A thousand times Annette had thought of the state in which she found herself to-day, in the world of toil and poverty. But what she had thought then bore no resemblance to what she thought now that she was taking part in it.
Yesterday she had believed in the democratic axiom of the Rights of Man, and it had seemed to her unjust that the masses should be deprived of them. To-day, the injustice—if there remained any question of just and unjust—was that rights existed for the privileged. There are no rights. Man has no right to anything. Nothing belongs to him. He has to conquer everything anew every day. That is the Law: "Thou shalt earn thy bread in the sweat of thy brow." Rights are the deceitful invention of a fallen combatant, to sanction the spoils of his past victory. Rights are nothing but the strength of yesterday, heaping up its treasures. But the living right, the only one, is work. The conquest of every day. . . . What a sudden vision of the human battlefield! It had no terrors for Annette. The courageous soul accepted this combat as a necessity; and she found it just because she was "in form," young and robust. If she conquered, so much the better! If she was conquered, so much the worse! (She would not be conquered. . . .) She had not given up pity, but she had given up weakness. The first of her duties was "Don't be pusillanimous!"
By the new light of this law of labor, everything became dear to her. The old faiths were put to the test, and a new morality rose on the ruins of the old, cemented on this heroic foundation. The morality of freedom, the morality of strength, not of Pharisaism and debility. And examining under this light the doubts that troubled her, especially that which lay deepest in her heart, "Have I the right to my child?" she answered, "Yes, if I can keep him alive, if I can make a man of him. If I can do this, everything will be all right. If I cannot, everything will be wrong. This is the only morality; everything else is hypocritical."
This inflexible decision redoubled her vigor and her joy in the struggle.
She was meditating in this fashion one day as she was walking about Paris, going from one task to another. The walking excited her mind. Now that her daily activity was methodically regulated, her dreams resumed their rights. But they were waking dreams, clear, precise, dreams that had nothing misty about them. The more limited her time was, the more she made of these slight intervals; like ivy the hours climbed up, covering the walls of the days. Annette brought her enlarged conceptions of the true human morality face to face with the experiences of her day. Work and poverty had opened her eyes. She had a new perception of the untruthfulness of modern life which she had not seen when she was caught in it. The monstrous futility of this life—nine-tenths of this life—particularly for women. . . . Eating, sleeping, procreating. . . . Yes, a tenth part had some use. But the rest? . . . This "civilization"? What people call "thinking"? Is man—vulgus umbrarum—really made for thought? He wants to persuade himself that he is, he puts himself into the attitude for it, and he believes that he holds it, as by consecrated exploits. But he does not think. He does not think over his newspaper, or in his office, before the wheel on which his everyday activities revolve. The wheel turns with him, turns empty. Did they think, those young girls whom Annette had undertaken to teach? What was the meaning of the words they heard, read, uttered? To what did their life reduce itself? A few immense, depressing instincts brooding in their torpor under a mass of playthings. Desire and enjoyment. . . . Thought was also one of their playthings. Who was deceived by it? Themselves. The garment of this civilization, its luxury, its art, its movement and its noise—(that noise! one of its masks, to make itself believe that it was hurrying toward some end! what end? It hurried in order to stupefy itself)—what lay beneath it? Emptiness. People gloried in it. They gloried in their tinsel, in their chatter, in their trinkets. How rare were the men who revealed the shining light of Necessity! To the eternal brute in man the voice of its gods and its sages says nothing or is only one triviality the more. It never escapes from the confines of its desire and boredom. Like man himself, human society is a meretricious structure. Custom holds it together. A touch can lay it in ruins. . . .
Tragic thoughts. But they could not depress the ardent Annette. It is the inspiration within that gives joy or sadness, not ideas. Under an untroubled sky an anæmic soul perishes of melancholy. A vigorous soul, exposed to storms, wraps itself as happily in shadows as in sunlight. It knows quite well that they alternate. Annette came home sometimes crushed with fatigue and the feeling of a dark future. She would go to bed and sleep; in the middle of the night some ridiculous dream would wake her up laughing. Or, more often, in the evening, as she sat with her brow bent over her work and the fingers followed their path, her brain, following its path in turn, would suddenly pick up some absurd thought and she would be full of merriment. She had to take care not to laugh too loudly in order not to awaken Marc. "I'm an idiot," she said, as she dried her eyes. But her heart was lightened. These childish relaxings, these sudden reactions, were a wholesome heritage that came to her from her family. When the heart is full of clouds, the wind of joy rises and drives them away.
No, she had no need of distractions, books. Annette had enough to read in herself. And the most thrilling of books was her son.
[XXIV]
He was approaching his seventh year. He had adjusted himself to the change of his surroundings much more readily than might have been expected. Disagreeable or not, it was a change. He had cast his skin like a little snake. Ungrateful childhood! All Sylvie's indulgences and all her petting—she was so certain of her power over him!—were as if they had never been. After forty-eight hours he no longer even thought of them.
What pleases or displeases a child is never what you expect. The first thing Marc appreciated in his new life was the school whither his mother sent him pityingly—and the hours of solitude when there was nobody to watch him.