"Well, father, have I ever rebelled, have I broken my promise?" said Emile, surprised to hear Monsieur Cardonnet speak with superb and as it were insulting contempt of that profession of which he had done his best to extol the honor and brilliancy, when it was a question of persuading his son to study it.
"Emile," rejoined the manufacturer, "I do not propose to reproach you; but you have a passive, apathetic way of submitting, that is a hundred times worse than resistance. If I could have foreseen that you would waste your time, I would very quickly have thought of something else; for, as I have told you, time is the capital of capital, and here are two years of your life which have had no result in the way of developing your faculties and therefore none in the way of assuring your future."
"I flatter myself that the contrary is true," said Emile, with a smile of mingled sweetness and pride, "and I can assure you, father, that I have worked hard, read a great deal, thought a great deal—I dare not say learned a great deal—since I have been at Poitiers."
"Oh! I know very well what you have read and learned, Emile! I should have found it out from your letters even if I had not learned it from my correspondent; and I tell you that all this fine philosophico-metaphysico-politico-economical learning is of all things the vainest, the falsest, the most chimerical and the most ridiculous, not to say the most dangerous, for a young man. It has gone so far that your last letters would have made me roar with laughter as a judge, if I had not felt a mortal disappointment as a father; and it was precisely because I saw that you had mounted a new hobby-horse and were about to take your flight through space once more that I resolved to summon you here, perhaps for a time only, perhaps for good, if I do not succeed in restoring you to your senses."
"Your sarcasm and your contempt are very cruel, father, and grieve my heart more than they wound my self-esteem. That I am not in full accord with you is possible. I am prepared to hear you deny all my beliefs; but that you should repulse me with ironical jeers, when, for the first time in my life, I feel a longing and have the courage to pour all my thoughts and all my emotions into your bosom—that is a very bitter thing to me, and does me more harm than you think."
"There is more pride than you think in this puerile gentleness. Am I not your father, your best friend? Should I not force you to hear the truth when you are deceiving yourself and lead you back when you go astray? Come! a truce to vanity between us! I think more of your intelligence than you do yourself, for I do not propose to allow it to degenerate by feeding on unhealthy food. Listen to me, Emile! I know very well that it is the fashion among the young men of to-day to pose as legislators, to philosophize on every subject, to reform institutions that will last much longer than they will, and to invent religions and social systems—a new morality. The imagination delights in these chimeras, and they are very innocent when they don't last too long. But we must leave it all on the benches at school, and learn to know and understand society before destroying it. We soon discover that it is far superior to us, and that the wisest course is to submit to it, with shrewd tolerance. You are too big a boy now to waste your desires and reflections on a subject that has no bottom. I wish you to become interested in real, positive life; to study the meaning and application of the laws by which we are governed, instead of exhausting yourself in criticizing them. On the other hand, if such study tends to create a spirit of reaction and of disgust with the truth, you must abandon it and set about finding something useful to do for which you feel that you are fitted. Come, we are here to have an understanding and arrive at some conclusion: no vain declamations, no poetic dithyrambs against heaven and mankind! Poor creatures of a day that we are, we have no time to waste in trying to ascertain our destiny before and after our brief appearance on earth. We shall never solve that enigma. It is our bounden duty to work incessantly here on earth and to go hence without a murmur. We must account for our labors to the generation that precedes us and shapes us, and to that which follows us and which we shape. That is why family bonds are sacred and the rights of inheritance inalienable, despite your fine communistic theories, which I have never been able to understand, because they are not ripe and the human race must still wait for centuries before accepting them. Tell me, what do you propose to do?"
"I have absolutely no idea," replied Emile, overwhelmed by this avalanche of narrow-minded, cold commonplaces, uttered with brutal and arrogant fluency. "You solve with so much assurance questions which it will probably require my whole life to solve, that I am unable to follow you in this ardent race toward an unknown goal. I am too weak and my intelligence is apparently too limited to find in my own energy the motive or the reward of so many efforts. My tastes in no wise incline me to make them. I love mental labor, and I should love bodily labor, if it should become the servant of the other in procuring the gratification of the heart; but to work in order to hoard, to hoard in order to retain and increase one's hoard, until death puts an end to this unreasoning thirst—that has neither sense nor any attraction to me. I possess no faculty which you can employ for that object; I am not born a gambler and the enthralling chances of the rise and fall of my fortune will never cause me the slightest emotion. If my aspirations and my enthusiasm are chimeras unworthy of a serious mind, if there is no eternal truth, no divine reason for the existence of things, no ideal which we can carry in our heart to sustain ourselves and guide our footsteps through the evils and injustices of the present, then I no longer exist, I no longer believe in anything; I consent to die for you, father; but as to living and struggling like you and with you, I have neither the heart nor the arm nor the head for that sort of work."
Monsieur Cardonnet quivered with rage, but he restrained himself. Not without design had he thus awkwardly aroused his son's indignation and spirit of resistance. He had determined to lead him on to speak out his whole thought, and to test his enthusiasm, so to speak. When he realized from the young man's bitter tone and desperate expression that it really was as serious as he had feared, he determined to go around the obstacle and to manœuvre in such a way as to recover his influence.