Whilst the wind of anger and hatred blew in Alca, Eugine Bidault- Coquille,
poorest and happiest of astronomers, installed in an old steam-engine of the
time of the Draconides, was observing the heavens through a bad telescope, and
photographing the paths of the meteors upon some damaged photographic plates.
His genius corrected the errors of his instruments and his love of science
triumphed over the worthlessness of his apparatus. With an inextinguishable
ardour he observed aerolites, meteors, and fire-balls, and all the glowing
ruins and blazing sparks which pass through the terrestrial atmosphere with
prodigious speed, and as a reward for is studious vigils he received the
indifference of the public, the ingratitude of the State and the blame of the
learned societies. Engulfed in the celestial spaces he knew not what occurred
upon the surface of the earth. He never read the newspapers, and when he
walked through the town his mind was occupied with the November asteroids, and
more than once he found himself at the bottom of a pond in one of the public
parks or beneath the wheels of a motor omnibus.
Elevated in stature as in thought he respected himself and others. This was
shown by his cold politeness as well as by a very thin black frock coat and a
tall hat which gave to his person an appearance at once emaciated and sublime.
He took his meals in a little restaurant from which all customers less
intellectual than himself had fled, and thenceforth his napkin bound by its
wooden ring rested alone in the abandoned rack.
In this cook-shop his eyes fell one evening upon Colomban's memorandum in
favour of Pyrot. He read it as he was cracking some bad nuts and suddenly,
exalted with astonishment, admiration, horror, and pity, he forgot all about
falling meteors and shooting stars and saw nothing but the innocent man
hanging in his cage exposed to the winds of heaven and the ravens perching
upon it.
That image did not leave him. For a week he had been obsessed by the innocent
convict, when, as he was leaving his cook-shop, he saw a crowd of citizens
entering a public-house in which a public meeting was going on. He went in.
The meeting was disorderly; they were yelling, abusing one another and
knocking one another down in the smoke-laden hall. The Pyrotists and the
Anti-Pyrotists spoke in turn and were alternately cheered and hissed at. An
obscure and confused enthusiasm moved the audience. With the audacity of a
timid and retired man Bidault-Coquille leaped upon the platform and spoke for
three-quarters of an hour. He spoke very quickly, without order, but with
vehemence, and with all the conviction of a mathematical mystic. He was
cheered. When he got down from the platform a big woman of uncertain age,
dressed in red, and wearing an immense hat trimmed with heroic feathers,
throwing herself into his arms, embraced him, and said to him:
"You are splendid!"
He thought in his simplicity that there was some truth in the statement.
She declared to him that henceforth she would live but for Pyrot's defence and
Colomban's glory. He thought her sublime and beautiful. She was Maniflore, a
poor old courtesan, now forgotten and discarded, who had suddenly become a
vehement politician.
She never left him. They spent glorious hours together in doss-houses and in
lodgings beautified by their love, in newspaper offices, in meeting-halls and
in lecture-halls. As he was an idealist, he persisted in thinking her
beautiful, although she gave him abundant opportunity of seeing that she had
preserved no charm of any kind. From her past beauty she only retained a
confidence in her capacity for pleasing and a lofty assurance in demanding
homage. Still, it must be admitted that this Pyrot affair, so fruitful in
prodigies, invested Maniflore with a sort of civic majesty, and transformed
her, at public meetings, into an august symbol of justice and truth.
Bidault-Coquille and Maniflore did not kindle the least spark of irony or
amusement in a single Anti-Pyrotist, a single defender of Greatauk, or a
single supporter of the army. The gods, in their anger, had refused to those
men the precious gift of humour. They gravely accused the courtesan and the
astronomer of being spies, of treachery, and of plotting against their
country. Bidault-Coquille and Maniflore grew visibly greater beneath insult,
abuse, and calumny.
For long months Penguinia had been divided into two camps and, though at first
sight it may appear strange, hitherto the socialists had taken no part in the
contest. Their groups comprised almost all the manual workers in the country,
necessarily scattered, confused, broken up, and divided, but formidable. The
Pyrot affair threw the group leaders into a singular embarrassment. They did
not wish to place themselves either on the side of the financiers or on the
side of the army. They regarded the Jews, both great and small, as their
uncompromising opponents. Their principles were not at stake, nor were their
interests concerned in the affair. Still the greater number felt how difficult
it was growing for them to remain aloof from struggles in which all Penguinia
was engaged.
Their leaders called a sitting of their federation at the Rue de la
Queue-du-diable-St. Mael, to take into consideration the conduct they ought to
adopt in the present circumstances and in future eventualities.
Comrade Phoenix was the first to speak.
"A crime," said he, "the most odious and cowardly of crimes, a judicial crime,
has been committed. Military judges, coerced or misled by their superior
officers, have condemned an innocent man to an infamous and cruel punishment.
Let us not say that the victim is not one of our own party, that he belongs to
a caste which was, and always will be, our enemy. Our party is the party of
social justice; it can look upon no iniquity with indifference.
"It would be a shame for us if we left it to Kerdanic, a radical, to Colomban,
a member of the middle classes, and to a few moderate Republicans, alone to
proceed against the crimes of the army. If the victim is not one of us, his
executioners are our brothers' executioners, and before Greatauk struck down
this soldier he shot our comrades who were on strike.
"Comrades, by an intellectual, moral and material effort you must rescue Pyrot
from his torment, and in performing this generous act you are not turning
aside from the liberating and revolutionary task you have undertaken, for
Pyrot his become the symbol of the oppressed and of all the social iniquities
that now exist; by destroying one you make all the others tremble."
When Phoenix ended, comrade Sapor spoke in these terms:
"You are advised to abandon your task in order to do something with which you
have no concern. Why throw yourselves into a conflict where, on whatever side
you turn, you will find none but your natural, uncompromising, even necessary
opponents? Are the financiers to be less hated by us than the army? What inept
and criminal generosity is it that hurries you to save those seven hundred
Pyrotists whom you will always find confronting you in the social war?
"It is proposed that you act the part of the police for your enemies, and that
you are to re-establish for them the order which their own crimes have
disturbed. Magnanimity pushed to this degree changes its name.
"Comrades, there is a point at which infamy becomes fatal to a society.
Penguin society is being strangled by its infamy, and you are requested to
save it, to give it air that it can breathe. This is simply turning you into
ridicule.
"Leave is to smother itself and let us gaze at its last convulsions with
joyful contempt, only regretting that it has so entirely corrupted the soil on
which it has been built that we shall find nothing but poisoned mud on which
to lay the foundations of a new society."
When Sapor had ended his speech comrade Lapersonne pronounced these few words:
"Phoenix calls us to Pyrot's help for the reason that Pyrot is innocent. It
seems to me that that is a very bad reason. If Pyrot is innocent he has
behaved like a good soldier and has always conscientiously worked at his
trade, which principally consists in shooting the people. That is not a motive
to make the people brave all dangers in his defence. When it is demonstrated
to me that Pyrot is guilty and that he stole the army hay, I shall be on his
side."
Comrade Larrivee afterwards spoke.
"I am not of my friend, Phoenix's opinion but I am not with my friend Sapor
either. I do not believe that the party is bound to embrace a cause as soon as
we are told that that cause is just. That, I am afraid, is a grievous abuse of
words and a dangerous equivocation. For social justice is not revolutionary
justice. They are both in perpetual antagonism: to serve the one is to oppose
the other. As for me, my choice is made. I am for revolutionary justice as
against social justice. Still, in the present case I am against abstention. I
say that when a lucky chance brings us an affair like this we should be fools
not to profit by it.
"How? We are given an opportunity of striking terrible, perhaps fatal, blows
against militarism. And am I to fold my arms? I tell you, comrades, I am not a
fakir, I have never been a fakir, and if there are fakirs here let them not
count on me. To sit in meditation is a policy without results and one which I
shall never adopt.
"A party like ours ought to be continually asserting itself. It ought to prove
its existence by continual action. We will intervene in the Pyrot affair but
we will intervene in it in a revolutionary manner; we will adopt violent
action. . . . Perhaps you think that violence is old-fashioned and
superannuated, to be scrapped along with diligences, hand-presses and aerial
telegraphy. You are mistaken. To-day as yesterday nothing is obtained except
by violence; it is the one efficient instrument. The only thing necessary is
to know how to use it. You ask what will our action be? I will tell you: it
will be to stir up the governing classes against one another, to put the army
in conflict with the capitalists, the government with the magistracy, the
nobility and clergy with the Jews, and if possible to drive them all to
destroy one another. To do this would be to carry on an agitation which would
weaken government in the same way that fever wears out the sick.
"The Pyrot affair, little as we know how to turn it to advantage, will put
forward by ten years the growth of the Social party and the emancipation of
the proletariat, by disarmament, the general strike, and revolution."
The leaders of the party having each expressed a different opinion, the
discussion was continued, not without vivacity. The orators, as always happens
in such a case, reproduced the arguments they had already brought forward,
though with less order and moderation than before. The dispute was prolonged
and none changed his opinion. These opinions, in the final analysis, were
reduced to two: that of Sapor and Lapersonne who advised abstention, and that
of Phoenix and Larrivee, who wanted intervention. Even these two contrary
opinions were united in a common hatred of the heads of the army and of their
justice, and in a common belief in Pyrot's innocence. So that public opinion
was hardly mistaken in regarding all the Socialist leaders as pernicious
Anti-Pyrotists.
As for the vast masses in whose name they spoke and whom they represented as
far as speech can express the impossible--as for the proletarians whose
thought is difficult to know and who do not know it themselves, it seemed that
the Pyrot affair did not interest them. It was too literary for them, it was
in too classical a style, and had an upper-middle-class and high-finance tone
about it that did not please them much.
Read next: BOOK VI - MODERN TIMES#CHAPTER VIII - THE COLOMBAN TRIAL
Read previous: BOOK VI - MODERN TIMES#CHAPTER VI - THE SEVEN HUNDRED PYROTISTS
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