LOUISE MICHEL of his mother and two of the children, Martha and Henri, playfully calling the last named “Henricon.” His compagne had no complaint to make of his treatment of her, and even his laundress testified to his being courteous and kind.
Reader’s of Zola’s Germinal will remember the anarchist Souvarine’s affection for the pet rabbit, Pologne, and his sorrow at her death. The point is well observed. Nearly every French anarchist, whether propagandist par le fait or not, is a defender of the rights of all four-footed things; and many are strict vegetarians. In her fascinating autobiography, Louise Michel returns again and again with flaming wrath to the sufferings of domestic animals.
“Under my revolt against the strong,” she says, “I find, farther back than I can remember distinctly, a horror of the tortures inflicted on dumb beasts. I would have liked to see the animal defend himself,—the dog bite the one who abused him, the horse, bleeding under the lash, trample on his torturer. But always the dumb beast endures his lot with the resignation of the subdued races. What an object of pity is the beast!”
This typical anarchist trait is graphically illustrated by the following anecdote related by Flor O’Squarr:—
“One day in July I stopped before a book-stall of the rue Châteaudun, close by the rue Laffitte, when I was joined by an anarchist who led me before the show window of a bird dealer a few steps away. There, with a hand that shook, he pointed out to me some white mice shut up in tiny iron cages that were provided with squirrels’ wheels, whereon the little beasts galloped without respite.
“‘See there,’ moaned the dynamiter, ‘tell me if men are not villains! These poor white mice, so delicate, so pretty, suffer frightfully, don’t you know it, churning like that in this instrument of torture. It gives them nausea and pains in the stomach.’ He would have strangled the dealer without remorse to avenge the mice.”
Zola, in his account of the trial of the dynamiter Salvat (Paris), makes the culprit’s fellow-workmen testify that he was “a worthy man, an intelligent, diligent, and highly temperate workman, who adored his little daughter, and who was incapable of an indelicacy or meanness”; and this characterisation of a bomb-thrower of fiction might be applied with little change to almost every real bomb-thrower who has operated in France. Scarcely one appears to have been—the propagande apart—what we call a “bad egg” and the French call a “mauvais sujet” or to have had a bad disposition. There is scarcely a drunkard, a gambler, a libertine, or a domestic tyrant, in the lot. Indeed, they have had so few of the vices of genius that one almost sighs over their essential commonplaceness.
They have nearly all been highly abstemious and nearly all great readers. Pini’s living expenses averaged less than three francs a day, and were no more after a successful theft than before,—the best possible proof that he was not given to reckless dissipation.