Salsou adored, as he was adored by, his father and mother and his several brothers and sisters. He wrote them often in the years after he left home for the _trimard_; and his letters were replete with affection, notably one in which he acknowledged the photograph of his mother and two of the children, Martha and Henri, playfully calling the last named “Henricon.” His _compagne_ had no complaint to make of his treatment of her, and even his laundress testified to his being courteous and kind.
Reader’s of Zola’s _Germinal_ will remember the anarchist Souvarine’s affection for the pet rabbit, Pologne, and his sorrow at her death. The point is well observed. Nearly every French anarchist, whether propagandist _par le fait_ or not, is a defender of the rights of all four-footed things; and many are strict vegetarians. In her fascinating autobiography, Louise Michel returns again and again with flaming wrath to the sufferings of domestic animals.
“Under my revolt against the strong,” she says, “I find, farther back than I can remember distinctly, a horror of the tortures inflicted on dumb beasts. I would have liked to see the animal defend himself,—the dog bite the one who abused him, the horse, bleeding under the lash, trample on his torturer. But always the dumb beast endures his lot with the resignation of the subdued races. What an object of pity is the beast!”
This typical anarchist trait is graphically illustrated by the following anecdote related by Flor O’Squarr:—
“One day in July I stopped before a book-stall of the rue Châteaudun, close by the rue Laffitte, when I was joined by an anarchist who led me before the show window of a bird dealer a few steps away. There, with a hand that shook, he pointed out to me some white mice shut up in tiny iron cages that were provided with squirrels’ wheels, whereon the little beasts galloped without respite.
“‘See there,’ moaned the dynamiter, ‘tell me if men are not villains! These poor white mice, so delicate, so pretty, suffer frightfully, don’t you know it, churning like that in this instrument of torture. It gives them nausea and pains in the stomach.’ He would have strangled the dealer without remorse to avenge the mice.”