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Updated: May 25, 2025
At the mere mention of the flag tears came to Hamilton's eyes. And they were all sincere: they were all victims of the contagion. Andre Elsberger and his syndicalist friends, just as much as the rest, and even more: for, being crushed by necessity and pledged to a party that they detested, they submitted with a grim fury and a stormy pessimism which made them crazy for action.
Each hid that sorrow from the other: and they were only the more tender with each other: it was as though the poor creatures were striving to win one another's forgiveness. Madame Arnaud was kind and affectionate: she would gladly have been friends with Madame Elsberger. But she dared not: she was never approached.
But their disappointment too often leaves behind it a secret discontent, a qualis artifex pereo, which as best it can assumes a crust of what is usually called philosophy, and spoils their lives, until the wear and tear of daily life and new anxieties have erased all trace of the old bitterness. Such was the case of Andre Elsberger.
Elsberger was a queer man, full of courage, yet apathetic, sorrowful, and yet resigned. He had energy enough to bear a life of difficulty with dignity, but not enough to change it. It was as though he took a delight in justifying his own pessimism.
Elie Elsberger had gone away with his family to Spain, where he had been appointed manager of a mine. Old Weil had lost his wife and hardly ever lived in his flat in Paris. Only Christophe and his friend Cecile had kept up their relations with Lucile Arnaud: but they lived far away, and they were busy and hard at work all day long, so that they often did not come to see her for weeks together.
On the floor below in the flat corresponding to that of the two friends there lived a family of the name of Elie Elsberger: an engineer, his wife, and their two little girls, seven and ten years old: superior and sympathetic people who kept themselves very much to themselves, chiefly from a sort of false shame of their straitened means.
Elsberger, the engineer, had a brother ten years younger than himself, likewise an engineer. He was a very good fellow, like thousands of others, of the middle-class, and he had artistic aspirations: he was one of those people who would like to practise an art, but are afraid of compromising their reputation and position.
But the chief difficulty lay not in getting them to do something, but in getting them to act together. There they were quite unmanageable. The best of them were the most obstinate, as Christophe found in dealing with the tenants in his own house: M. Felix Weil, Elsberger, the engineer, and Commandant Chabran, lived on terms of polite and silent hostility.
But, if you go to work without a plan, how can you expect any good to come of it? With chance on the one hand, and tremendous organized forces on the other the result would never be in doubt: you would be crushed out of existence." Andre Elsberger did not listen.
"But tell me," Christophe would ask Andre Elsberger, "are you in touch with the proletarians of the rest of the nations?" "Some one has to begin. And we are the people to do it. We have always been the first. It is for us to give the signal!" "And suppose the others won't follow!" "They will." "Have you made treaties, and drawn up a plan?" "What's the good of treaties?
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