It is easy to explain the fascination such simple theories would have for a child’s mind. Such conversation made a deep impression. My father was of the type of those who were called later on “the old beards of 1848.” An idealist, without any notion of the probabilities of reality, my father thought that his political conceptions were absolute truths. As sentimental and as romantic as was my grandmother, he fostered illusions about political life resembling those which she fostered about individual life.
However, some of his conceptions seemed sublime to me in my childhood.
My father gave a place to nature in all that he said to me, for he sermonised me continually. The doctrine of Christ, which had given the formulas of liberty, equality, and fraternity, was mingled in his mind with an exuberant, poetical paganism, and this amalgamation furnished his discourses with pompous arguments on charity, on the laws of social sacrifice, and on the divine attributes of human heroism. My childish imagination, already initiated in researches for what grandmother called “superior things,” was dazzled and fascinated by degrees.
My father’s professional ability served marvellously well in placing all things of which he spoke within my mind’s reach. He simplified questions to such a degree that he succeeded in leading me to converse with him, and in making me feel that he took an extreme pleasure in our conversations.
This made me very proud. He was prudent in all that he said to me: “I do not say this to influence you; you are still too young for me to enforce any ideas upon you; I will teach you later,” etc., etc. I listened to admirable sonorous phrases, but could not judge of the gaps in their practical demonstrations, or of the possibility of the application of his ideas. I was touched by his devotedness to the suffering classes, of whom he often spoke.
I had, however, an instinctive feeling that the violence of my father’s character, of which he gave too frequent proofs, might make him, like his friend Saint-Just, cruel towards the fortunate ones of this world, as his good heart made him kind to the unhappy. And I wished to know whether I had guessed rightly. It was a hidden place in his heart to discover.
“I agree, after all, that your Saint-Just loved the humble and poor as much as you do,” I said to my father one day, “but you cannot prove to me that he was not cruel, that he did not kill.”
He answered:
“Action changes a man’s nature; you must judge Saint-Just from his intentions.”
“Hell is paved with them, papa,” I said.