Jacques refuses the war and dies from this refusal. Antoine agrees to fight, with no love for war,7 and eventually dies from this acceptance. He leaves behind his life as a wealthy and famous doctor, the newly-decorated town house whose paint is chipped off by his army equipment. He knows that he will never return to the world he is leaving behind.
But he keeps the essential thing, his profession, which he can pursue even during the war and even, as he sincerely remarks, into the revolution. Carried along in the crazy course of history, Antoine is now free; he has given up what he owns, not what he is. He will know how to judge the war: a doctor reads communiqués as lists of wounds and death agonies.
Gassed, crippled, certain that he is going to die, he regrets nothing of the old world. In the Epilogue his only two concerns are the future of mankind (he hopes for a “peace with neither victory or humiliation,” so that wars will not arise again) and Jean-Paul, Jacques’ son. As for himself, he no longer has anything but memories, among them the memory of Rachel, which make up his knowledge of life and which help him to die.
Les Thibault ends with the diary of a sick doctor and the death of the hero. A world is dying along with him, but the problem is to discover what one generous individual can pass on from the old world to the new. History overflows and floods whole continents and peoples, then the waters recede and the survivors count up what is missing and what remains. Antoine, a survivor of the war of 1914, transmits what he has been able to save from the disaster to Jean Paul that is to say, to us.
And here is his greatness, which is to have come back, lucidly, to everyone’s level. From the moment Antoine sees his death warrant in the eyes of his teacher, Philip, until his final solitude, he never ceases to grow in stature, but he does so precisely as he comes to recognize one by one his weaknesses and doubts. The petty, self-satisfied doctor now discovers his ignorance. “I am condemned to die without having understood very much about myself or about the world.” He knows that pure individualism is not possible, that life does not consist solely of the selfish glow of youthful strength.
With three thousand new babies every hour, and as many deaths, an infinite force sweeps the individual along in the uninterrupted flow of generation, drowning him in the vast, unfillable ocean of collective death. What else can he do but accept himself with his limitations, and try to reconcile the duties he has toward himself with those he has toward others? As to the rest, he has to wager once again.
Gassed and fallen from his throne, Ulysses seeks a definition of his wisdom, and realizes it must have an element of folly and of risk. To avoid being a burden on anyone, first of all he will kill himself, all alone, in a way both so humble and deliberate that one hesitates to say whether he is like a successful Barois or a bourgeois Kirilov.
And in spite of this sensible suicide, or because it is so reasonable, his wager will be irrational and optimistic: he bets on the continuity of the human adventure, writing his last words for Jacques’ son.
This double obliteration, by death and by fidelity to what will live on, makes Antoine vanish into the very stuff of history, of which men’s hopes are made, and whose roots are human misfortune. In this respect, the remark of Antoine’s that touches me most deeply is the one he jots down shortly before his death: “I’ve only been an average man.” This is true, in a way, whereas Jacques, by the same standards, is someone exceptional.
But it is the average man who gives the whole work its strength, illuminates its underlying movement, and crowns it with this admirable Epilogue. After all, the truth Ulysses represents includes Antigone’s as well, although it does not hold the other way round. What are we to think of the creator who can build, silently and without commentaries, two characters who are so different and so commanding?
Since I have concentrated on the relevance of Martin du Gard’s work to the present day, I still must show that his very doubts are our own. The birth of an awareness of history in the Thibault brothers is paired with the posing of a problem we can well understand. Summer 1914, which reveals along with the impending war the failure of socialism in circumstances decisive to the future of the world, offers a summary of all Martin du Gard’s doubts. He was not lacking in lucidity.
We know that Summer 1914, appearing in 1936, was published long after The Death of the Father (1929). During this long interval, Martin du Gard carried out a veritable revolution in the structure of his work. He abandoned his original plan, and decided to give Les Thibault an ending different from the one he had originally intended. The first plan involved thirty or so volumes; the second reduces Les Thibault to eleven.
Martin du Gard had no hesitation next about destroying the manuscript of L’Appareillage (Setting Sail), a volume which was to follow The Death of the Father and which had cost him two years’ work. Between 1931. the date of this sacrifice, and 1933, the year when armed with a new plan he began to write Summer 1914, there were two years of quite natural confusion. This is perceptible in the book’s very structure. After a long pause the machine at first had some difficulty getting started again, and really gets going only in the second volume.
But it seems to me that we also feel this change in a number of new perspectives. Begun at the moment of Hitler’s ascendance to power, when the Second World War could already be sensed on the horizon, this great historical fresco of a conflict men tried to hope would be the last is almost compelled to call itself into question. In Vieille France, written during the years when Martin du Gard had given up Les Thibault, the schoolmistress was already asking herself a formidable question: “Why is the world like this? Is it really society’s fault?… Is it not rather man’s own fault?”
The same question worries Jacques at the height of his revolutionary fervor, just as it explains most of Antoine’s attitudes toward historical events. One can therefore suppose it must have haunted the novelist himself.
None of the contradictions of social action are, in any case, eluded in the long, perhaps overlong, ideological conversations that fill Summer 1914. The main problem, the use of violence in the cause of justice, is discussed at great length in the conversations between Jacques and Mithoerg. The famous distinction between the yogi and the commissar has already been made by Martin du Gard: within the revolution, in fact, it brings about the confrontation between the apostle and the technician. Better still, the nihilistic aspect of the revolution is isolated, in order to be treated in depth, in the character of Meynestrel.
The latter believes that after having put man in the place of God, atheism ought to go even further and abolish man himself. Meynestrel’s reply, when asked what will replace man, is “Nothing.” Elsewhere, the Englishman Patterson defines Meynestrel as “the despair of believing in nothing.” Finally, like all those who join the revolution from nihilism, Meynestrel believes that the best results are achieved by the worst means.
He has no hesitation about burning the secret papers Jacques has brought back from Berlin, which prove the collusion between the Prussian and Austrian general staffs. The publication of these documents would risk altering the attitude of the German social democrats, thus making the war, which Meynestrel considers as the “trump card” for social upheaval, far less likely.
These examples are enough to show that there was nothing naïve in Martin du Gard’s socialism. He cannot manage to believe that perfection will one day be embodied in history. If he does not believe this, it is because his doubt is the same as the schoolteacher’s in Vieille France.
This doubt concerns human nature. “His pity for men was infinite; he gave them all the love his heart contained; but whatever he did, however hard he tried, he remained skeptical about man’s moral potentialities.” To be certain only of men, and to know that men have little worth, is the cry of pain that runs through the whole of this work, for all its strength and richness, and that brings it so close to us. For, after all, this fundamental doubt is the same doubt that is hidden in every love and that gives it its tenderest vibration.
This ignorance, acknowledged in such simple terms, moves us because it is the other side of a certainty we also share. The service of man cannot be separated from an ambiguity that must be maintained in order to preserve the movement of history. From this come the two pieces of advice that Antoine bequeaths to Jean-Paul. The first is one of prudent liberty, assumed as a duty. “Don’t let yourself be tied down to
