That evening, there was a journalist – an old, thin, sorry-looking bearded socialist – who, from his seat at a table surrounded by young people was providing commentary on an opinion piece to appear the following day in Le Réveil, on the topic of Article 35 of the 1793 Constitution and the insurrectionary duty of the people.
‘When the Government violates the rights of the people, insurrection is their most sacred of rights and the most indispensable of duties ... I set out in my article the mechanics of rebellion; it is triggered when the people’s capacity for the intolerable reaches the point where rebellion is the only possible solution. And we are almost there! This is where we find ourselves!’ gesticulated the old revolutionary from ’48 by way of emphasis.
‘When we’ve torched everything, we shall rebuild a society that is fair and egalitarian. We shall confiscate the means of production from the capitalists and return them to the people,’ thundered Perrachon, a young law student and friend of Auguste. A chubby-faced fellow, renowned for causing disruption at the Sorbonne.
Auguste intervened.
‘But once you have them, these workers’ cooperatives, they’ll have no choice but to compete with each other in order to amortise the cost of their new machinery and produce tonnes of commodities irrespective of people’s actual needs, and they’ll then have to beg the state to declare war so they can liquidate their surplus. And so it will go, over and over, until the world explodes.’
The old Forty-Eighter started to laugh heartily.
‘That’s youth speaking, there, courting disaster! I’ve lived through three revolutions, but I still haven’t witnessed the apocalypse.’
Auguste found all these debates at the Café Madrid intellectually stimulating, and a world apart from the opinions of his own family, whose construction interests had, for the time being, tanked. Which was to say that, the last he had heard, his brother Ferdinand was spending every Sunday afternoon in the salon of the Reinach family, close friends of Adolphe Thiers, doubtless seeking goodness knows what form of advantage, almost certainly involving the accumulation of more wealth. It would definitely not be a first, because it was Thiers himself, when he was Minister for Public Works, who had championed the planned railway between Paris and Saint-Germain, and who had awarded the contract for the construction of the stations to his grandfather, and then to his father.
When the journalist from Le Réveil decamped, Auguste pulled up a chair at a table with Perrachon and Trousselier, a tall, dark-haired medical student with an enormous nose hanging over his walrus-like moustache.
These two friends from the university were a couple of years older than Auguste and had come of age when the previous conscription laws had still been in force, narrowly managing to take advantage of the regime of exemption from military service in return for payment of a sum of money. Their parents had paid what they’d had to in order for their respective sons to be exempted from military service and that had been the end of the matter. They were his two closest friends; he felt he could trust them.
‘Where did you pull that from, that business about the end of the world?’ asked Perrachon.
‘From one of our Philosophy profs, a man from Alsace who translated one of Marx’s texts, The Fetishism of Commodities, for us. It’s a terrifyingly prophetic text about the mechanisms of accumulation and concentration of wealth. And with my family busy trying to buy me a man, the supposed philosopher in me is currently spending quite some time reflecting on the issue of wealth,’ said Auguste, ironically.
‘They’re reporting in La Marseillaise that Bismarck is plotting with Kaiser Wilhelm to install a Prussian cousin on the Spanish throne because he wants to prod the French into declaring war against him,’ commented Perrachon.
‘Don’t I know it; I’m reading the papers twice a day and not sleeping a wink.’
Trousselier interrupted to reassure his friend.
‘Well, your sacrifice won’t make a jot of difference when it comes to this war, which is entirely the work of speculators on both sides.’
‘As you might imagine, this war is the last thing I want, but should I refuse to go, I’ll be executed.’
‘Rest assured you’re not the only one in your class to find yourself in a jam. On Saturday morning I was woken by the heart-wrenching cries of my neighbour across the landing, who was clinging to her son as the soldiers came to round him up. His father stood there on the doorstep, his arms dangling slack at his sides, crushed by guilt at not having found a solution. A few months earlier he had paid half the price, namely 5000 francs, to a dealer in human flesh for a substitute who was refused admission on the grounds of tuberculosis just as he was to enlist: the medical certificate had been faked!’
‘The poor man! Does it have anything to do with that story of the army surgeon that all the papers are talking about?’ asked Auguste.
‘Certainly does! The fellow wrote bogus certificates for brokers certifying sixty substitutes who didn’t qualify on medical grounds. They found 70,000 francs at his place! Fat lot of good that does for my neighbour, I hear you say; it was too late for him, he was given his marching orders on the spot.’
Perrachon hesitated for a moment, then proceeded with a conspiratorial air.
‘Well, lads, I’m going to tell you a good one, but you’re not to repeat it to anybody because it involves members of my family . . . do you promise?’
‘Promise,’ muttered the other two.
Perrachon hauled himself upright on his chair, adopting the pose of somebody about to deliver some tasty revelations.
‘Having hunted for months for somebody to replace my cousin Camille, whom of course you know, my Uncle Henry finally unearthed a man. Before submitting him to the recruitment board for admission, he had to notarise the sale. In the time it took him to hail a carriage to take him to the notary, the man was snatched from under his nose. By some kind of miracle, he located another a few days later; a superb recruit, five foot eleven inches, a magnificent cavalryman. The whole family came to admire him, he was that handsome! He signs him up and has the man stay at his place until it’s recruitment time so as not to risk going through the same drama. This fellow lives it up for two months, wanders around my aunt’s salon in his undergarments when she’s holding her Friday afternoon tea parties, scorches the tapestry work on the chairs with his tobacco, refuses to dine with the servants, snaffles the tastiest morsels, belches and farts away at the dining table as he regales them with appalling stories in his gutter language . . . And . . .’
And here Perrachon paused for effect.
‘. . . and makes my cousin pregnant.’
‘Your cousin? Which cousin?’ asked Trousselier, enthralled.
‘My cousin Pauline.’
‘No!’
‘Yes, indeed! The sublime Pauline. The very one! And . . . he gives her syphilis. Wait, that’s not even the end of the story . . . it continues! After making life hellish for the whole family, our man – when he finds himself before the recruitment officer – nonchalantly pulls down his coat to show off his superb tattoo from Toulon prison. Then off he goes, hands in his pockets, happy with his first down payment, and his board and lodging, on the hunt for another family of dupes.’
‘And?’