I was flattered by everyone at grandmother’s; I was humiliated unceasingly at my mother’s. If my father spoke of my intelligence, or my beauty, my mother said I was as stupid as I was ugly.
It seemed to me at that time that I was overestimated in both ways by them, and I began to criticise myself, as I have always since done—not with extreme indulgence nor with determined malice. I am grateful to my mother, after all, for having kept me from acquiring too much self-complacency.
I began my study on Greece again, with delight. My father was not only a professor, he was a poet.
“How can you be such a red republican, with such a love for Marmorean Greece?” I asked him.
“With the Greeks, marble was only the skeleton of architecture and sculpture,” my father replied, “and in Grecian colours red predominates. Besides, there is no question of art in republican conceptions, but only of politics. Art is eternal; politics is the science of an impulse toward progress. I may be classical in my taste in art, and worship what is antique. In politics I desire only new things. When the people shall have heard the vivifying good word, they will understand beauty and art as we understand it. They already appreciate them better than the middle class.”
I cannot describe how my father spoke of the people; the very word was pronounced by him with fervour, almost religiously.
“Papa,” I replied, “I want a white republic, an Athenian republic, with an aristocracy which shall arise from out the masses and which shall be the best portion of those masses. I wish a superior caste, which shall govern, instruct, and enlighten.”
“And I wish only the people, nothing but the people, in which we shall be mingled and melted as if in a powerful crucible,” said my father. “The mass of the people has sap which is exhausted in us; it has a vitality which we no longer possess. The humble class is not responsible for any of its faults, which no one ever endeavoured to correct usefully and intelligently during its youth. How admirable it is in its natural qualities, which so many elements strive to mislead! Why are the upper classes so vicious? Why have they not given the people some elementary instruction before they tried to educate them? They would not then have allowed themselves to be speculated with by wicked and ambitious men.”
The President, Prince Louis Napoleon, passed reviews; made proselyting journeys; the “Orléans,” as they then said, intrigued at Clermont, the Legitimists at Wiesbaden; what remained of the republican form of government suffered assault on all sides.
My father said: “We still have the people with us!” But his conviction disagreed with the proof, constantly made more evident, that the government was eliminating the people by all possible means from taking part in national questions. The patriotic workmen were influenced by those who said they had suffered from the diminished part played by France in Europe under King Louis Philippe, and who did not cease to recall the glorious epoch of Napoleon I.