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THE WORKS OF ANATOLE FRANCE
IN AN ENGLISH TRANSLATION
EDITED BY FREDERIC CHAPMAN
THE REVOLT OF THE ANGELS
[Illustration]
THE REVOLT
OF THE ANGELS
BY ANATOLE FRANCE
A TRANSLATION BY
MRS. WILFRID JACKSON
[Illustration]
LONDON: JOHN LANE, THE BODLEY HEAD
NEW YORK: DODD, MEAD AND COMPANY
MCMXXIV
Copyright, 1914,
by
DODD, MEAD AND COMPANY
PRINTED IN U. S. A
THE REVOLT OF THE ANGELS
THE REVOLT OF THE ANGELS
CHAPTER I
CONTAINING IN A FEW LINES THE HISTORY OF A FRENCH FAMILY
FROM 1789 TO THE PRESENT DAY
Beneath the shadow of St. Sulpice the ancient mansion of the d'Esparvieu
family rears its austere three stories between a moss-grown fore-court
and a garden hemmed in, as the years have elapsed, by ever loftier and
more intrusive buildings, wherein, nevertheless, two tall chestnut trees
still lift their withered heads.
Here from 1825 to 1857 dwelt the great man of the family, Alexandre
Bussart d'Esparvieu, Vice-President of the Council of State under the
Government of July, Member of the Academy of Moral and Political
Sciences, and author of an _Essay on the Civil and Religious
Institutions of Nations_, in three octavo volumes, a work unfortunately
left incomplete.
This eminent theorist of a Liberal monarchy left as heir to his name his
fortune and his fame, Fulgence-Adolphe Bussart d'Esparvieu, senator
under the Second Empire, who added largely to his patrimony by buying
land over which the Avenue de l'Impératice was destined ultimately to
pass, and who made a remarkable speech in favour of the temporal power
of the popes.
Fulgence had three sons. The eldest, Marc-Alexandre, entering the army,
made a splendid career for himself: he was a good speaker. The second,
Gaétan, showing no particular aptitude for anything, lived mostly in the
country, where he hunted, bred horses, and devoted himself to music and
painting. The third son, René, destined from his childhood for the law,
resigned his deputyship to avoid complicity in the Ferry decrees against
the religious orders; and later, perceiving the revival under the
presidency of Monsieur Fallières of the days of Decius and Diocletian,
put his knowledge and zeal at the service of the persecuted Church.
From the Concordat of 1801 down to the closing years of the Second
Empire all the d'Esparvieus attended mass for the sake of example.
Though sceptics in their inmost hearts, they looked upon religion as an
instrument of government.
Mark and René were the first of their race to show any sign of sincere
devotion. The General, when still a colonel, had dedicated his regiment
to the Sacred Heart, and he practised his faith with a fervour
remarkable even in a soldier, though we all know that piety, daughter of
Heaven, has marked out the hearts of the generals of the Third Republic
as her chosen dwelling-place on earth.
Faith has its vicissitudes. Under the old order the masses were
believers, not so the aristocracy or the educated middle class. Under
the First Empire the army from top to bottom was entirely irreligious.
To-day the masses believe nothing. The middle classes wish to believe,
and succeed at times, as did Marc and René d'Esparvieu. Their brother
Gaétan, on the contrary, the country gentleman, failed to attain to
faith. He was an agnostic, a term commonly employed by the modish to
avoid the odious one of freethinker. And he openly declared himself an
agnostic, contrary to the admirable custom which deems it better to
withhold the avowal.
In the century in which we live there are so many modes of belief and of
unbelief that future historians will have difficulty in finding their
way about. But are we any more successful in disentangling the condition
of religious beliefs in the time of Symmachus or of Ambrose?
A fervent Christian, René d'Esparvieu was deeply attached to the liberal
ideas his ancestors had transmitted to him as a sacred heritage.
Compelled to oppose a Jacobin and atheistical Republic, he still called
himself Republican. And it was in the name of liberty that he demanded
the independence and sovereignty of the Church.
During the long debates on the Separation and the quarrels over the
Inventories, the synods of the bishops and the assemblies of the
faithful were held in his house. While the most authoritatively
accredited leaders of the Catholic party: prelates, generals, senators,
deputies, journalists, were met together in the big green drawing-room,
and every soul present turned towards Rome with a tender submission or
enforced obedience; while Monsieur d'Esparvieu, his elbow on the marble
chimney-piece, opposed civil law to canon law, and protested eloquently
against the spoliation of the Church of France, two faces of other days,
immobile and speechless, looked down on the modern crowd; on the right
of the fire-place, painted by David, was Romain Bussart, a
working-farmer at Esparvieu in shirt-sleeves and drill trousers, with a
rough-and-ready air not untouched with cunning. He had good reason to
smile: the worthy man laid the foundation of the family fortunes when he
bought Church lands. On the left, painted by Gérard in full-dress
bedizened with orders, was the peasant's son, Baron Emile Bussart
d'Esparvieu, prefect under the Empire, Keeper of the Great Seal under
Charles X, who died in 1837, churchwarden of his parish, with couplets
from _La Pucelle_ on his lips.
René d'Esparvieu married in 1888 Marie-Antoinette Coupelle, daughter of
Baron Coupelle, ironmaster at Blainville (Haute Loire). Madame René
d'Esparvieu had been president since 1903 of the Society of Christian
Mothers. These perfect spouses, having married off their eldest daughter
in 1908, had three children still at home--a girl and two boys.
Léon, the younger, aged seven, had a room next to his mother and his
sister Berthe. Maurice, the elder, lived in a little pavilion comprising
two rooms at the bottom of the garden. The young man thus gained a
freedom which enabled him to endure family life. He was rather
good-looking, smart without too much pretence, and the faint smile which
merely raised one corner of his mouth did not lack charm.
At twenty-five Maurice possessed the wisdom of Ecclesiastes. Doubting
whether a man hath any profit of all his labour which he taketh under
the sun he never put himself out about anything. From his earliest
childhood this young hopeful's sole concern with work had been
considering how he might best avoid it, and it was through his remaining
ignorant of the teaching of the _École de Droit_ that he became a doctor
of law and a barrister at the Court of Appeal.
He neither pleaded nor practised. He had no knowledge and no desire to
acquire any; wherein he conformed to his genius whose engaging fragility
he forbore to overload; his instinct fortunately telling him that it was
better to understand little than to misunderstand a lot.
As Monsieur l'Abbé Patouille expressed it, Maurice had received from
Heaven the benefits of a Christian education. From his childhood piety
was shown to him in the example of his home, and when on leaving college
he was entered at the _École de Droit_, he found the lore of the
doctors, the virtues of the confessors, and the constancy of the nursing
mothers of the Church assembled around the paternal hearth. Admitted to
social and political life at the time of the great persecution of the
Church of France, Maurice did not fail to attend every manifestation of
youthful Catholicism; he lent a hand with his parish barricades at the
time of the Inventories, and with his companions he unharnessed the
archbishop's horses when he was driven out from his palace. He showed on
all these occasions a modified zeal; one never saw him in the front
ranks of the heroic band exciting soldiers to a glorious disobedience or
flinging mud and curses at the agents of the law.
He did his duty, nothing more; and if he distinguished himself on the
occasion of the great pilgrimage of 1911 among the stretcher-bearers at
Lourdes, we have reason to fear it was but to please Madame de la
Verdelière, who admired men of muscle. Abbé Patouille, a friend of the
family and deeply versed in the knowledge of souls, knew that Maurice
had only moderate aspirations to martyrdom. He reproached him with his
lukewarmness, and pulled his ear, calling him a bad lot. Anyway, Maurice
remained a believer.
Amid the distractions of youth his faith remained intact, since he left
it severely alone. He had never examined a single tenet. Nor had he
enquired a whit more closely into the ideas of morality current in the
grade of society to which he belonged. He took them just as they came.
Thus in every situation that arose he cut an eminently respectable
figure which he would have assuredly failed to do, had he been given to
meditating on the foundations of morality. He was irritable and
hot-tempered and possessed of a sense of honour which he was at great
pains to cultivate. He was neither vain nor ambitious. Like the majority
of Frenchmen, he disliked parting with his money. Women would never have
obtained anything from him had they not known the way to make him give.
He believed he despised them; the truth was he adored them. He indulged
his appetites so naturally that he never suspected that he had any. What
people did not know, himself least of all,--though the gleam that
occasionally shone in his fine, light-brown eyes might have furnished
the hint--was that he had a warm heart and was capable of friendship.
For the rest, he was, in the ordinary intercourse of life, no very
brilliant specimen.