GERMINAL
strike against our wishes, we didn't count on finishing up with the Company. Only one gets carried away, one begins to expect things, and when it turns out badly one forgets that one ought to have expected that, instead of lamenting and quarrelling as if it were a catastrophe tumbled down from heaven."
"Then if you think the games's lost," asked Rasseneur, "why don't you make the mates listen to reason?"
The young man looked at him fixedly.
"Listen! enough of this. You have your ideas, I have mine. I came in here to show you that I feel esteem for you in spite of everything. But I still think that if we come to grief over this trouble, our starved carcasses will do more for the people's cause than all your common-sense politics. Ah! if one of those bloody soldiers would just put a bullet in my heart, that would be a fine way of ending!"
His eyes were moist, as in this cry there broke out the secret desire of the vanquished, the refuge in which he desired to lose his torment for ever.
"Well said!" declared Madame Rasseneur, casting on her husband a look which was full of all the contempt of her radical opinions.
Sourvarine, with a vague gaze, feeling about with his nervous hands, did not appear to hear. His fair girlish face, with the thin nose and small pointed teeth, seemed to be growing savage in some mystic dream full of bloody visions. And he began to dream aloud, replying to a remark of Rasseneur's about the International which had been let fall in the course of the conversation.
"They are all cowards; there is only one man who can make their machine into a terrible instrument of destruction. It requires will, and none of them have will; and that's why the revolution will abort once more."
He went on in a voice of disgust, lamenting the imbecility of men, while the other two were rather disturbed by these somnambulistic confidences made in the darkness. In Russia there was nothing going on well, and he was in despair over the news he had received. His old companions were all turning to the politicians; the famous Nihilists who made Europe tremble—sons of popes, of the lower middle class, of tradesmen—could not rise above the idea of national liberation, and seemed to be-
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