Windbags.
So marches the world, in this its Paper Age, or Era of Hope. Not
without obstructions, war-explosions; which, however, heard from
such distance, are little other than a cheerful marching-music.
If indeed that dark living chaos of Ignorance and Hunger,
five-and-twenty million strong, under your feet,—were to begin
playing!
For the present, however, consider Longchamp; now when Lent is
ending, and the glory of Paris and France has gone forth, as in
annual wont. Not to assist at _Tenebris_ Masses, but to sun
itself and show itself, and salute the Young Spring.[42]
Manifold, bright-tinted, glittering with gold; all through the
Bois de Boulogne, in longdrawn variegated rows;—like longdrawn
living flower-borders, tulips, dahlias, lilies of the valley; all
in their moving flower-pots (of new-gilt carriages): pleasure of
the eye, and pride of life! So rolls and dances the Procession:
steady, of firm assurance, as if it rolled on adamant and the
foundations of the world; not on mere heraldic parchment,—under
which smoulders a lake of fire. Dance on, ye foolish ones; ye
sought not wisdom, neither have ye found it. Ye and your fathers
have sown the wind, ye shall reap the whirlwind. Was it not, from
of old, written: _The wages of sin is death?_
But at Longchamp, as elsewhere, we remark for one thing, that
dame and cavalier are waited on each by a kind of human familiar,
named _jokei._ Little elf, or imp; though young, already
withered; with its withered air of premature vice, of
knowingness, of completed elf-hood: useful in various
emergencies. The name _jokei_ (jockey) comes from the English; as
the thing also fancies that it does. Our Anglomania, in fact , is
grown considerable; prophetic of much. If France is to be free,
why shall she not, now when mad war is hushed, love neighbouring
Freedom? Cultivated men, your Dukes de Liancourt, de la
Rochefoucault admire the English Constitution, the English
National Character; would import what of it they can.
Of what is lighter, especially if it be light as wind, how much
easier the freightage! Non-Admiral Duke de Chartres (not yet
d’Orléans or Egalité) flies to and fro across the Strait;
importing English Fashions; this he, as hand-and-glove with an
English Prince of Wales, is surely qualified to do. Carriages and
saddles; top-boots and _rédingotes_, as we call riding-coats. Nay
the very mode of riding: for now no man on a level with his age
but will trot _à l’Anglaise_, rising in the stirrups; scornful of
the old sitfast method, in which, according to Shakspeare,
“butter and eggs” go to market. Also, he can urge the fervid
wheels, this brave Chartres of ours; no whip in Paris is rasher
and surer than the unprofessional one of Monseigneur.
Elf _jokeis_, we have seen; but see now real Yorkshire jockeys,
and what they ride on, and train: English racers for French
Races. These likewise we owe first (under the Providence of the
Devil) to Monseigneur. Prince d’Artois also has his stud of
racers. Prince d’Artois has withal the strangest horseleech: a
moonstruck, much-enduring individual, of Neuchâtel in
Switzerland,—named _Jean Paul Marat_. A problematic Chevalier
d’Eon, now in petticoats, now in breeches, is no less problematic
in London than in Paris; and causes bets and lawsuits. Beautiful
days of international communion! Swindlery and Blackguardism have
stretched hands across the Channel, and saluted mutually: on the
racecourse of Vincennes or Sablons, behold in English
curricle-and-four, wafted glorious among the principalities and
rascalities, an English Dr. Dodd,[43]—for whom also the too early
gallows gapes.
Duke de Chartres was a young Prince of great promise, as young
Princes often are; which promise unfortunately has belied itself.
With the huge Orléans Property, with Duke de Penthievre for
Father-in-law (and now the young Brother-in-law Lamballe killed
by excesses),—he will one day be the richest man in France.
Meanwhile, “his hair is all falling out, his blood is quite
spoiled,”—by early transcendentalism of debauchery. Carbuncles
stud his face; dark studs on a ground of burnished copper. A most
signal failure, this young Prince! The stuff prematurely burnt
out of him: little left but foul smoke and ashes of expiring
sensualities: what might have been Thought, Insight, and even
Conduct, gone now, or fast going,—to confused darkness, broken by
bewildering dazzlements; to obstreperous crotchets; to activities
which you may call semi-delirious, or even semi-galvanic! Paris
affects to laugh at his charioteering; but he heeds not such
laughter.
On the other hand, what a day, not of laughter, was that, when he
threatened, for lucre’s sake, to lay sacrilegious hand on the
Palais-Royal Garden![44] The flower-parterres shall be riven up;
the Chestnut Avenues shall fall: time-honoured boscages, under
which the Opera Hamadryads were wont to wander, not inexorable to
men. Paris moans aloud. Philidor, from his Café de la Regence,
shall no longer look on greenness; the loungers and losels of the
world, where now shall they haunt? In vain is moaning. The axe
glitters; the sacred groves fall crashing,—for indeed Monseigneur
was short of money: the Opera Hamadryads fly with shrieks. Shriek
not, ye Opera Hamadryads; or not as those that have no comfort.
He will surround your Garden with new edifices and piazzas:
though narrowed, it shall be replanted; dizened with hydraulic
jets, cannon which the sun fires at noon; things bodily, things
spiritual, such as man has not imagined;—and in the Palais-Royal
shall again, and more than ever, be the _Sorcerer’s Sabbath_ and
_Satan-at-Home_ of our Planet.
What will not mortals attempt? From remote Annonay in the
Vivarais, the Brothers Montgolfier send up their paper-dome,
filled with the smoke of burnt wool.[45] The Vivarais provincial
assembly is to be prorogued this same day: Vivarais
Assembly-members applaud, and the shouts of congregated men. Will
victorious Analysis scale the very Heavens, then?
Paris hears with eager wonder; Paris shall ere long see. From
Reveilion’s Paper-warehouse there, in the Rue St. Antoine (a
noted Warehouse),—the new Montgolfier air-ship launches itself.
Ducks and poultry are borne skyward: but now shall men be
borne.[46] Nay, Chemist Charles thinks of hydrogen and glazed
silk. Chemist Charles will himself ascend, from the Tuileries
Garden; Montgolfier solemnly cutting the cord. By Heaven, he also
mounts, he and another? Ten times ten thousand hearts go
palpitating; all tongues are mute with wonder and fear; till a
shout, like the voice of seas, rolls after him, on his wild way.
He soars, he dwindles upwards; has become a mere gleaming
circlet,—like some Turgotine snuff-box, what we call “_Turgotine
Platitude;_” like some new daylight Moon! Finally he descends;
welcomed by the universe. Duchess Polignac, with a party, is in
the Bois de Boulogne, waiting; though it is drizzly winter; the
1st of December 1783. The whole chivalry of France, Duke de
Chartres foremost, gallops to receive him.[47]
Beautiful invention; mounting heavenward, so beautifully,—so
unguidably! Emblem of much, and of our Age of Hope itself; which
shall mount, specifically-light, majestically in this same
manner; and hover,—tumbling whither Fate will. Well if it do not,
Pilatre-like, explode; and demount all the more tragically!—So,
riding on windbags, will men scale the Empyrean.
Or observe Herr Doctor Mesmer, in his spacious Magnetic Halls.
Long-stoled he walks; reverend, glancing upwards, as in rapt
commerce; an Antique Egyptian Hierophant in this new age. Soft
music flits; breaking fitfully the sacred stillness. Round their
Magnetic Mystery, which to the eye is mere tubs with water,—sit
breathless, rod in hand, the circles of Beauty and Fashion, each
circle a living circular _Passion-Flower:_ expecting the magnetic
afflatus, and new-manufactured Heaven-on-Earth. O women, O men,
great is your infidel-faith! A Parlementary Duport, a Bergasse,
D’Espréménil we notice there; Chemist Berthollet too,—on the part
of Monseigneur de Chartres.
Had not the Academy of Sciences, with its Baillys, Franklins,
Lavoisiers, interfered! But it did interfere. (Lacretelle, 18me
Siecle, iii.258.) Mesmer may pocket his hard money, and withdraw.
Let him walk silent by the shore of the Bodensee, by the ancient
town of Constance; meditating on much. For so, under the
strangest new vesture, the old great truth (since no vesture can
hide it) begins again to be revealed: That man is what we call a
miraculous creature, with miraculous power over men; and, on the
whole, with such a Life in him, and such a World round him, as
victorious Analysis, with her Physiologies, Nervous-systems,
Physic and Metaphysic, will never completely _name_, to say
nothing of explaining. Wherein also the Quack shall, in all ages,
come in for his share.[48]