"That's a fine sort of love! If she loves you, she will be happy in her devotion to you. And as for the children, you French people are absurd. You would like only to bring them into the world when you are sure of turning them out with comfortable private means, so that they will have nothing to suffer and nothing to fear…. Good Lord! That's nothing to do with you: your business is only to give them life, love of life, and courage to defend it. The rest … whether they live or die … is the common lot. Is it better to give up living than to take the risks of life?"
The sturdy confidence which emanated from Christophe affected André, but did not change his mind. He said:
"Yes, perhaps, that is true…."
But he stopped at that. Like all the rest, his will and power of action seemed to be paralyzed.
* * * * *
Christophe had set himself to fight the inertia which he found In most of his French friends, oddly coupled with laborious and often feverish activity. Almost all the people he met in the various middle-class houses which he visited were discontented. They had almost all the same disgust with the demagogues and their corrupt ideas. In almost all there was the same sorrowful and proud consciousness of the betrayal of the genius of their race. And it was by no means the result of any personal rancor nor the bitterness of men and classes beaten and thrust out of power and active life, or discharged officials, or unemployed energy, nor that of an old aristocracy which has returned to its estates, there to die in hiding like a wounded lion. It was a feeling of moral revolt, mute, profound, general: it was to be found everywhere, in a greater or less degree, in the army, in the magistracy, in the University, in the officers, and in every vital branch of the machinery of government. But they took no active measures. They were discouraged in advance: they kept on saying:
"There is nothing to be done:"
or
"Let us try not to think of it."
Fearfully they dodged anything sad in their thoughts and conversation: and they took refuge in their home life.