Grandmother and I went to Blérancourt to see them plant the tree of Liberty, but it displeased us to behold my father attending this ceremony dressed in a blue blouse. His tri-coloured scarf was tied so as to show the red only. Already my father declared: “Of the three colours, we like only the red.” White seemed to him too Legitimist, and blue too Orléanist.
“Juliette,” asked grandmother, in my ear, as we were starting for the ceremony, “do you like that blouse? does it not shock your taste?”
“It is partly blue, at any rate, grandmother,” I answered, laughing; “and, with papa’s ideas, it might have been all red!”
A young poplar tree was brought and planted in a large hole prepared for it in the market-place.
My father, since the Republic had been declared in the name of liberty, had become reconciled with the priest, who now blessed the tree of Liberty.
In his speech the priest declared that if the Republic realized the evangelical ideals of its programme, incarnated in the names of liberty, equality, and fraternity, it would be the finest form of government existing; but, in order to accomplish this, it was necessary that all republicans should be as sincere, as generous, and, he cleverly added, as Christian in heart, if not in form, and as devoted to the poor as the new Mayor.
In a speech full of ardour, which carried me away, and with a fiery eloquence which fascinated grandmother, my father answered the priest that no one could deny that the Republic, and its principles of liberty, equality, and fraternity, was born from the Gospel; that Christ was the first of all socialists and republicans; that a true republican should possess all the Christian virtues, and that Christianity was the finest human formula ever conceived.
I was amazed. My father added: “All that has reference to the temporal power of the Church is admirable. It is more advanced than we socialists in the understanding and the practice of association. We have a great deal to learn from her, but it is time that she herself should learn from us the worship of nature, and allow herself to be penetrated by the truth of science!”
“My dear Mayor,” said the vicar to my father after the ceremony, “you would accept the Christian religion with your eyes shut under the condition that it should be heathenish.”
“In return,” said my father, laughingly, to the vicar, “accept my heathen religion, springing from the love of nature, under the condition that it inspires Christian virtues.”