I am answering at once your questions that concern me personally.
No! the Prussians did not loot my house. They HOOKED some little
things of no importance, a dressing case, a bandbox, some pipes; but
on the whole they did no harm. As for my study, it was respected. I
had buried a large box full of letters and hidden my voluminous
notes on Saint-Antoine. I found all that intact.
The worst of the invasion for me is that it has aged my poor, dear,
old mother by ten years! What a change! She can no longer walk
alone, and is distressingly weak! How sad it is to see those whom
one loves deteriorate little by little!
In order to think no longer on the public miseries or on my own, I
have plunged again with fury into Saint-Antoine, and if nothing
disturbs me and I continue at this pace, I shall have finished it
next winter. I am very eager to read to you the sixty pages which
are done. When we can circulate about again on the railroad, do come
to see me for a little while. Your old troubadour has waited for you
for such a long time! Your letter of this morning has saddened me.
What a proud fellow you are and what immense courage you have!
I am not like a lot of people whom I hear bemoaning the war of
Paris. For my part, I find it more tolerable than the invasion,
there is no more despair possible, and that is what proves once more
our abasement. "Ah! God be thanked, the Prussians are there!" is the
universal cry of the bourgeois. I put messieurs the workmen into the
same pack, and would have them all thrust together into the river!
Moreover they are on the way there, and then calm will return. We
are going to become a great, flat industrial country like Belgium.
The disappearance of Paris (as center of the government) will render
France colorless and dull. She will no longer have a heart, a
center, nor, I think, a spirit.
As for the Commune, which is about to die out, it is the last
manifestation of the Middle Ages. The very last, let us hope!
I hate democracy (at least the kind that is understood in France),
that is to say, the exaltation of mercy to the detriment of justice,
the negation of right, in a word, antisociability.
The Commune rehabilitates murderers, quite as Jesus pardoned
thieves, and they pillage the residences of the rich, because they
have been taught to curse Lazarus, who was not a bad rich man, but
simply a rich man. "The Republic is above every criticism" is
equivalent to that belief: "The pope is infallible!" Always
formulas! Always gods!
The god before the last, which was universal suffrage, has just
shown his adherents a terrible farce by nominating "the murderers of
Versailles." What shall we believe in, then? In nothing! That is the
beginning of wisdom. It was time to have done with "principles" and
to take up science, and investigation. The only reasonable thing (I
always come back to that) is a government by mandarins, provided the
mandarins know something and even that they know many things. The
people is an eternal infant, and it will be (in the hierarchy of
social elements) always in the last row, since it is number, mass,
the unlimited. It is of little matter whether many peasants know how
to read and listen no longer to their cure, but it is of great
matter that many men like Renan or Littre should be able to live and
be listened to! Our safety is now only in a LEGITIMATE ARISTOCRACY,
I mean by that, a majority that is composed of more than mere
numbers.
If they had been more enlightened, if there had been in Paris more
people acquainted with history, we should not have had to endure
Gambetta, nor Prussia, nor the Commune. What did the Catholics do to
meet a great danger? They crossed themselves while consigning
themselves to God and to the saints. We, however, who are advanced,
we are going to cry out, "Long live the Republic!" while recalling
what happened in '92; and there was no doubt of its success, observe
that. The Prussian existed no longer, they embraced one another with
joy and restrained themselves from running to the defiles of the
Argonne where there are defiles no longer; never mind, that is
according to tradition. I have a friend in Rouen who proposed to a
club the manufacture of lances to fight against the breech-loaders!
Ah! it would have been more practical to keep Badinguet, in order to
send him to the galleys once peace was made! Austria did not have a
revolution after Sadowa, nor Italy after Novara, nor Russia after
Sebastopol! But the good French hasten to demolish their house as
soon as the chimney has caught fire.
Well, I must tell you an atrocious idea; I am AFRAID that the
destruction of the Vendome column is sowing the seeds of a third
Empire! Who knows if in twenty or in forty years, a grandson of
Jerome will not be our master?
For the moment Paris is completely epileptic. A result of the
congestion caused by the siege. France, on the whole, has lived for
several years in an extraordinary mental state. The success of la
Lanterne and Troppman have been very evident symptoms of it. That
folly is the result of too great imbecility, and that imbecility
comes from too much bluffing, for because of lying they had become
idiotic. They had lost all notion of right and wrong, of beautiful
and ugly. Recall the criticism of recent years. What difference did
it make between the sublime and the ridiculous? What lack of
respect; what ignorance! what a mess! "Boiled or roasted, same
thing!" and at the same time, what servility for the opinion of the
day, the dish of the fashion!
All was false! False realism, false army, false credit, and even
false harlots. They were called "marquises," while the great ladies
called themselves familiarly "cochonnettes." Those girls who were of
the tradition of Sophie Arnould, like Lagier, roused horror. You
have not seen the reverence of Saint-Victor for la Paiva. And this
falseness (which is perhaps a consequence of romanticism,
predominance of passion over form, and of inspiration over rule) was
applied especially in the manner of judging. They extolled an
actress not as an actress, but as a good mother of a family! They
asked art to be moral, philosophy to be clear, vice to be decent,
and science to be within the range of the people.
But this is a very long letter. When I start abusing my
contemporaries, I never get through with it.
CLXXXIX. TO GEORGE SAND
Croisset, Sunday evening, 10 June, 1871
Dear master,
I never had a greater desire or a greater need to see you than now.
I have just come from Paris and I don't know to whom to talk. I am
choking. I am overcome, or rather, absolutely disheartened.
The odor of corpses disgusts me less than the miasmas of egotism
that exhale from every mouth. The sight of the ruins is as nothing
in comparison with the great Parisian inanity. With a very few
exceptions it seemed to me that everybody ought to be tied up.
Half the population wants to strangle the other half, and VICE
VERSA. This is clearly to be seen in the eyes of the passers-by.
And the Prussians exist no longer! People excuse them and admire
them. The "reasonable people" want to be naturalized Germans. I
assure you it is enough to make one despair of the human race.
I was in Versailles on Thursday. The excesses of the Right inspire
fear. The vote about the Orleans is a concession made to it, so as
not to irritate it, and so as to have the time to prepare against
it.
I except from the general folly, Renan who, on the contrary, seemed
to me very philosophical, and the good Soulie who charged me to give
you a thousand affectionate messages.
I have collected a mass of horrible and unpublished details which I
spare you.
My little trip to Paris has troubled me extremely, and I am going to
have a hard time in getting down to work again. What do you think
of my friend Maury, who kept the tricolor over the Archives all
during the Commune? I think few men are capable of such pluck.
When history clears up the burning of Paris, it will find several
elements among which are, without any doubt: (1) the Prussians, and
(2) the people of Badinguet; they have NO LONGER ANY written proof
against the Empire, and Haussman is going to present himself boldly
to the elections of Paris.
Have you read, among the documents found in the Tuileries last
September, a plot of a novel by Isidore? What a scenario!
CXC. TO GUSTAVE FLAUBERT, at Paris
[FOOTNOTE: Evidently an answer to a lost letter.] Nohant, 23 July,
1871
No, I am not ill, my dear old troubadour, in spite of the sorrow
which is the daily bread of France; I have an iron constitution and
an exceptional old age, abnormal even, for my strength increases at
the age when it ought to diminish. The day that I resolutely buried
my youth, I grew twenty years younger. You will tell me that the
bark undergoes none the less the ravages of time. I don't care for
that, the heart of the tree is very good and the sap still runs as
in the old apple trees in my garden, which bear fruit all the better
the more gnarly they are. Thank you for having worried over the
illness which the papers have bestowed upon me. Maurice thanks you
also and embraces you. He is still mingling with his scientific,
literary, and agricultural studies, beautiful marionette shows. He
thinks of you every time and says that he would like to have you
here to note his progress, for he continually improves.
In what condition are we, according to your opinion?
In Rouen, you no longer have any Prussians at your back, that's
something, and one would say that the bourgeois Republic wants to
impose itself. It will be foolish. You foretold that, and I don't
doubt it; but after the inevitable rule of the Philistines, life
will extend and spread on all sides. The filth of the Commune shows
us dangers which were not sufficiently foreseen and which enforce a
new political life on everybody, carrying on one's affairs oneself
and forcing the charming proletariat created by the Empire to know
what is possible and what is not. Education does not teach honesty
and disinterestedness overnight. The vote is immediate education.
They have appointed Raoul Rigault and company. They know how much
people like that cost now by the yard; let them go on and they will
die of hunger. There is no other way to make them understand in a
short time.
Are you working? Is Saint-Antoine going well? Tell me what you are
doing in Paris, what you are seeing, what you are thinking. I have
not the courage to go there. Do come to see me before you return to
Croisset. I am blue from not seeing you, it is a sort of death.