At one o’clock on the 16th I went to the Rue d’Antin. The voice of the
auctioneer could be heard from the outer door. The rooms were crowded
with people. There were all the celebrities of the most elegant
impropriety, furtively examined by certain great ladies who had again
seized the opportunity of the sale in order to be able to see, close at
hand, women whom they might never have another occasion of meeting, and
whom they envied perhaps in secret for their easy pleasures. The
Duchess of F. elbowed Mlle. A., one of the most melancholy examples of
our modern courtesan; the Marquis de T. hesitated over a piece of
furniture the price of which was being run high by Mme. D., the most
elegant and famous adulteress of our time; the Duke of Y., who in
Madrid is supposed to be ruining himself in Paris, and in Paris to be
ruining himself in Madrid, and who, as a matter of fact, never even
reaches the limit of his income, talked with Mme. M., one of our
wittiest story-tellers, who from time to time writes what she says and
signs what she writes, while at the same time he exchanged confidential
glances with Mme. de N., a fair ornament of the Champs-Elysées, almost
always dressed in pink or blue, and driving two big black horses which
Tony had sold her for 10,000 francs, and for which she had paid, after
her fashion; finally, Mlle. R., who makes by her mere talent twice what
the women of the world make by their dot and three times as much as the
others make by their amours, had come, in spite of the cold, to make
some purchases, and was not the least looked at among the crowd.
We might cite the initials of many more of those who found themselves,
not without some mutual surprise, side by side in one room. But we fear
to weary the reader. We will only add that everyone was in the highest
spirits, and that many of those present had known the dead woman, and
seemed quite oblivious of the fact. There was a sound of loud laughter;
the auctioneers shouted at the top of their voices; the dealers who had
filled the benches in front of the auction table tried in vain to
obtain silence, in order to transact their business in peace. Never was
there a noisier or a more varied gathering.
I slipped quietly into the midst of this tumult, sad to think of when
one remembered that the poor creature whose goods were being sold to
pay her debts had died in the next room. Having come rather to examine
than to buy, I watched the faces of the auctioneers, noticing how they
beamed with delight whenever anything reached a price beyond their
expectations. Honest creatures, who had speculated upon this woman’s
prostitution, who had gained their hundred per cent out of her, who had
plagued with their writs the last moments of her life, and who came now
after her death to gather in at once the fruits of their dishonourable
calculations and the interest on their shameful credit! How wise were
the ancients in having only one God for traders and robbers!
Dresses, cashmeres, jewels, were sold with incredible rapidity. There
was nothing that I cared for, and I still waited. All at once I heard:
“A volume, beautifully bound, gilt-edged, entitled Manon Lescaut. There
is something written on the first page. Ten francs.”
“Twelve,” said a voice after a longish silence.
“Fifteen,” I said.
Why? I did not know. Doubtless for the something written.
“Fifteen,” repeated the auctioneer.
“Thirty,” said the first bidder in a tone which seemed to defy further
competition.
It had now become a struggle. “Thirty-five,” I cried in the same tone.
“Forty.”
“Fifty.”
“Sixty.”
“A hundred.”
If I had wished to make a sensation I should certainly have succeeded,
for a profound silence had ensued, and people gazed at me as if to see
what sort of a person it was, who seemed to be so determined to possess
the volume.
The accent which I had given to my last word seemed to convince my
adversary; he preferred to abandon a conflict which could only have
resulted in making me pay ten times its price for the volume, and,
bowing, he said very gracefully, though indeed a little late:
“I give way, sir.”
Nothing more being offered, the book was assigned to me.
As I was afraid of some new fit of obstinacy, which my amour propre
might have sustained somewhat better than my purse, I wrote down my
name, had the book put on one side, and went out. I must have given
considerable food for reflection to the witnesses of this scene, who
would no doubt ask themselves what my purpose could have been in paying
a hundred francs for a book which I could have had anywhere for ten,
or, at the outside, fifteen.
An hour after, I sent for my purchase. On the first page was written in
ink, in an elegant hand, an inscription on the part of the giver. It
consisted of these words:
Manon to Marguerite.
Humility.
It was signed Armand Duval.
What was the meaning of the word Humility? Was Manon to recognise in
Marguerite, in the opinion of M. Armand Duval, her superior in vice or
in affection? The second interpretation seemed the more probable, for
the first would have been an impertinent piece of plain speaking which
Marguerite, whatever her opinion of herself, would never have accepted.
I went out again, and thought no more of the book until at night, when
I was going to bed.
Manon Lescaut is a touching story. I know every detail of it, and yet
whenever I come across the volume the same sympathy always draws me to
it; I open it, and for the hundredth time I live over again with the
heroine of the Abbé Prévost. Now this heroine is so true to life that I
feel as if I had known her; and thus the sort of comparison between her
and Marguerite gave me an unusual inclination to read it, and my
indulgence passed into pity, almost into a kind of love for the poor
girl to whom I owed the volume. Manon died in the desert, it is true,
but in the arms of the man who loved her with the whole energy of his
soul; who, when she was dead, dug a grave for her, and watered it with
his tears, and buried his heart in it; while Marguerite, a sinner like
Manon, and perhaps converted like her, had died in a sumptuous bed (it
seemed, after what I had seen, the bed of her past), but in that desert
of the heart, a more barren, a vaster, a more pitiless desert than that
in which Manon had found her last resting-place.
Marguerite, in fact, as I had found from some friends who knew of the
last circumstances of her life, had not a single real friend by her
bedside during the two months of her long and painful agony.
Then from Manon and Marguerite my mind wandered to those whom I knew,
and whom I saw singing along the way which led to just such another
death. Poor souls! if it is not right to love them, is it not well to
pity them? You pity the blind man who has never seen the daylight, the
deaf who has never heard the harmonies of nature, the dumb who has
never found a voice for his soul, and, under a false cloak of shame,
you will not pity this blindness of heart, this deafness of soul, this
dumbness of conscience, which sets the poor afflicted creature beside
herself and makes her, in spite of herself, incapable of seeing what is
good, of hearing the Lord, and of speaking the pure language of love
and faith.
Hugo has written Marion Delorme, Musset has written Bernerette,
Alexandre Dumas has written Fernande, the thinkers and poets of all
time have brought to the courtesan the offering of their pity, and at
times a great man has rehabilitated them with his love and even with
his name. If I insist on this point, it is because many among those who
have begun to read me will be ready to throw down a book in which they
will fear to find an apology for vice and prostitution; and the
author’s age will do something, no doubt, to increase this fear. Let me
undeceive those who think thus, and let them go on reading, if nothing
but such a fear hinders them.
I am quite simply convinced of a certain principle, which is: For the
woman whose education has not taught her what is right, God almost
always opens two ways which lead thither the ways of sorrow and of
love. They are hard; those who walk in them walk with bleeding feet and
torn hands, but they also leave the trappings of vice upon the thorns
of the wayside, and reach the journey’s end in a nakedness which is not
shameful in the sight of the Lord.
Those who meet these bold travellers ought to succour them, and to tell
all that they have met them, for in so doing they point out the way. It
is not a question of setting at the outset of life two sign-posts, one
bearing the inscription “The Right Way,” the other the inscription “The
Wrong Way,” and of saying to those who come there, “Choose.” One must
needs, like Christ, point out the ways which lead from the second road
to the first, to those who have been easily led astray; and it is
needful that the beginning of these ways should not be too painful nor
appear too impenetrable.
Here is Christianity with its marvellous parable of the Prodigal Son to
teach us indulgence and pardon. Jesus was full of love for souls
wounded by the passions of men; he loved to bind up their wounds and to
find in those very wounds the balm which should heal them. Thus he said
to the Magdalen: “Much shall be forgiven thee because thou hast loved
much,” a sublimity of pardon which can only have called forth a sublime
faith.
Why do we make ourselves more strict than Christ? Why, holding
obstinately to the opinions of the world, which hardens itself in order
that it may be thought strong, do we reject, as it rejects, souls
bleeding at wounds by which, like a sick man’s bad blood, the evil of
their past may be healed, if only a friendly hand is stretched out to
lave them and set them in the convalescence of the heart?
It is to my own generation that I speak, to those for whom the theories
of M. de Voltaire happily exist no longer, to those who, like myself,
realize that humanity, for these last fifteen years, has been in one of
its most audacious moments of expansion. The science of good and evil
is acquired forever; faith is refashioned, respect for sacred things
has returned to us, and if the world has not all at once become good,
it has at least become better. The efforts of every intelligent man
tend in the same direction, and every strong will is harnessed to the
same principle: Be good, be young, be true! Evil is nothing but vanity,
let us have the pride of good, and above all let us never despair. Do
not let us despise the woman who is neither mother, sister, maid, nor
wife. Do not let us limit esteem to the family nor indulgence to
egoism. Since “there is more joy in heaven over one sinner that
repenteth than over ninety and nine just persons that need no
repentance,” let us give joy to heaven. Heaven will render it back to
us with usury. Let us leave on our way the alms of pardon for those
whom earthly desires have driven astray, whom a divine hope shall
perhaps save, and, as old women say when they offer you some homely
remedy of their own, if it does no good it will do no harm.
Doubtless it must seem a bold thing to attempt to deduce these grand
results out of the meagre subject that I deal with; but I am one of
those who believe that all is in little. The child is small, and he
includes the man; the brain is narrow, and it harbours thought; the eye
is but a point, and it covers leagues.