Germinal - Emile Zola [286]
Out on the highway Étienne walked for a while, deep in thought. All sorts of ideas were racing through his mind. But above all he felt the pleasure of the fresh air and the open sky, and he took deep breaths. The sun was rising gloriously on the horizon, stirring the countryside to a joyful awakening. A tide of gold was sweeping over the immense plain from east to west as the warmth of life took hold, spreading out in a tremulous wave of vibrant newness and youth that mingled the sighs of the earth, the songs of the birds and every murmur and whisper of stream and wood. It was good to be alive, the old world wanted to see another spring.
Filled with this spirit of hope, Étienne slowed his pace, gazing absently to left and right, taking in the gaiety of the new season. He thought about himself, and he felt strong, matured by his hard times down the pit. His education was complete, and he was leaving newly armed, a philosopher soldier of the revolution, having declared war on the society he saw around him and condemned. In his delight at going to join Pluchart, at going to be Pluchart, a leader who was listened to, he started making speeches to himself, rehearsing the phrases as he went. He considered how he might broaden his programme of objectives, for the bourgeois refinement that had taken him out of his own class had now made him hate the bourgeoisie even more. Discomfited by the workers’ reek of poverty, he felt the need to raise them up to glory and set a halo on their heads; he would show how they alone among human beings were great and unimpeachably pure, the sole font of nobility and strength from which humanity at large might draw the means of its own renewal. Already he could see himself addressing the Assembly, sharing in the triumph of the people – if the people didn’t destroy him first.
High above him he heard a lark singing, and he looked up at the sky. Tiny red clouds, the lingering mists of the night, were melting into the limpid blue; and in his mind’s eye the shadowy figures of Souvarine and Rasseneur appeared before him. It was clear that everything went wrong when people tried to gain power for themselves. Hence the failure of this famous International of theirs, which was supposed to have changed the world but which was now weak and impotent because its formidable army of supporters had been divided and fragmented by internal squabbling. Was Darwin right, then? Would the world forever be a battleground on which the strong devoured the weak in pursuit of the perfection and continuity of the species? The question worried him, even if, as a man sure in the certainty of his own knowledge, he believed he could answer it. But there was one prospect which dispelled all his doubts and held him in thrall, and this was the idea that his first speech would be devoted to his own version of Darwin’s theory. If one class had to devour the other, then surely it was the people, still young and hardy, which would devour a bourgeoisie that had worn itself out in self-gratification? New blood would mean a new society. And by thus looking forward to a barbarian invasion that would regenerate the old, decaying nations of the world, Étienne once again demonstrated his absolute faith in the coming revolution, the real revolution, the workers’ revolution, whose conflagration would engulf the dying years of the century in flames as crimson as the morning sun which now rose bleeding into the sky.
He walked on, lost in his dreams,