The romance of my childhood and youth

General curiosity is insatiable with regard to the small details concerning the habits and customs of an author if he is already celebrated, or is likely to achieve success.

But, on the other hand, if the present custom weakens to an infinite degree the elements of personal appreciation of any work, it adds to knowledge of the author’s portrait, which stands out from all these inquiries and indiscretions, with traits of physiognomy that possess, perhaps, more lively interest.

We must obviously submit to the custom, and ask ourselves whether, by means of much observation of both the author and his work, we may not obtain a broader and more enlightened criticism, uniting the author’s intentions with the result achieved by his book.

[ix]Or else is it because, overworked as we are, we have perhaps become unable to enjoy the delight of reading a book for itself, containing, by chance, no anecdotes which please us—nothing, in fact, outside the actual interest of the book itself, but forming part of it; or is it that we have no longer any time for profound or matured reflection, or judgments expressed in axioms, the terms of which have long been weighed in the balance of thought?

It requires time to discover the master thought of any work of real worth, in order to disclose its high morality, its art tendencies.

The maddening rule of our new mode of life being the desire to know all things as quickly as possible, we ask the author, whose motives are known beforehand, what he meant to say, or do, or prove, and in this way we think to gain time and not run the risk of “idle dreaming.”

Ah! as to dreams, shall we speak of them?—golden money, no longer current, which we scatter behind us in our haste to pursue what others are pursuing. If, by chance, we find it again, how soiled by the road’s dust it seems!

The asking of a question or two, and even the explanation of a phenomenon which is often as clear as day, can be undertaken as we hurry along, but simply to examine the “whys and wherefores”[x] of things, or to attempt to discover the laws of facts, and group them methodically, giving the logical relation of these laws in general origins—verily, only a few vulgar slang words can express the impression made on the minds of those who wish to be considered “modern men,” with respect to these very problems of which we, of the elder generation, are so fond, and which are called by the moderns—“stuff.”

“In writing your memoirs you encourage what you appear to condemn,” people will doubtless say to me. But I condemn nothing. I simply note a state of mind and ways of life. I feel sure that if in “my time” an author’s work held the first place, and that if nowadays the author himself excites disproportionate interest, the future will establish an equilibrium between these two extremes.

If the candles of literary people of the present time are burned at both ends, it is, perhaps, because there remain few embers of the luminous torches of the past. The authors of the future will be obliged to renew their provision of wood, which must burn itself out, normally, in the middle.

However this may be, it is, perhaps, profitable to register the facts in a fleeting epoch for the use of those who are running in pursuit of an epoch which is to take its place.

[xi]Old people are fond of describing what took place in former times, and they have a real mission so to do if only they will refrain from trying to enforce upon us the superiority of the teaching of that which has disappeared, and if they will tell their story simply, leaving a younger generation to discover its lesson, and from it form conclusions.

Those of the older generation who educated us thought sentimentalism and humanity, which appeared at first brutally, and then were gloriously driven back by the Terror and the Empire, had returned again triumphantly.

Moreover, the Revolution and Bonaparte had opened our gates to a foreign influx. Our fathers gave shelter to every Utopian idea brought from Italy, Germany, Austria, and Russia. The mixture was so confusing that all manner of extravagant things sprang from it.

The consciences of the “men of progress” were concentrated around the social conception of the “suffering classes,” and the political conception involved in the crimes of the “higher classes.” Love and indignation were the food with which they fed our youthful hearts.

The Bible, the socialism of Christ, and examples of sublimity of character taken from Greece and Rome, became the strange mixture that was the[xii] guiding spirit of our fathers’ action, and inspired our primal ideas.

People of reason, who possessed solid common-sense, the Bourgeois, were, naturally, to a much overrated degree, our enemies.

We are, in all our primal impulses, the children of the men of 1848; our very reaction was born of their action.

We have been led on solely by their example; haunted, just as they were, by the feeling that we should add to our unlimited dreams what they had deemed to be the counterpoise to the great love of humanity, namely, science; but a science which we thought was to bring relief to the worker, by machinery, a cheaper rate of living to the poor, and a more equal distribution of wealth to the unfortunate.

“The rights of man,” that oft-repeated phrase which has never been rightly understood by those who called themselves its defenders, possessed for them, before, during, and after 1848, only one significance, namely: the realisation by society in general of the greatest sum of possible happiness for each individual.

Those who at that time proclaimed themselves socialists—and this tradition exists among the same class of the present day—took no account of general[xiii] society, of its affiliations, of its necessary average existence, or of its “badly cut coats,” so to speak.

They refused to see opposed to the rights of the socialist man the general social rights, which mean, in plain words, the rights of each individual man, and which, summed up, become the rights of all men.

Religious dogma alone can affirm the absolute right of an individual soul, because each soul comes in contact with other souls only in the infinite. Absoluteness can only be realised in evolutions towards death. But contact with living men has its contingencies which society pulverises well or badly, according as individuals mingle together happily or not, or according as they disturb society or serve it well.

Social problems, whether robed in dithyrambic form or clad in offensive rags, are unable to force upon society reforms which are laid down in names unless society has become ready to assimilate them; otherwise they upset society, agitate it, and throw it back on reaction.

I am the daughter of a man who was a sincere sectarian, disinterested even to self-sacrifice, and who dreamed of absolute liberty and absolute equality. Until the terrible year of 1870, his mind[xiv] mastered my own. For an instant, during the days of the Commune, he thought his dreams were about to be realised. Were he alive now, he would be a disciple of Monsieur Brisson, whose political ancestor he was. He would have pursued only one idea: the upsetting of everything.