XXXI
“LIBERTY, EQUALITY, AND FRATERNITY”
WHEN I stayed with my father I missed my grandmother—her liveliness, her fancies, her caprices, her gracious tenderness, and her maternal feeling. Grandfather’s wit amused and rested me, and to be without Blondeau’s devotion and my friend Charles’s admiration was a great deprivation. But as soon as I returned to grandmother I felt myself an orphan. I was nervous, my mind was empty, I was stupefied, and became more childlike, more enervated, less fit for “the struggle for life,” a phrase which grandfather indulged in too frequently and used on all occasions.
These allusions to the “struggle for life” sometimes came up in such a droll manner in conversation that they made us all laugh, but I often thought that these same struggles did really exist, and were anything but droll. Had I not already experienced them? The memory of that scene of my father’s violence rose so tragically in my mind that it seemed to impress me much more when I invoked it than at the time when I endured the pain. Then, too, my father’s strange, insane idea of marrying me to a workman never left my mind.
I had sometimes dreamed of a cottage or a farm, with a gentleman for a husband, but never of a “lodging,” with a weaver’s loom or a carpenter’s block in the centre of the room, waiting for “my man” to return from taking his work home, having “finished his day.”
I could have no doubts about my deep and growing love for the people—a love which in my days of enthusiasm seemed capable of enabling me to sacrifice my very life for their cause; I wished to help them and to serve them, but to form a part of them,—I, whom generations of ancestors had elevated above them—that I could never do.
I recalled Saint-Just’s words, which his sister often repeated to me in speaking of the elegance of the young Jacobite, “the people’s friend.” He said:
“I wish to raise the people up to me, and desire to see them one day dressed as I am myself, but I will never lower myself to them nor wear their blue blouse.”
My father, on the contrary, delighted to wear the sayon of the Gauls, the peasant’s blouse, and workman’s smock-frock. He failed, however, to induce my mother to dress herself as a woman of the people.
To be sure, when I stayed with my aunts I gladly wore the peasant costume, which they had worn for years, but then they saw no one—they had retired from the world but had always remained gentlewomen. They had not chosen that mode of dress to become one of the lower class. Their ways, their conversation, their lives, showed the refinement of their caste. The contrast between their refinement and the peasant garb pleased them, because it was rustic and made them think of Trianon; whereas the contrast sought by my father would have made one think rather of the women who sat and knitted by the guillotine, the “tricoteuses” of the Revolution.
One day I had a discussion with my father on this subject, and told him I would much rather see the “white caps” (the name given in Picardy to the peasant women) wearing hats like mine—although at that time such a thing was not dreamed of, though doubtless they would have been pleased to don them—than I should care to wear their caps.