Letter from Miss Le Compte [June 1885]

Marseille, June 1, 1885.

Companion Seymour, 

Enclosed find a communication on the part of our Italian friends to whom I announced the formation of a new group in London. 

Our friends are Collectivist-Anarchist. We Communist-Anarchists get along well with them in the movement, while publicly discussing with them without quarter the base of their Collectivist Anarchy. I hope our Mutualistic Anarchist friends will be as fraternal with them as we are. 

If it wasn’t for that translation to be done again for you, or, what is proving still harder, to be recovered from police or ‘mouchard’ clutches, I would tell you how the theoretic battle rages under the blue sky, under the burning sun of the Midi.[1] But, till that is in the hands of the printer you may be sure I’ll have no heart for anything else. That is why I have never sent you the description of the spy Marie-Rivet veuve Diancourt who so adroitly provided herself with Anarchist correspondence and enriched herself with Anarchist funds. 

But while it is yet fresh let me report that in several towns in the Midi the revolutionists of all schools have united in ‘red flag’ meetings in denunciation of the Municipal rioters of Paris and of the horrors of the 24th of May.[2] Marseille, as usual, led all the cities of the Midi. In the Eldorado over twelve hundred persons assisted, and Citizens Gras, Boyer, and others, who are strong on such occasions, were stronger than ever in denunciation of Gragnon and Company.[3]

With Gragnon music for accompaniment the Devil must laugh – if Devil there be – to read the rhetorical ‘poetry’ with which the great farсеur Victor Hugo celebrated his ‘freedom loving’ city. 

But I must tell you an incident which may flatter your English pride. A couple of days ago I was at the railroad station waiting to receive some companions and bought a Cri du Peuple (the great serio-comic semi-socialist journal of Paris). The front page was given up to an illustration of the Arch of Triumph with ‘the poet’s’ remains lying in state, the whole was framed with fragments, i.e., selections from his poems relative to Paris. I, empassioned lover of poesy, was reading that stuff walking up and down under the trees in the charming garden of the station when I heard my name called and three or four young fellows came running to meet me. They are hangers-on to one of the English-speaking consulates of Marseille. In everything they are French, except that their mother-tongue is English, and they were just going to Paris to do honour to the remains of the great poet. ‘But was he a great poet?’ I ask; ‘great romancer, if you will, but poet, that’s another matter,’ and we fell to reading aloud the selections of the Cri du Peuple. ‘Is there a verse in all that,’ I ask, ‘that will live in the memory by its own force of beauty? Take it where it treats of simple natural beauty, as on the bank of the river; does it wake in the heart of anyone the memory of a similar scene in any land? Would anyone standing there in life involuntarily repeat any of those verses?’ And by way of contrast I repeated some of the lines by which Goldsmith made immortal with beauty the story of a village :– 

Sweet Auburn, loveliest village of the plain, 
Where health and plenty cheered each labouring swain, 
Where smiling Spring its earliest visits paid, 
And parting Summer’s lingering blooms delayed; 
Dear lovely bowers of innocence and ease, 
Seats of my youth, where every charm could please. 
How oft have I loitered in thy shade, 
For talking age and whispering lovers made’[4]

‘How beautiful! how beautiful!’ they all cried, and one, becoming poet by the influence of poetry, said, ‘As you recited it it seemed the trees bent down to listen.’ The conversation ended, as all conversation with me ends, by propaganda – ‘It is not enough to love Beauty,’ I said, ‘we must love Truth. For Truth will rescue Beauty from the hands that debase and pollute her. We must make the Social Revolution singly in the interests of Truth. That done, lovelier Auburns will arise whose builders will be poets, and whose poets will be builders – building ever better than they know.’ 

These fellows are not Social Revolutionists, as you may infer from their connection with Consulates, but it often happens in life that one’s enemy does him a good turn. And so it is in this case. It is owing to the friendly enmity of the English-speaking Consulates that I can walk under the trees and recite poetry, instead of being still walled up in the Woman’s Prison of Marseilles. 

Marie Le Compte. 

P.S.– You will have ‘God and the State’ in July.

From The Anarchist (June 1885)

Notes

1, ‘the translation’ was of Bakunin’s God and the State.

2, Police attacked a commemoration of the Paris Commune at the Pere Lachaise cemetery.

3,  El Dorado was a park in the Martigues district of the city. Felix Gras (1844-1901) was a republican and poet who harboured one of the leaders of the Marseilles commune in his own home. Antide Boyer (1850-1918) was a socialist worker who became, successively a political journalist, town councillor, deputy mayor and senator. One of the founders of socialism in the Bouches-du-Rhone department. Arthur Gragnon (1844-1914) was prefect of police in Marseilles 1885-1887. 

4, The start of The Deserted Village by Oliver Goldsmith.

[A note on the front page of this issue reads ‘On another page will be found an interesting letter from our brave co-worker, Marie Le Compte. She has only lately been released from the clutches of the French Government, the evidence adduced by the political spy, Diancourt, having fallen through. Whether the prosecution and the vague charges levelled against her were got up for that purpose or not, the authorities have succeeded in seizing many of her valuable manuscripts, including her translation of Dieu et l’Etat, which the International Publishing Company had arranged to shortly bring out. She is now making another translation.’]