Monsieur Bergeret had a great liking and esteem for craftsmen. As he
did not indulge in any elaborate appointments, he rarely employed
workmen, but, when he did employ one, he tried to enter into
conversation with him, being sure of hearing something worth listening
to.
So he extended a gracious welcome to Roupart, the carpenter, who came
one morning to put up some book-shelves in his study.
Riquet, as was his custom, lay in the depths of his master’s arm-chair,
peacefully slumbering. But the immemorial recollection of the perils
which surrounded his wild forbears in the forests makes the domestic
dog sleep lightly. It should further be said that this hereditary
readiness to awaken promptly was fostered in Riquet by the sense of
duty. Riquet regarded himself as a watch-dog. Firmly convinced that his
mission in life was to guard the house, he was proud and happy in his
vocation.
Unfortunately, however, he thought of all houses as being what they
are in the country or the fables of La Fontaine, standing betwixt
courtyard and garden, of which a dog could make the circuit, sniffing
a soil redolent of the odours of cattle and manure. He had formed no
idea of the plan of the flat occupied by his master on the fifth story
of a great block of buildings. So, unacquainted with the limits of his
domain, he was not quite clear as to what he had to guard. And he was
a ferocious guardian. Supposing that the appearance of this stranger
clad in patched blue trousers, smelling of perspiration and carrying
his load of planks, was imperilling the house, he leaped from his chair
and proceeded to bark at the man, retreating before him with heroic
deliberation. Monsieur Bergeret bade him be silent, and he regretfully
obeyed, sad and surprised to see his devotion useless and his signals
disregarded. His earnest gaze, turned upon his master, seemed to say:
“So you allow this anarchist to enter, dragging his infernal machine
behind him. Well, come what may, I’ve done my duty.”
Then he went back to his chair and slept again. Monsieur Bergeret,
abandoning the scholiasts of Virgil, entered into conversation with
the carpenter. First he questioned him as to the purchasing, cutting
and polishing of different woods and the joining of the planks. He
loved to obtain fresh information and he realized the excellence of the
vulgar tongue.
His face to the wall, Roupart answered him between intervals of long
silence, during which he took measurements. It was then that he
discussed panelling and the making of joints.
“A tenon and mortice joint needs no glue if the work is properly done.”
“Is there not also such a thing as a dove-tail joint?” inquired
Monsieur Bergeret.
“It’s an old-fashioned affair; they don’t make ’em now,” replied the
carpenter.
Thus the professor learned something by listening to the artisan.
Having made sufficient headway with his work, the carpenter turned
to Monsieur Bergeret. His sunken, large-featured face, his brown
complexion, his hair matted over his forehead, and his little goatee,
grey with dust, gave him the look of a bronze figure. His smile, which
was gentle, but came with difficulty, showed his white teeth and gave
him a youthful look.
“I know you, Monsieur Bergeret.”
“Do you really?”
“Oh yes, I know you. That was something a bit out of the common what
you did, and no mistake. You don’t mind my mentioning it, I hope?”
“Not in the least.”
“Well, then, you did something quite out of the common. You cut your
own class, refused to have any truck with the brass hats and sky
pilots.”
“I hate forgers, my friend,” replied Monsieur Bergeret. “Surely that is
permissible in a philologist. I have made no secret of my opinions, but
I have not gone out of my way to spread them. How did you get to know
of them?”
“I will tell you. One sees all sorts of people at the workshop in the
Rue Saint-Jacques. All sorts and conditions, big and little. One day I
was planing some wood, and I heard Pierre say: ‘That low-down cur of a
Bergeret.’ And Paul asks him, ‘Won’t somebody smash his jaw for him?’
And then I realized that you were on the right side in the Affair.
There aren’t many like you in this part of Paris.”
“And what do your friends say?”
“There aren’t many Socialists hereabouts, and the few there are don’t
agree. Last Saturday at the club there was a lot of tag-rag and bobtail
and the whole lot of us started quarrelling. Old Fléchier, who fought
in 1870, a Communard, who was deported—he’s a man, he is—he got up on
the platform and said: ‘Citizens, keep your hair on! The intellectual
bourgeois are no less bourgeois than the military bourgeois. Let the
capitalists scratch each other’s eyes out. Fold your arms and keep
your eyes on the anti-Semites. At present they are drilling with sham
guns and wooden swords, but when the time comes to expropriate the
capitalists I don’t see why we shouldn’t make a start with the Jews.’
“That pretty well brought the house down. But, I ask you, should an old
Communard, a good revolutionary, talk in that way? I am not educated
like old Fléchier, who has read Marx, but I could see well enough
that his arguments were all wrong. It seems to me that Socialism,
which stands for truth, should also stand for justice and kindliness,
that everything just and kindly must come from it as naturally as the
apple comes from the apple-tree. I take it that when we fight against
injustice we are fighting for ourselves, for the working-classes,
because it’s on us that all injustice lies so heavy. In my opinion,
everything that is equitable is a beginning of Socialism. Like Jaurès,
I believe that to take sides with the upholders of violence and
falsehood is to turn one’s back upon the social revolution. I know
nothing of Jews or Christians. I recognize only men—and there again
the only distinction I make is between the just and the unjust. Jews
or Christians, it is difficult for the rich to be just; but when the
laws are just, men will be just too. Even now the Collectivists and
Anarchists are preparing for the future by fighting against tyranny
and inspiring the people with hatred of war and love for their
fellow-men. Even now we can do something. It’ll keep us from dying
desperate with the bitterness of rage in our hearts. For sure enough
we shan’t see the triumph of our ideas, and when Collectivism is
established all over the world I shall have been carried feet foremost
from my garret a long while before. But there! I’m jawing and the
time’s going.”
He pulled out his watch, and seeing that it was eleven o’clock he put
on his waistcoat, picked up his tools, and ramming his cap on the back
of his head, said, without turning round:
“It’s a sure thing that the middle classes are rotten. The Dreyfus case
showed that plainly enough.”
With that, he went off to his dinner.
Then, with wide-open mouth, bristling hair and flaming eyes, Riquet
rushed at Roupart’s departing heels, pursuing them with frantic barks.
It may have been that a bad dream had troubled his light slumber and
caused him to take advantage of the enemy’s retreat, or, as his master
feigned to believe, that his anger had been aroused by the name which
had just been pronounced.
Alone with Riquet, Monsieur Bergeret addressed him gently in these
sorrowful words:
“You, too, poor little blackamoor, so feeble in spite of your sharp
teeth and your deep bark, the apparent strength of which renders your
weakness ridiculous and your cowardice amusing—you, too, worship the
pomps of the flesh. You bow to the old iniquities and worship injustice
out of respect for the social order that gives you food and a roof
over your head. You, too, would uphold an illegal judgment obtained by
fraud and untruth; you, too, are the plaything of appearances and allow
yourself to be seduced by lies. You have been brought up on clumsy
falsehoods and your darkened mind feeds on the works of darkness. You
deceive and are deceived with delightful thoroughness, and you, too,
have your racial hatreds, your cruel prejudices and your contempt for
the unfortunate.”
And as Riquet gazed at his master with a look of infinite innocence
Monsieur Bergeret continued still more gently:
“Yes, I know: you have a vague goodness, the goodness of a Caliban. You
are a pious dog; you have your theology and your morality, and you try
to do well. But then you know nothing. You keep watch over the house,
guarding it even against its friends and those who would make it more
beautiful. The workman whom you wanted to drive out of the house has,
in his simple fashion, some admirable ideas. But you did not listen to
him.
“Your shaggy ears are turned not to him whose words are wisest but to
him who makes the most noise; and the natural fear which in the days
of the cave-dwellers was the wise counsellor of your ancestors and of
mine—the fear that created the gods and crime—makes you turn from the
unfortunate and deprives you of pity. And you do not even want to be
just. The white face of the new goddess Justice is strange to you, and
you prostrate yourself before the old gods, black like yourself with
fear and violence. You admire brute force, thinking it the sovereign
power, because you do not know that it destroys itself. You do not know
that all chains must fall before a just idea.
“You do not know that true strength lies in wisdom and that through
wisdom alone the nations rise to greatness. You do not know that that
which makes the glory of the nations is not the senseless clamour
raised in public places, but the noble thought concealed in some
garret, which, spreading one day over the whole world, will change
its face. You do not know that those who have suffered imprisonment,
outrage and exile, for justice’ sake, have honoured their country in
the act. You do not understand.”