Put the bracelets on an ordinary man, tell him he's a bad egg, treat him rough,
shove him into the jug or its equivalent (you see I have regard always
for M. le Surveillant's delicate but no doubt necessary distinction
between La Ferté and Prison), and he will become one of three animals—a
rabbit, that is to say timid; a mole, that is to say stupid; or a hyena,
that is to say Harree the Hollander. But if, by some fatal, some
incomparably fatal accident, this man has a soul—ah, then we have and
truly have most horribly what is called in La Ferté Macé by those who
have known it: La Misère. Monsieur Auguste's valiant attempts at
cheerfulness and the natural buoyancy of his gentle disposition in a
slight degree protected him from La Misère. The Machine-Fixer was lost.
By nature he was tremendously sensible, he was the very apotheosis of
l'ame sensible in fact. His sensibilité made him shoulder not only the
inexcusable injustice which he had suffered but the incomparable and
overwhelming total injustice which everyone had suffered and was
suffering en masse day and night in The Enormous Room. His woes, had they
not sprung from perfectly real causes, might have suggested a persecution
complex. As it happened there was no possible method of relieving
them—they could be relieved in only one way: by Liberty. Not simply by
his personal liberty, but by the liberation of every single
fellow-captive as well. His extraordinarily personal anguish could not be
selfishly appeased by a merely partial righting, in his own case, of the Wrong—the ineffable and terrific and to be perfectly avenged Wrong—done to those who ate and slept and wept and played cards within that abominable and unyielding Symbol which enclosed the immutable vileness of our common life. It was necessary, for its appeasement, that a shaft of bright lightning suddenly and entirely should wither the human and material structures which stood always between our filthy and pitiful selves and the unspeakable cleanness of Liberty.
B. recalls that the little Machine- Fixer said or hinted that he had been either a socialist or an anarchist when he was young. So that is doubtless why we had the privilege of his
