Ah! yes, the men! Be they coachmen, _valets_, dudes, priests, or poets,
they are all the same. Low-lived wretches!
I think that these are the last recollections that I shall call up. I
have others, however,--many others. But they all resemble each other,
and it tires me to continually write the same stories, and to unroll,
in a continuous and monotonous panorama, the same faces, the same
souls, the same phantoms. And then I feel that I have no mind left
for it, for I am becoming more and more distracted from the ashes of
this past by the new preoccupations of my future. I could have told
also of my stay in the Countess Fardin's mansion. But what is the
use? I am too weary, and also too distressed. There, amid the same
social phenomena, there was one vanity that disgusts me more than any
other,--literary vanity; one species of stupidity that is lower than
any other,--political stupidity.
There I knew M. Paul Bourget in all his glory; it is needless to say
more. Ah! there you have the philosopher, the poet, the moralist,
befitting the pretentious nullity, the intellectual hollowness,
the falsehood, of that sphere of society in which everything is
artificial,--elegance, love, cooking, religious feeling, patriotism,
art, charity, and vice itself, which, making a pretext of politeness
and literature, wraps itself in mystical tinsel and covers itself with
sacred masks; that sphere of society in which there is to be found
but one sincere desire,--the fierce desire for money, which gives to
these ridiculous mountebanks something even more odious and grim than
their ridiculousness. That is the only thing that makes of these poor
phantoms living human creatures.
There I knew Monsieur Jean, he too a psychologist and a moralist,
a moralist of the servants' hall, a psychologist of the ante-room,
scarcely more of a _parvenu_ in his way, or more of a ninny, than he
who reigned in the _salon_. Monsieur Jean emptied chamber-vessels; M.
Paul Bourget emptied souls. Between the servants' hall and the _salon_
there is not such a distance of servitude as we think. But, since I
have put Monsieur Jean's photograph in the bottom of my trunk, let his
memory remain, similarly buried, in the bottom of my heart, under a
thick layer of oblivion.
It is two o'clock in the morning. My fire is going out, my lamp is
smoking, and I have no more wood or oil. I am going to bed. But there
is too much fever in my brain; I shall not sleep. I shall dream of him
who is on the way to me. I shall dream of what is to happen to-morrow.
Outside, the night is calm and silent. A sharp, cold air is hardening
the ground, beneath a sky sparkling with stars. And somewhere in this
night Joseph is on his way. Through space I see him,--yes, really, I
see him, serious, dreaming, enormous, in his compartment in a railway
carriage. He is smiling at me; he is drawing nearer to me; he is coming
toward me. He is bringing me, at last, peace, liberty, happiness.
Happiness?