“Real piety consists in giving one’s indulgences, one’s help, and one’s love to the wretched, not in limited charity, circumscribed to material relief, but with a broad humanity.”
My heart melted at these words, and, as my father’s acts were always in accordance with what he said, he moved every fibre of sensibility I possessed.
“A republic alone can give to men the greatest of all precious things: the liberty of their rights and their duties,” said my father, “allowing them the free expansion of their faculties for human benefaction. It alone can distribute instruction unreservedly and impose education by example.
“Socialist-republican principles endow every man, every citizen, with a dogma of pride which assures his moral value. If a man be a socialist-republican, he finds within himself the exact level of his scope of faculties, which in no wise oppress the scope of other person’s faculties.”
And then came endless preaching. My father’s conviction, sincere faith, and absolute certainty of the truth of his ideas, gave him such persuasive eloquence that no child of eleven could resist, especially one whom he treated as a beloved disciple.
One evening my father solemnly gave me a small guide entitled, “Twenty-one short precepts on the duties of a sincere Socialist-republican,” which Saint Paul would not have disavowed. He had composed it for me and for his peasant and workingmen proselytes.
XXIX
TALKS ABOUT NATURE
I WAS very fond of play, but, as I took my rôle of socialist-republican disciple so much in earnest, I seized every opportunity, like my father, of preaching its doctrines.
In the evenings, after dinner, which we took rather early, the children of the neighbourhood used to gather under the lime trees, in the large square, which was situated near our house. Our elders sat and chatted with one another, while the boys and girls, myself at the head, played at revolution. The sons and daughters of the parents whom my father had “converted” were all on my side, while the lukewarm, or ignorant, usually received chastisement, or finally came over to our party.