The young man gave way to some sad reflections as he returned to Maillebois. He had just come in contact with the thick layer of human ignorance, the huge blind, deaf multitude still enwrapped in the slumber of the earth. Behind the Bongards the whole mass of country folk remained stubbornly, dimly vegetating, ever slow to awaken to a true perception of things. There was a whole nation to be educated if one desired that it should be born to truth and justice. But how colossal would be the labour! How could it be raised from the clay in which it lingered, how many generations perhaps would be needed to free the race from darkness! Even at the present time the vast majority of the social body remained in infancy, in primitive imbecility. In the case of Bongard one descended to mere brute matter, which was incapable of being just because it knew nothing and would learn nothing.
Marc turned to the left, and after crossing the High Street found himself in the poor quarter of Maillebois. Various industrial establishments there polluted the waters of the Verpille, and the sordid houses of the narrow streets were the homes of many workpeople. Doloir the mason tenanted four fairly large rooms on a first floor over a wineshop in the Rue Plaisir. Marc, imperfectly informed respecting the address, was seeking it when he came upon a party of masons who had just quitted their work to drink a glass together at the bar of the wineshop. They were discussing the crime in violent language.
'A Jew's capable of anything,' one big fair fellow exclaimed. 'There was one in my regiment who was a thief, but that did not prevent him from being a corporal, for a Jew always gets out of difficulties.'
Another mason, short and dark, shrugged his shoulders. 'I quite agree,' said he, 'that the Jews are not worth much, but all the same the priests are no better.'
'Oh! as for the priests,' the other retorted, 'some are good, some are bad. At all events the priests are Frenchmen, whereas those dirty beasts, the Jews, have sold France to the foreigners twice already.' Then, as his comrade, somewhat shaken in his views, asked him if he had read that in Le Petit Beaumontais, 'No, I didn't,' he added; 'those newspapers give me too much of a headache. But some of my mates told me, and, besides, everybody knows it well.'
The others, thereupon feeling convinced, became silent, and slowly drained their glasses. They were just quitting the wineshop when Marc, approaching, asked the tall fair one if he knew where Doloir the mason lived. The workman laughed. 'Doloir, monsieur? that's me,' he said; 'I live here; those are my three windows.'
The adventure quite enlivened this tall sturdy fellow of somewhat military bearing. As he laughed his big moustaches rose, disclosing his teeth, which looked very white in his highly coloured face, with large, good-natured blue eyes.
'You could not have asked anybody more likely to know, could you, monsieur?' he continued. 'What do you wish of me?'
Marc looked at him with a feeling of some sympathy in spite of the hateful words he had heard. Doloir, who had been for several years in the employment of Darras, the Mayor and building contractor, was a fairly good workman—one who occasionally drank a drop too much, but who took his pay home to his wife regularly. He certainly growled about the employers, referred to them as a dirty gang, and called himself a socialist, though he had only a vague idea what socialism might be. At the same time he had some esteem for Darras, who, while making a great deal of money, tried to remain a comrade with his men. But above everything else three years of barrack-life had left an ineffaceable mark on Doloir. He had quitted the army in a transport of delight at his deliverance, freely cursing the disgusting and hateful calling in which one ceased to be a man. But ever since that time he had been continually living his three years' service afresh; not a day passed but some recollection of it came to him. With his hand spoilt as it were by the rifle he had carried, he had found his trowel heavy, and had returned to work in a spiritless fashion, like one who was no longer accustomed to toil, but whose will was broken and whose body had become used to long spells of idleness, such as those which intervened between the hours of military exercise. To become once more the excellent workman that he had been previously was impossible. Besides, he was haunted by military matters, to which he was always referring apropos of any subject that presented itself. But he chattered in a confused way, he had no information, he read nothing, he knew nothing, being simply firm and stubborn on the patriotic question, which, to his mind, consisted in preventing the Jews from handing France over to the foreigners.