“They tell us about some time in the dark ages when our grandfathers took the Bastille. Well, you would think to hear the fakers talk who run things now that there was nothing left to do, that we were all in heaven; you can see it carved on the monuments. We know that it is not so; there is another pot boiling, another revolution on the way; but the old one did not do such great things for us after all! It’s hard to see plain, hard to trust anybody; there is no one to show us the way, to point to something grand and fine above all these swamps full of toads. … People are always doing something to confuse the issue, nowadays; talking about Right, Justice, Liberty. But that trick is played out. Good enough to die for, but you can’t live for things like that.”
“How about the present?” asked Clerambault.
“Now? There is no going, back, but I often think that if I had to begin over again—”
“When did you change your mind about all these things?”
“That was the funniest thing of all. It was as soon as I was wounded. It was like getting out of bed in the morning. I had hardly slipped a leg out of life than I wanted to draw it in again. I had been so well off, and never thought of it, ass that I was! I can still see myself, as I came to. The ground was all torn up around me, worse even than the bodies themselves lying in heaps, mixed pell-mell like a lot of jackstraws; the ground simply reeked, as if it was itself bleeding. It was pitch dark, and at first I did not feel anything but the cold, except that I knew I was hit, all right. … I didn’t know exactly what piece of me was missing, but I was not in a hurry to find out; I was afraid to know, afraid to stir, there was only one thing I was sure of, that I was alive. If I had only a minute left, I meant to hold on to it. … There was a rocket in the sky; I never thought what it meant, I didn’t care, but the curve it made, and the light, like a bright flower. … I can’t tell you how lovely it seemed. I simply drank it in. … I remembered when I was a child, one night near La Samaritaine. There were fireworks on the river. That child seemed to be someone else, who made me laugh, and yet I was sorry for him; and then I thought that it was a good thing to be alive, and grow up, and have something, somebody, no matter who to love … even that rocket; and then the pain came on, and I began to howl, and didn’t know any more till I found myself in the ambulance. There wasn’t much fun in living then; it felt as if a dog was gnawing my bones … might as well have stayed at the bottom of the hole … but even then how fine it seemed to live the way I used to, just live on every day without pain … think of that! and we never notice it—without any pain at all … none! … it seemed like a dream, and when it did let up for a second, just to taste the air on your tongue, and feel light all over your body—God Almighty! to think that it was like that all the time before, and I thought nothing of it. … What fools we are to wait till we lose a thing before we understand it! And when we do want it, and ask pardon because we did not appreciate it before, all we hear is: ‘Too late!’ ”
“It is never too late,” said Clerambault.
Gillot was only too ready to believe this; as an educated workman he was better armed for the fray than Moreau or Clerambault himself. Nothing depressed him for long; “fall down, pick yourself up again, and try once more,” he would say, and he always believed he could surmount any obstacle that barred his way. He was ready to march against them on his one leg, the quicker the better. Like the others, he was devoted to the idea of revolution and found means to reconcile it with his optimism; everything was to pass off quietly according to him, for he was a man without rancour.
It would not have been safe, however, to trust him too much in this respect; there are many surprises in these plebeian characters, for they are very easily moved and apt to change. Clerambault heard him one day talking with a friend named Lagneau on leave from
