There is a certain formidable machine, have you seen it?
It is the rolling-mill.
You must be on your guard against it, it is crafty and ferocious; if it catches hold of the skirt of your coat, you will be drawn in bodily.
That machine is laziness.
Stop while there is yet time, and save yourself!
Otherwise, it is all over with you; in a short time you will be among the gearing.
Once entangled, hope for nothing more.
Toil, lazybones! there is no more repose for you!
The iron hand of implacable toil has seized you.
You do not wish to earn your living, to have a task, to fulfil a duty!
It bores you to be like other men?
Well!
You will be different.
Labor is the law; he who rejects it will find ennui his torment.
You do not wish to be a workingman, you will be a slave.
Toil lets go of you on one side only to grasp you again on the other. You do not desire to be its friend, you shall be its negro slave.
Ah! You would have none of the honest weariness of men, you shall have the sweat of the damned.
Where others sing, you will rattle in your throat.
You will see afar off, from below, other men at work; it will seem to you that they are resting.
The laborer, the harvester, the sailor, the blacksmith, will appear to you in glory like the blessed spirits in paradise.
What radiance surrounds the forge!
To guide the plough, to bind the sheaves, is joy.
The bark at liberty in the wind, what delight!
Do you, lazy idler, delve, drag on, roll, march!
Drag your halter. You are a beast of burden in the team of hell!
Ah! To do nothing is your object.
Well, not a week, not a day, not an hour shall you have free from oppression.
You will be able to lift nothing without anguish.
Every minute that passes will make your muscles crack.
What is a feather to others will be a rock to you.
The simplest things will become steep acclivities.
Life will become monstrous all about you.
To go, to come, to breathe, will be just so many terrible labors.
Your lungs will produce on you the effect of weighing a hundred pounds.
Whether you shall walk here rather than there, will become a problem that must be solved.
Any one who wants to go out simply gives his door a push, and there he is in the open air.
If you wish to go out, you will be obliged to pierce your wall.
What does every one who wants to step into the street do?
He goes downstairs; you will tear up your sheets, little by little you will make of them a rope, then you will climb out of your window, and you will suspend yourself by that thread over an abyss, and it will be night, amid storm, rain, and the hurricane, and if the rope is too short, but one way of descending will remain to you, to fall. To drop hap-hazard into the gulf, from an unknown height, on what?
On what is beneath, on the unknown. Or you will crawl up a chimney-flue, at the risk of burning; or you will creep through a sewer-pipe, at the risk of drowning; I do not speak of the holes that you will be obliged to mask, of the stones which you will have to take up and replace twenty times a day, of the plaster that you will have to hide in your straw pallet.
A lock presents itself; the bourgeois has in his pocket a key made by a locksmith.
If you wish to pass out, you will be condemned to execute a terrible work of art; you will take a large sou, you will cut it in two plates; with what tools?
You will have to invent them.
That is your business.
Then you will hollow out the interior of these plates, taking great care of the outside, and you will make on the edges a thread, so that they can be adjusted one upon the other like a box and its cover.
The top and bottom thus screwed together, nothing will be suspected.
To the overseers it will be only a sou; to you it will be a box.
What will you put in this box?
A small bit of steel.
A watch-spring, in which you will have cut teeth, and which will form a saw.