A TRIMARDEUR DISPUTING WITH SOCIALISTS
But he is chiefly interesting as being the nearest modern approach to the early Christian apostle and the most perfect embodiment of the missionary spirit in existence. Figure him as the contemporary missionary or missionary agent minus a salary and a domicile,—if you can imagine such an anachronistic phenomenon!
He is usually a skilful and reliable workman who has lost his job from his irresistible propensity to spread radical ideas among his fellow-workmen or for his active connection with a strike. He sets out on his proselyting tour “with neither purse nor scrip nor shoes,” “neither bread, neither money” almost literally; and, literally, without “two coats.” In the country he mingles with the peasants and farm labourers, sleeping under their roofs, “eating and drinking such things as they give,” and converting as many as he may, sure of a welcome, for that matter, wherever there is a lodge—and where is there not?—of that most fraternal of all freemasonries,—discontent. In the cities he works during his sojourn, if work is to be had; and, when he “goes out of a city,” he blesses that city if it has “received” him, and “he shakes off the very dust from his feet as a testimony against it” if it has “received him not.”
The origin, methods, and manners of the trimardeur have been well described by one Flor O’Squarr. I take up his description at the point where the incipient trimardeur has been turned away by his employer. “He offers his labour to the factory opposite, to the foundry adjacent. Vain proceeding! Unfavourable reports immediately follow him or have preceded him there. The employers also combine. He will be received nowhere except by mistake and for a short time. At the beginning this conspiracy of the world against him surprises and disturbs him. He exclaims: ‘What have I done to them, then? Why do they drive me away thus, as they would a mangy or vicious cur? I have defended my interests and those of my fellows. It was my right, after all.’
“Later he discerns injustice in this persistent hostility,—bourgeois injustice, parbleu! This discovery provokes in him the idea of revolt, as a draught of alcohol inflames the blood. Persecution has begun then. Well, let it be so! He will accept it, not without pride. The theory of anarchy sinks a little deeper into his brain, after the manner of a spike on which the employers have tried their sledges. Then he buckles his belt, turns up his pantaloons, tightens his shoe-lacing, and gains the trimard with a few sous in his pocket, en route for the nearest large town, where he hopes to find employment and an unworked field for his neophytic zeal.
“If he sets out from Angers, from Trélazé, for instance, he tramps as far as Nantes, where he improvises himself porter or stevedore along the quays of the Loire, undertaking with the rashest indifference any occupation for which only muscle is required....
“Signalled anew, ... our man rebuckles his belt, turns up again his pantaloons, retightens his shoe-lacing, and gains the trimard with a few sous in his pocket, headed towards St. Nazaire or Brest, towards Rennes or towards Cherbourg, towards any city whatsoever in which he can hope to earn his bread and convert men. Along the road he manages to get shelter on the farms, and he carries on his propaganda among the peasantry.
“This tireless fanaticism will carry him through Normandy towards the regions of the north. He will be expelled from the spinning-mills of Rouen, the glass-works of Douai, the mines of Anzin, the forges of Fives. From there he will pass into Belgium, always ‘on the hoof’ (à pattes) and on the trimard: he will visit Brussels, where the marvellous workingmen’s organisations of Brasseur and Jean Volders will make him shrug his shoulders,—‘Fudge, all that! authoritative socialism, that’; Antwerp, which will detain him a week, a bit disconcerted by the machine; Liège and Scraing, which will keep him a month; le Borinage, which he will contemplate as a promised land. Perhaps he will go into Germany, the vast Germany so inclement to anarchy,—that is, if he does not descend into the east by the Luxembourg, and gain the Jura by the Vosges.
“In two or three years he will have seen many districts and many countries, and will have scattered behind him everywhere, indifferently, seeds of revolt without troubling himself about the nature of the ground. His information will be considerably augmented. He will have made good by experience the defects of his education. He will know various languages and patois, having spoken Breton at Vannes, Normand at Caen, Walloon at Namur, Flemish at Gand, Marollien at Brussels, German in the east or in Switzerland; and, like the cosmopolitan Bohemian who had learned to borrow five francs in all the tongues of the world, he will have become capable of preaching anarchy in all the ‘argots.’...