Germinal - Emile Zola [102]
This was the point at which Étienne acquired a firmer grasp of the ideas that had been floating around in his head for some time. Until then he had experienced only an instinctive sense of resistance amid the silent, festering resentment of his comrades. All sorts of confusing issues puzzled him. Why were some men poor and other men rich? Why were some men under the heel of other men, and with no hope of ever taking their place? And the first forward step was the realization of his own ignorance. But then a deep sense of shame, a secret sorrow, began to gnaw away at him: he knew nothing, and he didn’t dare discuss with others these things he cared so passionately about, like equality among men, or the fairness and justice which demanded that the fruits of the earth be shared among all. So he acquired a taste for study, but of the unmethodical kind characteristic of people taken with a craze for knowledge. He was now in regular correspondence with Pluchart, who was better educated and already very involved in the socialist movement. He had books sent to him, whose poorly digested contents finally turned his head: especially a book on medicine, The Hygiene of Miners,1 in which a Belgian doctor had summarized the various illnesses that people working in the coal industry were dying of; not to mention a number of arid and impenetrably technical treatises on political economy, some anarchist pamphlets, which made his head spin, and old newspaper articles, which he kept for use as irrefutable ammunition in any future discussion. On top of which, Souvarine also lent him books, and the one about co-operative societies had set him dreaming for a whole month about a universal exchange system which abolished money and based the whole of social life on the value of labour. The shame he felt at his own ignorance receded, to be replaced by a new sense of pride now that he was aware of himself starting to think.
During these first few months Étienne remained at the level of the enthusiastic beginner, his heart bursting with generous indignation against the oppressor and eagerly espousing the prospect of imminent triumph for the oppressed. He had not yet put together a system of his own from all his sundry reading. The practical measures demanded by Rasseneur were all mixed up in his mind with the violence and destruction advocated by Souvarine; and when he came out of the Advantage, where the three of them spent time almost every day ranting and railing against the Company, he would walk along in a kind of dream in which he was witness to the radical regeneration of all the peoples of the world with not a window broken or a drop of blood shed. Admittedly the means to this end remained obscure, and he preferred simply to believe that everything would turn out fine, for he soon got lost when he tried to formulate a specific programme of reform. Indeed he was full of moderation and illogicality, insisting from time to time that politics had to be kept out of the ‘social question’,2 an opinion he had read somewhere and which seemed like the right thing to say among the apathetic colliers he worked with.
In the Maheu household they had taken to sitting up half an hour longer every evening before going to bed, and Étienne kept returning to the same subject. Now that he was becoming more refined, he was increasingly offended by the cheek-by-jowl nature of life in the village. Were they animals to be herded together like