They were internationalists, not foregoing by so being their legitimate pride of race, not accepting without resistance being conquered by an enemy, not admitting or imitating the utilitarian ideas of national groupings morally inferior to themselves, but in order to infuse into other nations their principles of love and of regeneration.
My father said to me, towards the end of April, that he saw the distance grow wider every day between his hopes and the actual events taking place.
“I am afraid,” he added, “that our Republic will be only a rose-water Republic, of the kind which some day will be dyed with blood. The ‘yellow gloves’ of the National are the masters, and are delivering the Republic over to ambitious men.”
My grandmother, on the contrary, declared herself quite satisfied with the Republic, which she found in no wise frightful, as she had feared it would be.
“Jean Louis, I am getting on very well with your Republic!” she would say to my father.
At first my father answered: “Wait a little, mother;” later he replied: “You are more satisfied than I am.” One day he burst forth: “By Heaven! if the Republic suits you, it is because it is made for your benefit! The Orléanists might as well return; they will have nothing to change in favour of the middle class.”
My father became soon, in the most bitter sense of the word, a malcontent. Of course I became a malcontent also.
XXXIV
I GO TO BOARDING-SCHOOL
I WAS a very aggressive malcontent moreover. My discussions with grandmother became so violent that grandfather several times was angry with me, and even Blondeau blamed me. My friend Charles, who would probably have upheld me—for he was a revolutionist, as well as my father and myself—had left Chauny to become the secretary of one of his boyhood friends, a high functionary of the Republic, at Paris.