Worldliness and Home Life

In the days of the Second Empire, in one of our prettiest provincial sub-prefectures, only a short distance from a bathing resort frequented by the Emperor, there lived a highly respectable mayor, an intelligent man besides, whose head was suddenly turned by the thought that the chief of state might one day stay at his house. Until then he had lived in the old family home, as a son who respected its smallest memories. As soon as the fixed idea of receiving the Emperor of the French had seized hold of his brain, he became another man. What had seemed to him sufficient and even comfortable, all that simplicity loved by his parents and forebears, now decidedly appeared to him shabby, ugly, contemptible. Impossible to have an emperor climb that wooden staircase, to invite him to sit in those old armchairs, to let him set foot on those outmoded carpets. So the mayor sent for the architect and the masons, had the walls attacked with pickaxes, knocked down partitions and created a drawing room out of all proportion, in its luxury and size, to the rest of the house. He withdrew with his family into a few cramped rooms where people and furniture, crowded together against their will, got in each other's way. Then, having emptied his purse and turned his household upside down on this impulse, he waited for the imperial guest. Alas! He did live to see the end of the Empire, but never the Emperor.

This poor man's madness is not as rare as one might think. All those who sacrifice their home life to worldliness are touched in the head, just as he was.

The more agitated the times, the more threatening the danger of such a sacrifice. Our contemporaries are constantly exposed to it, and a great many succumb. How many family treasures have been squandered for nothing, to satisfy worldly conventions or ambitions, while the happiness whose entrance these impious sacrifices were meant to prepare has kept people waiting forever! It is a fool's bargain to surrender the family hearth, to let good traditions fall into disuse, to abandon simple domestic customs. Home life holds such a place in society that one need only weaken it for disorder to be felt throughout the entire social organism. To develop normally, this organism must be supplied with individuals of well-tempered character, each with a worth and a personal stamp of their own. Otherwise society becomes a herd, and sometimes a herd without a shepherd. But from what source will the individual draw his originality, that unique something which, joined to the distinctive qualities of others, makes up the richness and solidity of a community? He can draw it only from the family. Destroy that constellation of practices and memories which makes each home a kind of climate in miniature, and you dry up the springs of character; you cut the very roots of public spirit.

It matters to our country that every home should be a deep and respected world, leaving an indelible moral imprint on its members. But before going further, let us clear away a misunderstanding. The family spirit, like all the finest things, has its caricature, which goes by the name of domestic selfishness. Some families are like closed citadels, organized for the exploitation of the outside world. Whatever does not concern them directly leaves them indifferent. They live like colonists, I would almost say like intruders, in the society around them. Their clannishness is pushed to such an extreme that they become enemies of the human race. On a small scale, they resemble those powerful societies, formed here and there across history, which seized dominion over the world and for which nothing counted but themselves. It is this spirit that has sometimes led people to regard the family as a den of selfishness that had to be destroyed for the salvation of society. But just as there is an abyss between esprit de corps and party spirit, there is an abyss between the family spirit and the spirit of a family clique.

Now, it is the family spirit we are speaking of here. Nothing in the world can equal it. For it contains the seeds of all those great and simple virtues that secure the endurance and strength of social institutions. At the very foundation of the family spirit lies respect for the past, for the best thing a family possesses is its shared memories. An intangible, indivisible, inalienable capital, these memories form a sacred trust. Each member of the family should regard them as their most precious possession. They exist in a twofold form: in idea and in fact. We find them in language, in the well-worn grooves of thought, in feelings, even in instincts. And in material form we see them represented by portraits, furniture, buildings, costumes, songs. To the uninitiated, all this is nothing; to those who know how to value the things of family life, these are relics that must not be given up at any price.

But what generally happens in the world we live in? Worldliness wages war on the family spirit. Every struggle is poignant; I know of none more gripping than this one. By great means and small, by all sorts of new habits, demands and pretensions, the worldly spirit forces its way into the sanctuary of the home. What are this stranger's rights? His credentials? On what can he base his peremptory claims? People generally neglect to ask themselves this. They are wrong. We behave toward the invader as very simple poor folk behave toward a grand visitor. For this cumbersome guest of a day, they strip their garden, harry their servants and children, neglect their work. Unjust and clumsy conduct. We must have the courage to remain what we are, before anyone whatsoever.

The worldly spirit is capable of every impudence. Here is a simple home that has formed, and still forms, characters of distinction. Its people, its furniture, its habits: everything there holds together. Through a marriage, through business or social connections, the worldly spirit slips in. It finds everything old-fashioned, awkward, naive. It all lacks modernity. At first it confines itself to criticism, to witty mockery. But that is the most dangerous moment. Look out: there is the enemy! If you let yourself be shaken in the least by its arguments, tomorrow you will sacrifice a piece of furniture, the day after a good old tradition, and little by little the dear relics of the heart, the familiar objects, and with them filial piety, will go off to the junk dealer.

Amid the new habits and the changed surroundings, your friends of former days and your aged parents will feel out of place. You will go one step further and shelve them in their turn: worldliness does away with the old. Thus fitted out with an entirely transformed setting, you will be astonished to see yourself in it. It will remind you of nothing; but it will be correct, and the worldly spirit, at least, will declare itself satisfied. Alas, that is just where you are deceived. After making you throw out pure treasures like so much worthless scrap iron, it will find you ill at ease in your new livery and will hasten to make you feel all the absurdity of your position. Better to have had, from the very start, the courage of your convictions and to have defended your home.

Many young people, when they marry, yield to the promptings of the worldly spirit. Their parents had set them an example of modest living; but the new generation thinks it is asserting its right to existence and freedom by rejecting a way of life that seems to it too patriarchal. So it sets out to establish itself in the latest fashion, at great expense, and parts with useful things for next to nothing. Instead of filling the house with things that say to us, "Remember!" people furnish it with brand-new furniture to which no thought is yet attached. I am wrong: these objects are often like symbols of the easy, superficial life. Among them one breathes some heady vapor of worldliness. They recall life outside, high living, the social whirl. And even if one were sometimes inclined to forget it, they bring the mind back to it and say to us, in another sense: "Remember! Do not forget the hour of the club, the theater, the races." So the home is arranged in such a way that it becomes a pied-à-terre where one comes to rest a little between two long absences. It is not pleasant to stay there long. Since it has no soul, it does not speak to the soul. Just time enough to sleep and eat, and quickly one must get out. One might grow drowsy there, a stay-at-home.

Everyone knows people who have a mania for going out, who would think the world was going to stop if they were not seen everywhere. Staying at home is their worst chore; they cannot even bear to picture themselves there. Their horror of home life goes so far that they would rather pay to be bored outside than enjoy themselves at home for nothing.

Little by little, a society thus drifts toward herd life, which must not be confused with public life. Herd life is as featureless as that of swarms of flies in the sun. Nothing resembles one man's worldly life more than another man's worldly life. And this universal banality destroys the very essence of public spirit. One need not travel very far to see the ravages the spirit of worldliness has wrought in present-day society; and if we have so little depth, balance, calm good sense and initiative, one of the main reasons lies in the decline of home life. The masses have fallen into step behind fashionable society. The common people have become worldly. For it is worldliness to leave one's own home and go live in the tavern. Poverty and the wretched state of housing are not enough to explain the current that carries everyone out of the home. Why does the peasant desert for the inn the house where his father and grandfather were so content? The dwelling has stayed the same; it is the same fire in the same fireplace; how is it that it now lights only a broken circle, instead of the evening gatherings of old when young and old sat elbow to elbow? Something has changed in people's minds. Giving way to unwholesome desires, they have broken with simplicity. The fathers have deserted their post of honor, the wife languishes by the lonely hearth, and the children quarrel while they wait until they, too, can go their separate ways.

We must learn home life again, and the value of domestic traditions. A reverent care has set apart certain monuments, the only remains of the past among us. Likewise old costumes, provincial dialects and old songs have found, before vanishing from the world, pious hands to gather them. How right we are to keep these crumbs of a great past, these vestiges of our ancestors' soul! Let us do the same for family traditions; let us save, and make last as long as we can, everything patriarchal that still survives, in whatever form!

But not everyone has a tradition to preserve. All the more reason to redouble our efforts in building and nurturing family life. For this, we need neither a large household nor spacious rooms. To make a home, we need the spirit of home. Just as the smallest village can have its history and moral character, the smallest dwelling can have a soul. Oh, the spirit of places, the atmosphere that surrounds us in human dwellings! What a world of mysteries! Here, from the very threshold, a chill goes through you and unease takes hold of you. Something elusive pushes you away. There, as soon as you have closed the door behind you, kindliness and good cheer surround you. They say walls have ears. They also have a voice, a silent eloquence of their own. Over everything a dwelling contains hovers the spirit of the people who live there. And I see a proof of the power of this spirit even in the rooms of bachelors and of women who live alone. What a gulf between one room and another! Here, inertia, indifference, the humdrum; the occupant's motto is written even in the way the books and photographs are arranged: "Nothing matters to me." There, it is the joy of living, an infectious zest; the visitor feels something saying to him in a thousand ways: "Whoever you are, guest of an hour, I wish you well; peace be with you!"

No one will ever say enough about the power of home life, the influence of a flower loved and tended in the window, the charm of an old armchair where the grandfather sat, holding out his wrinkled old hands to the kisses of chubby-cheeked little children. Poor moderns! Forever moving house or remodeling! We who, by dint of altering the face of our cities, our houses, our customs and our beliefs, no longer have anywhere to lay our heads, let us not add to the sadness and emptiness of our uncertain lives by abandoning home life. Let us rekindle the flame on the dead hearth; let us make ourselves inviolate shelters, warm nests where children grow into men and women, where love finds a hiding place, old age rest, prayer an altar and the homeland reverence!