All these comfortable people invoked divers principles: some followed the bidding of their hearts, others that of their reason, others again only their interests: some associated their way of thinking with the Gospel, others with M. Bergson, others, again, with Karl Marx, with Proudhon, with Joseph de Maistre, with Nietzsche, or with M. Sorel. There were men who were revolutionaries to be in the fashion, some who were so out of snobbishness, and some from shyness: some from hatred, others from love: some from a need of active, hotheaded heroism: and some in sheer slavishness, from the sheeplike quality of their minds. But all, without knowing it, were at the mercy of the wind. All were no more than those whirling clouds of dust which are to be seen like smoke in the far distance on the white roads in the country, clouds of dust foretelling the coming of the storm.
Olivier and Christophe watched the wind coming. Both of them had strong eyes. But they used them in different ways. Olivier, whose clear gaze, in spite of himself, pierced to the very inmost thoughts of men, was saddened by their mediocrity: but he saw the hidden force that sustained them: he was most struck by the tragic aspect of things. Christophe was more sensible of their comic aspect. Men interested him, ideas not at all. He affected a contemptuous indifference towards them. He laughed at Socialistic Utopias. In a spirit of contradiction and out of instinctive reaction against the morbid humanitarianism which was the order of the day, he appeared to be more selfish than he was: he was a self-made man, a sturdy upstart, proud of his strength of body and will, and he was a little too apt to regard all those who had not his force as shirkers. In poverty and alone he had been able to win through: let others do the same! Why all this talk of a social question? What question? Poverty?
“I know all about that,” he would say. “My father, my mother, I myself, we have been through it. It’s only a matter of getting out of it.”
“Not everybody can,” Olivier would reply. “What about the sick and the unlucky?”
“One must help them, that’s all. But that is a very different thing from setting them on a pinnacle, as people are doing nowadays. Only a short while ago people were asserting the odious doctrine of the rights of the strongest man. Upon my word, I’m inclined to think that the rights of the weakest are even more detestable: they’re sapping the thought of today, the weakest man is tyrannizing over the strong, and exploiting them. It really looks as though it has become a merit to be diseased, poor, unintelligent, broken—and a vice to be strong, upstanding, happy in fighting, and an aristocrat in brains and blood. And what is most absurd of all is this, that the strong are the first to believe it. … It’s a fine subject for a comedy, my dear Olivier!”
“I’d rather have people laugh at me than make other people weep.”
“Good boy!” said Christophe. “But, good Lord, who ever said anything to the contrary? When I see a hunchback, my back aches for him. … We’re playing the comedy, we won’t write it.”
He did not suffer himself to be bitten by the prevalent dreams of social justice. His vulgar common sense told him and he believed that what had been would be.
“But if anybody said that to you about art you’d be up in arms against him.”
“May be. Anyhow, I don’t know about anything except art. Nor do you. I’ve no faith in people who talk about things without knowing anything about them.”
Olivier’s faith in such people was no greater. Both of them were inclined to push their distrust a little too far: they had always held aloof from politics. Olivier confessed, not without shame, that he could not remember ever having used his rights as an elector: for the last ten years he had not even entered his name at the mairie.
“Why,” he asked, “should I take part in a comedy which I know to be futile? Vote? For whom should I vote? I don’t see any reason for choosing between two candidates, both of whom are unknown to me, while I have only too much reason to expect that, directly the election is over, they will both be false to all their professions of faith. Keep an eye on them? Remind them of their duty? It would take up the whole of my life, with no result. I have neither time, nor strength, nor the rhetorical weapons, nor sufficient lack of scruple, nor is my heart steeled against all the disgust that action brings. Much better to keep clear of it all. I am quite ready to submit to the evil. But at least I won’t subscribe to it.”
But, in spite of his excessive clear-sightedness, Olivier, to whom the ordinary routine of politics was repulsive, yet preserved a chimerical hope in a revolution. He knew that it was chimerical: but he did not discard it. It was a sort of racial mysticism in him. Not for nothing does a man belong to the greatest destructive and constructive people of the Western world, the people who destroy to construct and construct to destroy—the people who play with ideas and life, and are forever making a clean sweep so as to make a new and better beginning, and shed their blood in pledge.
Christophe was endowed with no such hereditary Messianism. He was too German to relish much the idea of a revolution. He thought that there was no changing the world. Why all these theories, all these words, all this futile uproar?
“I have no need,” he would say, “to make a revolution—or long speeches about revolution—in order to prove to my own satisfaction that I am strong. I
