GERMINAL
knew nothing then; now he had read and studied, his ideas were ripe, and he boasted that he had a system. He explained it badly, however, in confused phrases which contained a little of all the theories he had successively passed through and abandoned. At the summit Karl Marx's idea remained standing: capital was the result of spoliation, it was the duty and the privilege of work to re-conquer that stolen wealth. In practice he had at first, with Proudhon, been captured by the chimera of a mutual credit, a vast bank of exchange which suppressed middlemen; then Lasalle's co-operative societies, endowed by the state, gradually transforming the earth into a single industrial town, had aroused his enthusiasm until he grew disgusted in face of the difficulty of controlling them; and he had arrived recently at collectivism, demanding that all the instruments of production should be restored to the community. But this remained vague; he knew not how to realise this new dream, still hindered by scruples of reason and good sense, not daring to risk the sectary's absolute affirmations. He simply said that it was a question of getting possession of the Government first of all. Afterwards they would see.
"But what has taken you? Why are you going over to the bourgeois?" he continued violently, again planting himself before the inn-keeper. "You said yourself it would have to burst up!"
Rasseneur blushed slightly.
"Yes, I said so. And if it does burst up, you will see that I am not more of a coward than anyone else. Only I refuse to be among those who increase the mess in order to fish out a position for themselves."
Étienne blushed in his turn. The two men no longer shouted, having become bitter and spiteful, conquered by the coldness of their rivalry. It was at bottom that which always strains systems, making one man revolutionary in the extreme, pushing the other to an affectation of prudence, carrying them, in spite of themselves, beyond their true ideas into the fatality of those parts which men do not choose for themselves. And Souvarine, who was listening, exhibited on his pale, girlish face a silent contempt—the crushing contempt of the man who was willing to yield his life in obscurity without even gaining the splendour of martyrdom.
[214]
