Félicien was the son of Séverin Bonnaire, who had married Léonie, the daughter of Ma-Bleue and Achille Gourier. He, Félicien, only a fortnight previously had for his part espoused Hélène Jollivet, daughter of André Jollivet and Pauline Froment. But when Bonnaire wished to explain those relationships to Ragu, the latter made the gesture of a man who feels quite lost amidst such a tangle of alliances. The young people were charming—the wife very young and adorably fair; the husband also fair, and tall and strong. Love perfumed all the bright, gay, simple, yet elegantly furnished rooms of their home, which, like the streets, was that day full of roses; for it seemed as if roses had rained upon Beauclair—there were some everywhere, even on the roofs. The whole house was visited, and then they returned to a room which served as a workshop—a large, square apartment, where an electrical motor was installed. Besides following three or four other callings, Félicien was by taste a metal-turner, and preferred to work at this avocation in his own home. Several of his comrades, young men of his own age, were similarly inclined, and a new movement was thus arising among the generation just reaching manhood. One found the worker on a small scale following some calling at home in all freedom, irrespective of work in the great general workshops. For these individual artisans the supply of electric power, which they found in their homes even as they found water there, was of wonderful assistance. Home-work under such conditions proved easy, and clean, and light, and some houses were gradually becoming family workshops and tending to the realisation of the formula: The free workman in the free city.
'Till this evening, my children,' said Bonnaire, taking leave. 'Shall you dine at our table?'
'Oh! it's impossible this time, grandfather,' was the reply; 'we have our places at grandmother Morfain's table. But we shall see one another at dessert.'
Ragu took his seat in the car again without speaking a word. He had remained silent throughout the visit, though for a moment he had paused before the little motor. At last, he once again managed to throw off the emotion which he had felt in the midst of so much comfort and happiness.
'Come,' he exclaimed, 'can one call those the houses of well-to-do bourgeois, when there's machinery in the largest room? I grant that your men are better lodged, and have more enjoyment, since want has disappeared. But they are still workmen, mercenaries condemned to labour! In the old days there were at least a few happy, privileged folk who did nothing. All your progress consists in reducing the entire community to common slavery!'
At this despairing cry from that devotee of sloth, whose religion was fast crumbling, Bonnaire gently shrugged his shoulders. 'One must understand, my good fellow,' said he, 'what it is that you call slavery. If it be slavery to breathe and eat and sleep—in a word, to live—why, then work is slavery. But if you live you must necessarily work; one cannot live an hour without doing work of some kind. However, we'll talk of all that by-and-by. For the present let us go home to lunch, and we'll spend the afternoon in visiting the workshops and the stores.'
After their meal, indeed, they went out again, but this time on foot, walking along leisurely. They crossed the entire works, all the sunlit halls, where the steel and copper of the new machinery shone like jewels in the bright radiance. That morning, moreover, some of the workers—parties of youths and girls—had come to decorate the machinery with garlands of verdure and roses; for was it not right that it should participate in the festival of work, powerful, gentle, and docile artisan that it was, bringing relief both to man and to beast? And nothing could have been gayer or more touching. The roses that adorned the presses, the huge hammers, the giant planing, rolling, and turning machines, proclaimed how attractive work had become, bringing comfort to the body and delight to the mind. Songs rang out, too, chains were formed, and amidst general laughter quite a farandole began, spreading gradually from one hall to another, and transforming the entire works into an immense palace of rejoicing.
Ragu, who still remained impassive, walked about, raising his eyes to the lofty windows, which were bright with sunshine, or glancing now at the slabs under foot, and now at the walls of speckless brightness, or else examining the machines, many of which were unknown to him. They were huge creatures, provided with all sorts of intricate works, in order that they might perform most of the tasks once allotted to man, the most trying as well as the most delicate. Some had legs, arms, feet, and hands, so that they might move, embrace, clutch, and manipulate metal with fingers at once supple, nimble, and strong. The new puddling furnaces, in which the 'bloom' was kneaded mechanically, particularly struck Ragu. Was it possible that the 'bloom' came out like that, quite ready to pass under the hammer! And then there was the electricity that propelled the bridges, that set the huge hammers in motion, that worked the rolling-machinery, which could have covered the whole world with rails. On each and every side one found that sovereign electric force. It had become like the very blood of the factory, circulating from one to the other end of the workshops, giving life to all things, acting as the one source of movement, heat, and light.
'It's good, no doubt,' Ragu grunted. 'The place is very clean and very large, and ever so much better than our dirty dens of former times, where we found ourselves like pigs in their styes. There has certainly been a good deal of progress; but the worry is that one hasn't yet found a way to give each man an income of a hundred thousand francs.'
'Oh! but we have our income of a hundred thousand francs,' retorted Bonnaire jestingly. 'Just come and see.'