"The common people also believed it, and every employer could bring his employés to the feet of the new masters, the poor creatures imagining that their arms were about to bring them in millions. It was a sort of fever, a universal mania. I sought men, I found only machines. I talked of the fatherland and honor, they replied by discussing sulphur and silk weaving. I went away disheartened, but uncertain, not daring to censure too severely what I had seen, and saying to myself that it was not for me, ignorant and uncivilized as I was, to pass judgment upon the new resources which these mysterious discoveries were going to create for my country.
"But since then, great heaven! I have seen the result of these fine promises so far as the common people are concerned! I have seen some shrewd fellows restore their own fortunes by ruining their friends and paying court to the ruling powers. I have seen many families of petty tradespeople attain great wealth; but I have seen honorable men persecuted more and more; I have seen, especially, and I see now every day, more beggars and more poor wretches without bread, without homes, without education, without a future. And I ask myself what good you have done with your new ideas, your progress, your theories of equality! You despise the past, you spit upon the old abuses, and you have killed the future by creating new abuses more monstrous than the old. The best among you, the young men, are on the alert for the revolutionary doctrines of nations more advanced than ours. You consider yourselves highly enlightened, very strong, when you can say: 'No more nobles, no more priests, no more convents, no more of anything connected with the past!' And you do not see that you no longer have the poesy, the faith and the pride which gave life to the past.
"Let us see!" added the Capuchin, folding his arms over his heaving breast, and eyeing Michel with a half fatherly, half bullying, air: "you are a very young man, a child! You consider yourself very clever, because you know what people say and think in society at this moment. You look at this stupid monk, who passes the day breaking rock in order to set out an extra row of peppers or tomatoes on the lava next year, and you say:
"'That's a strange way for a man to pass his life! And yet this man was neither lazy nor dull. He might have been a lawyer or a tradesman, and have earned money like other men. He might have married, had children, and taught them to hold their own in society. He preferred to bury himself alive in a convent and beg! It is because he is under the influence of the past, and has always been the dupe of the old chimeras and old superstitions of his country!'
"Very good! now, do you know what I think as I look at you? I say to myself: 'Here is a young man who has come much in contact with the minds of other men, who has very quickly thrown off the fetters of his class, who does not choose to share the sufferings of his native country, the labors of his kinsmen. He will succeed; he is a handsome youth, keener and more logical in his ideas and his words at eighteen than I was at thirty. He knows a multitude of things which had seemed useless to me and which I did not even suspect, until the leisure of the cloister enabled me to educate myself a little. He stands there, smiling at my enthusiasm, and, mounted on his sound sense, his premature experience, his knowledge of men, and his profound study of the science of personal interest, looks upon me in his mind as a teacher looks upon his pupil. He is the mature man; and I, an old brigand and old monk, am the fearless youth, the blind and artless child! Strange transposition! He represents the new generation, all for gold and glory; and I the dust of ruins, the silence of the tomb!'
"Very good! but let the tocsin sound, let the volcano rumble, let the people roar, let that black point which we see in the roadstead, and which is the ship of State, bristle with guns to destroy the city at the first breath of aspiration toward liberty; let the brigands come down from the mountains, let the flames soar aloft to the clouds; and in that last convulsion of the dying fatherland, the young artist will take his brushes, he will go and take his seat upon a hill, out of all danger, and he will paint a picture, saying to himself: 'What an unfortunate people, and what a magnificent spectacle! I must hasten to put it on canvas! in an instant this people will have ceased to exist, its last hour is striking!'
"Whereas the old monk will take his gun, which is not yet rusty; he will turn his sleeves back to the shoulder, and without stopping to ask himself what will be the result of it all, he will rush into the scrimmage and will fight for his countrymen until his crushed and trampled body no longer resembles a human being. And I would rather die so, boy, than survive, as you will do, the destruction of my race!"
"My father! my father! do not believe it," cried Michel, conquered and carried off his feet by the Capuchin's exaltation. "I am not a coward! and if my Sicilian blood flowed sluggishly on foreign soil, it is quickened by the fiery breath which your breast exhales. Do not crush me beneath that terrible malediction! Take me in your arms and set me on fire with your flames. With you I feel really alive, and this new life intoxicates and enraptures me!"
"Good! here is an honest impulse at last!" said the monk, embracing him. "I like this better than the fine theories concerning art which you have persuaded your father to respect blindly."
"Forgive me, uncle," rejoined Michel, with a smile, "I do not surrender on that point. I will maintain with my last breath the dignity and importance of art. You said just now that in the midst of civil war I would coolly go and sit down in a corner, to paint episodes of the conflict instead of fighting. I would fight, I beg you to believe, and I would fight hard if the object were to drive out the enemy. I would gladly lay down my life; glory would come to me more quickly so than I shall attain it by studying painting, and I love glory: in that respect I fear that I am incorrigible. But if I were in truth doomed to survive the downfall of my people after fighting in vain for their triumph, it is probable that I should collect my painful reminiscences and paint many pictures, to reproduce and perpetuate the memory of those bloody catastrophes. The more excited and desperate I was, the better and more striking my work would be. It would speak to men's hearts; it would arouse admiration for our heroism, pity for our misfortunes, and I assure you that it might prove that I had served our cause better with my brush than I had done with my gun."