of justice. Why did the
bourgeois
class, which was the best educated, become rotten so soon? Was it not by reason of its iniquities, its denial of justice, its refusal to restore what it had stolen, to give to the humble and the suffering their legitimate share of the world’s good things? Some folk, in condemning education, cited the ignominious downfall of the
bourgeoisie
as an example, and accused science of producing a multitude of casteless individuals, thereby increasing the sum of evil and tribulation. And yes, so long as the passion for knowledge merely for its own sake should become keener and keener in a social system which was all falsehood and injustice, it would only add to existing ruins. It was necessary that science should tend towards justice, and bring to the future city of fraternity a moral system of liberty and peace.

Even to be just did not suffice; Marc also required kindliness and affection of his pupils. Nothing could germinate, nothing could flower, unless it were by love and for it. In the universal flame of desire and union one found the focus of the world. Within each human being was implanted an imperious need to mingle with all others; and personal action, liberty, and individuality were like the play of different organs, all dependent on the universal Being. If each individual man, even when isolated, represented so much will and power, his actions, at all events, only began to count when they exercised an influence on the community. To love, to make oneself loved, to make all others love: the teacher’s
rôle
was found entire in those three propositions, those three degrees of human instruction. To love — Marc loved his pupils with his whole heart, giving himself to them unreservedly, knowing full well that one must indeed love if one would teach, for only love has the power of touching and convincing. To make oneself loved — that was a task to which he devoted every hour, fraternising with his boys, never seeking to make them fear him, but, on the contrary, striving to win them over by persuasion, affection, the good-fellowship of an elder brother still growing up among his juniors. To make all others love — that again was his constant thought; he was ever recalling the true saying that the happiness of each is compounded of the happiness of all; and he brought forward the daily example of the progress and pleasure of each boy when the whole class had worked well.

Schooling, no doubt, should have as its objects the culture of energy, the liberation and exaltation of each individuality; a child must judge and act by himself alone in order that as a man he may yield the sum-total of his personal value. But, as Marc put it, would not the crop resulting from such intensive culture increase the common harvest of all? Could a man create true glory for himself without contributing in one or another form to the happiness of others? Education necessarily tended to solidarity, to the universal attraction which was gradually blending mankind into one family. And Marc’s mind and heart were set on sympathy and affection, on a joyous, brotherly school, full of sunshine, song, and laughter, where happiness was taught, where the pupils learnt to live the life of science, truth, and justice, which would come in all its fulness when the way for it should have been sufficiently prepared by generations of children taught as they ought to be.

From the very outset Marc combated the system by which violence, terror, and folly were inculcated in so many children. The right of the stronger, massacre, carnage, the devastation and razing of cities — all those things were set before the young, glorified in books, pictures, and constant, almost hourly, lessons. Great was the display of the bloody pages of history, the wars, the conquests, the names of the captains who had butchered their fellow-beings. The minds of children were enfevered by the crash of arms, by nightmares of slaughter steeping the plains in blood. In the prize books given to them, in the little papers published for their perusal, on the very covers of their copy-books, their eyes encountered the savagery of armies, the burning of fleets, the everlasting calamity of man sinking to the level of a wolf. And when a battle was not depicted there came a miracle, some absurd legend, some source of darkness: a saint delivering a country by his or her prayers, an intervention of Jesus or Mary ensuring the ownership of the world to the wealthy, a Churchman solving political and social difficulties by a mere sign of the Cross. The humble were invariably warned that they must show obedience and resignation. To impress it on their minds in childhood’s hour, stormy skies were shown them, illumined by the lightning of an irritated and cruel Deity. Terror reigned, terror of that Deity, terror too of the devil, a base and hideous terror, which seized on man in his infancy and kept him cowering until he reached the grave after a life which was all dense night, ignorance, and falsehood. In that manner one fashioned only slaves, flesh fit to serve the master’s capricious purposes. And indeed that education of blind faith and perpetual extermination was based on the necessity of ever having soldiers ready to defend the established and iniquitous order of things.

Yet what an antiquated idea it was to cultivate human energy by lessons of warfare! It corresponded with the times when the sword alone decided questions between nation and nation, and between kings and their subjects. But nowadays, if nations still guard themselves — as they do, in formidable fashion, full of anxious dread lest everything should collapse — who will dare to say that victory will rest with the warlike nations? Who, on the contrary, cannot see that the triumphant nation of to-morrow will be that which defeats the others on the economic field, by reorganising the conditions of human toil, and by bringing more justice and happiness to mankind?