Work [Travail]

by Émile Zola

Full of serenity, without fear for the future, Luc watched his town growing like a beautiful being, endowed with eternal youth. It had descended from the Brias gorges, between the two promontories of the Bleuse Mountains, and was now spread over the meadow-land of La Roumagne. In fine weather its white house-fronts smiled amidst the verdure without a single puff of smoke besmirching the pure atmosphere, for there were no chimneys left, electricity having everywhere replaced coal and wood for heating purposes. The light silk canopy of the broad blue sky spread over all, immaculate, without a speck of soot. Thus in aspect the town remained a new one, bright and gay under the refreshing breezes, whilst on all sides one heard the carolling of water, the crystalline streaming of springs, whose purity brought health and perpetual delight. The population steadily increased, fresh houses were built, fresh gardens were planted. A happy people, free and brotherly, becomes a centre of attraction, and thus the little towns of the neighbourhood, Saint-Cron, Formerie, and Magnolles, had found it necessary to follow the example of Beauclair, and had ended by becoming so many prolongations of the original city. It had been sufficient to make an experiment on a small scale, and by degrees the arrondissement, the department, the whole region was won over. Irresistible happiness was on the march, and nothing will be able to withstand the force of happiness when men possess a clear and decisive perception of it. Mankind has known but one struggle through the ages, the struggle for happiness, which is to be found beneath every form of religion, every form of government. Egotism is merely an individual effort to acquire the greatest possible sum of happiness for self; and why should not each set his egotism in treating his fellows as brothers when he becomes convinced that the happiness of each rests in the happiness of all? If there was contention between different interests in the past, it was because the old social pact opposed them one to the other, making warfare the very soul of society. But let it be demonstrated that work reorganised will apportion wealth justly, and that the passions, playing freely, will lead to harmony and unity, and then peace will at once ensue, and happiness will be established in a brotherly contract of solidarity. Why should one fight one against the other, when interests cease to clash? If all the desperate, pain-fraught exertions of generations, the prodigious sum of efforts, blood, and tears that mankind has given to mutual slaughter throughout so many centuries, had only been devoted to the conquest of the world, the subjugation of the natural forces, man would long since have been the absolute, happy sovereign of creatures and things. When humanity at last became conscious of its imbecile dementia, when man ceased to be wolfishly inclined towards his brother, and resolved to devote some of the genius and wealth hitherto squandered in mutual annihilation, to the common work of happiness, the mastery of the elements, on that day the nations first started on their march towards the happy city. And no! it is not true that a nation having its every need satisfied, having to battle no longer for existence, would thereby gradually lose the strength it requires to live, and sink into torpor and catalepsy. The human dream will always be without a limit, there will always remain much of the Unknown to be conquered. Each time a new craving is contented, desire will give birth to another, the satisfaction of which will exalt men and make them heroes of science and beauty. Desire is infinite, and if men long battled together in order to steal happiness one from the other, they will battle side by side to increase it, to make it an immense banquet, resplendent with joy and glory, vast enough to satiate the passions of thousands of millions of human creatures. And there will be only heroes left, and each fresh child born into the world will receive as his birthgift the whole earth, the unbounded expanse of heaven, and the paternal sun, the source of immortal life.

As Luc gaily contemplated his triumphant town he often repeated that love alone had created all the prodigies he beheld. He had sown the seed, and now he reaped inexhaustible harvests of kindliness and brotherliness. At the very outset he had felt that it was necessary to found his city by and for woman if it was to prove fruitful and for ever desirable and beautiful. Woman saved—Josine set in her due place of beauty, dignity, and tenderness—was not that the symbol of the future alliance, the union of the sexes, ensuring social peace, and free and just life in common? Then, too, the new system of education, the sexes being reared together and acquiring the same knowledge, had brought them to a complete understanding, and made them sincerely desirous of attaining to the one object of life, that object which was reached by loving a great deal in order that one might be loved a great deal in return. True wisdom lay in creating happiness, it was thus that one logically became happy oneself. And now love chose freely; no law, mutual consent alone, regulated marriage. A young man, a young girl had known one another since their schooldays, had passed through the same workshops together, and when they bestowed themselves one on the other, that bestowal was simply like the florescence of their long intimacy. They gave themselves to one another for life, long and faithful unions predominating; they grew old together, even as they had grown up together, in a bestowal of their whole beings, their rights being equal, their love equal also. Yet their liberty remained entire, separation was always possible for those who ceased to agree, and their offspring remained with one or the other, as they decided, or when difficulties supervened in the charge of the community. The bitter duel of man and woman, all the questions which had so long set the sexes one against the other, like savage, irreconcilable enemies, came to an end in that solution: woman free in all respects, woman the free companion of man, resuming her position as an equal, as an indispensable factor in the union of love. She had a right to abstain from marrying, to live as a man, to play a man's part as far as she desired, if she chose; but why should she deny desire, and set herself apart from life? Only one thing is sensible and beautiful, and that is life in its entirety. And so the natural order of things had come about, peace was signed between the reconciled sexes, each finding happiness in the happiness of a common home tasting at last all the delights of the bond of love, which was freed from the baseness of pecuniary and social considerations. One could no longer sell himself for the other's dowry, families could no longer barter their sons and daughters like mere merchandise.

Thus the fulness of love reigned in the community. The sense of love, developed and purified, became the perfume, the flame, the focus of existence. It was widespread, general, universal love, springing from the mated couple, and passing to the mother, the father, the children, the relations, the neighbours, the citizens, the men and women of the whole world in ever-broadening waves, a sea of love which ended by bathing the entire earth. Loving kindness was like the pure air on which every breast fed; there remained but one breath of brotherly affection, and that alone had at last brought about the long-dreamt-of unity, the divine harmony. Humanity—equilibrated like the planets, by force of attraction, by the law of justice, solidarity and love—would henceforth journey happily through the eternal infinite. And such was the ever-recurring harvest, the immense harvest of tenderness and kindliness, which Luc each morning saw arising from all sides; from all the furrows which he had sown so abundantly; from his entire city, where for so many years he had cast the good seed by the handful into the schools, into the workshops, into every home, and even into every heart.

'Look! look!' he said with a laugh some morning when Josine, Sœurette, and Suzanne remained near his arm-chair before the open window. 'Look, there are trees which have flowered since last night, and it seems as if kisses were winging their flight, like song-birds, from some of the roofs. There, yonder, both on the right and on the left, love flaps his wings, as it were, in the rising sunlight.'

The three women joined in his laughter, and jested in a tender way to please him. 'Certainly,' Josine would say, 'on that side, above that house with the blue tiles spangled with white stars, there is a great quiver of the sunlight, telling of internal rapture. That must be the house of some newly-wedded pair.'

'And straight before us,' said Sœurette, 'see how the window-panes are flashing with the splendour of a rising planet, in that house-front where the faïence ornaments are decorated with roses! Assuredly a child has been born there.'

'And on all sides, over all the dwellings, over the whole town the rays are pouring,' said Suzanne in her turn. 'They form sheaves of wheat, a field of prodigious fertility. Is it not the peace springing from the love of all that grows and is harvested there each day?'

Luc listened to them with rapture. What a delightful reward was that which he himself had won from love, which had surrounded him with the sublime affection of those three women, whose presence filled his last days with perfume and brilliancy! They were full of solicitude, infinitely good, infinitely loving, with serene eyes which ever brought him joy in life, and gentle hands which sustained him to the very threshold of the grave. And they were very old and quite white, light and aerial like souls, like gay, active, pure flames, glowing with youthful, eternal passion. He lived on; and they lived on also, and were like his force, his activity and intelligence, healthy and strong as they were in spite of everything, coming and going for him when he himself could no longer move, like guardians, housewives, and companions, who prolonged and broadened his life far beyond the usual limits.

At seventy-eight years of age Josine remained the amorosa, the Eve, who had long ago been saved from error and suffering. Extremely slim, suggesting a dry, pallid flower that had retained its perfume, she had preserved her supple gracefulness, her delicate charm. In the bright sunlight her white hair seemed to recover some of its golden hue, the sovereign gold of youth. And Luc adored her still, as on the distant day when he had succoured her, setting in his love for her his love for the whole suffering people, for all tortured women; choosing her, indeed, as the most wretched, the most dolorous, in order that with her—should he save her—he might likewise save all the disinherited of the world whom shame and hunger were clutching at the throat. Even nowadays it was religiously that he kissed her mutilated hand, the wound dealt by iniquitous labour, in the prison of the wage-system, from which his compassion and love for her had helped him to extricate the workers. He had not remained unfruitful in his mission of redemption and deliverance; he had felt the need of woman, the necessity of being strong and complete in order to redeem his brothers. It was the mated couple, the fruitful spouse, that had given birth to the new people. When she had borne him children his work itself had begun to create, had become lasting. And on her side she likewise adored him, with the adoration of their first meeting, a flame of tender gratitude, a gift of her whole person, a passion and a desire for the infinite of love, whose inextinguishable flame age had not weakened.

Sœurette, born the same year as Luc, her eighty-fifth birthday being near at hand, was the most active of the three women, on her feet, busy the whole day long. It had long seemed as if she had ceased to grow older. Small of frame, shrunken even, she had nevertheless been beautified by gentle age. So dark, so thin, so graceless in former times, she had become a delightful little old woman, a little white mouse, whose eyes were full of light. Long ago, in the distressing crisis of her love for Luc, amidst her grief at loving and remaining unloved, her good brother Jordan had told her that she would become resigned, and would sacrifice her passion to the love of others. And each day she had indeed become more and more resigned, her renunciation proving at last a source of pure joy, a force of divine delight. She still loved Luc, she loved him in each of his children and grandchildren, with whom she had long assisted Josine. And she loved him with a deeper and deeper love, freed from all egotism, a chaste flame, that glowed with sisterly affection and motherliness. The delicate attentions, the discreet comforts which she had lavished on her brother, were now bestowed on her friend. She was always on the watch, in order to make his every hour delight. And all her happiness lay in that: to feel how greatly he himself was attached to her, to end almost a century of life in that passionate friendship, which was as sweet as love itself.