On that day, Julien, excited, and jeered at by us, spoke his mind. He thought the soldiers horrid, he did not see what there was in them to attract us. It was all the soldiers’ fault, because if there were not any soldiers, there would not be any fighting. In fact, he hated war; it terrified him, and, later on, he would find some way to prevent his brother from going. It was a sort of morbid, unconquerable aversion which he felt.
Weeks and months went by. We had got tired of the regiments; we had found out another sport, which was to go fishing, of a morning, for the little fresh-water fish, and to eat what we caught in a third-rate tavern. The water was icy. Julien got a cold on the chest, of which he nearly died. In college, war was no longer talked about. We had fallen back deeper than ever into Homer and Virgil. All at once, we learned that the French had conquered, which seemed to us quite natural. Then, regiments again began to pass, but in the other direction. They no longer interested us; still, we did see two or three. They did not seem to us so fine, diminished as they were by half—and the rest is lost in a mist. Such was the Crimean war, in France, for schoolboys shut up in a country college.
II.
In 1859 I was in Paris, finishing my studies at the Lycée St. Louis. As it happened, I was there with my two school-fellows from Aix, Louis and Julien. Louis was preparing for his entrance examination to the Ecole Polytechnique; Julien had decided to go in for law. We were all out-students.
By this time we had ceased to be savages, entirely ignorant of the contemporary world. Paris had ripened us. Thus, when the war with Italy broke out, we were abreast of the stream of political events which had led to it. We even discussed the war in the character of politicians and military adepts. It was the fashion at college to take interest in the campaign, and to follow the movements of the troops on the map. During our college hours we used to mark our positions with pins and fight and lose battles. In order to be well up to date, we devoured an enormous supply of newspapers. It was the mission of us out-students to bring them in. We used to arrive with our pockets stuffed, with thicknesses of paper under our coats, enclosed from head to foot in an armour of newspapers. And while lectures were going on these papers were circulated; lessons and studies were neglected; we drank our fill of news, shielded by the back of a neighbour. In order to conceal the big sheets we used to cut them in four, and open them inside our books. The professors were not always blind, but they let us go our own way with the tolerance of men resigned to let the idler bear the burden of his idleness.
At first, Julien shrugged his shoulders. He was possessed by a fine adoration of the poets of 1830, and there was always a volume of Musset or Hugo in his pocket which he used to read at lecture. So when anyone handed him a newspaper he used to pass it on scornfully without even condescending to look at it, and would continue reading the poem which he had begun. To him it seemed monstrous that anybody could care about men who were fighting one another. But a catastrophe which changed the whole course of his life caused him to alter his opinion.
One fine day Louis, who had just failed in his examination, enlisted. It was a rash step which had long been in his mind. He had an uncle who was a general, and he thought himself sure of making his way without passing through the military schools. Besides, when the war was over, he could still try Saint-Cyr. When Julien heard this news, it came upon him like a thunderbolt. He was no longer the boy declaiming against war with missish arguments, but he still had an unconquerable aversion. He wished to show himself a hardened man; and he succeeded in not shedding tears before us. But from the time his brother went, he became one of the most eager devourers of newspapers. We came and went from college together; and our conversations turned on nothing but possible battles. I remember that he used to drag me almost every day to the Luxembourg Gardens. He would lay his books on a bench and trace a whole map of Northern Italy in the sand. That kept his thoughts with his brother. In the depths of his heart he was full of terror at the idea that he might be killed.
Even now, when I inquire of my memory, I find it difficult to make clear the elements of this horror of war on Julien’s part. He was by no means a coward. He merely had a distaste for bodily exercises, to which he reckoned abstract mental speculations far superior. To live the life of a learned man or a poet, shut into a quiet room, seemed to him the real end of man on this earth; while the turmoils of the street, battles, whether with fist or sword, and everything which develops the muscles seemed to him only fit for a nation of savages. He despised athletes and acrobats and wild beast tamers. I must add that he had no patriotism. On this subject we heaped contempt upon him, and I can still see the smile and shrug of the shoulders with which he answered us.
One of the most vivid memories of that time which remains with me is the memory of the fine summer day on which the news of the victory of Magenta became known in Paris. It was June—a splendid June, such as we seldom have in France. It was Sunday. Julien and I had planned the evening before to take a walk in the Champs Elysées. He was very uneasy about his brother, from whom he had had no letter, and I wanted to distract his thoughts. I called for him at one o’clock, and we strolled down towards the Seine at the idle pace of schoolboys with no usher behind them.
Paris on a holiday in very hot weather is something that deserves knowing. The black shadow of the houses cuts the white pavement sharply. Between the shuttered, drowsy house fronts is visible but a strip of sky of a hard blue. I do not know any place in the world where, when it is hot, it is hotter than in Paris; it is a furnace, suffocating, asphyxiating. Some corners of Paris are deserted, among others the quays, whence the loungers have fled to suburban copses. And yet, what a delightful walk it is, along the wide, quiet quays, with their row of little thick trees, and below, the magnificent rush of the river all alive with its moving populace of vessels.