The painter Lethière--Brutus unveiled by M. Ponsard--Madame
Hannemann--Gohier--Andrieux--Renaud--Desgenettes--Larrey, Augereau
and the Egyptian mummy--Soldiers of the new school--My dramatic
education--I enter the offices of the Forestry Department--The cupboard
full of empty bottles--Three days away from the office--Am summoned
before M. Deviolaine
In the meantime, as I have stated, I had become master of my evenings
as I had no longer to see after the portfolio, and I took advantage
of my liberty to taste a little of life. My mother recollected an old
friend of my father, and we ventured to call upon him. He belonged to
the good-natured order of human beings, and gave us a warm welcome.
He was the famous artist Lethière, painter of _Brutus Condamnant ses
fils_, a heroism that always seemed to me a trifle too Spartan, but
which M. Ponsard's _Lucrèce_ has since made clearer to me. M. Ponsard
was the first to reveal the great conjugal mystery that the sons of
Brutus were not the sons of Brutus, but only the fruit of adultery: by
beheading them Brutus exhibited revenge, not his devotion to them!
M. Ponsard, it will be noted, deserved not only to belong to the
Academy, but also to the Suscriptions and Belles-Lettres. Well, my
father's old friend was the painter of the fine picture entitled
_Brutus Condamnant ses fils._ He had painted my father's portrait,
representing him just as a horse had been shot dead under him by
a cannon-ball; my father had also sat to him for the model of his
_Philoctète_, in the Chamber of Deputies. We soon made ourselves known
to him, and were received with open arms. He embraced both my mother
and me, and invited us to look upon his house as our own, particularly
on Thursdays, when places should always be laid for us at his table.
We were greatly delighted with the latter offer. I have no desire to
hide from my readers that we were in a position to welcome the economy
effected by the gain of a dinner not at our own expense! M. Lethière
possessed fine talents, a kind heart and a winning manner. There lived
with him then, as ruling spirit in his household, a young woman,
fair, tall and thin, who nearly always dressed in black; her name
was Mademoiselle d'Hervilly, and under that name she became known in
painting and literature. She afterwards became Madame Hannemann, and
under that name became known in the medical profession. Her nature was
cold and very hard, but she possessed plenty of will-power. I believe
Madame Hannemann, now a widow, is extremely wealthy. This lady, who was
of a very superior character, did the honours of M. Lethière's house
and entertained his old friends, several of whom had been old friends
of my father. These old friends were: M. Gohier, past President of the
Directoire; Andrieux, Desgenettes, an old painter named Renaud and
several others.
Desgenettes, who had known my father very intimately in Egypt, at once
made friendly overtures to me, and introduced me to Larrey.
I shall have occasion several times to refer to the latter gentleman
and his son, who was one of my best friends. The Siege of Anvers in
1832 gloriously enabled him to prove himself a worthy son of his father.
Of all these men, Gohier struck me as the most remarkable. Contrary to
the laws of perspective, there are certain persons of ordinary calibre,
who having, through stress of eventful circumstance, occupied high
positions, loom larger in one's view the further away they recede. Now
I could not help but look upon the man who had presided over Barras,
Roger-Ducos, Moulin and Sièyes as worth notice; for, for the time
being, he had been first of the five kings who had governed France.
But I was deceived in my estimate of his greatness: M. Gohier was a
solid, worthy man who knew just so much of history as one cannot help
learning, who knew nothing of politics and who possessed no depth of
judgment. I cannot do better than compare him with our Boulay (de
la Meurthe), whom history will enroll as having been three years
Vice-President of the Republic, although he may pretend to have no
idea of such a thing, even on 2 December! Gohier cordially detested
Bonaparte; but his hatred was neither philosophical nor political,
but wholly a personal matter. He could never forgive the future First
Consul for the ridiculous part he had made him play on 18 Brumaire, by
inviting him to lunch with Joséphine, and in inviting himself to dine
at his house, whilst he was changing the whole Government.
I need not draw the portrait of Andrieux: everybody knows that petty,
old, shrivelled man, with his petty voice and his petty eyes, the
author of petty fables and petty comedies and petty stories, who died
at the age of eighty, leaving behind him a petty reputation after
having raised petty hopes.
Renaud was an old artist who had once painted a picture that was
thought well of, the _Jeunesse d'Achille._ He had grown old in painting
the nude. And in his old age he painted nothing but the Graces, naiads
and nymphs, turning to the public their ... blue and rosy backs.
Desgenettes was an old libertine of an extremely quick-witted and very
cynical turn of mind, half soldier, half doctor, very fond of the real
flesh-and-blood goddesses that old Renaud was so fond of copying; he
would relate in season and out" the broadest and most immodest of
stories, with great glee. There was much of the eighteenth century
about him.
Larrey, on the contrary, was austerely puritanic in appearance. He wore
his hair quite long, trimmed after the fashion of Merovingian princes:
he spoke slowly and seriously. The emperor was said to have spoken
of him as the most honest man he ever knew. Apart from the influence
of sincere kindliness that he diffused among young people, Larrey
presented a curious study to us all. He had known every celebrated
personage of the Empire; and he had cut off most of the arms and legs
that needed amputation; he had collected much curious information
indicative of character or of the secrets of the soul, by listening
to the first words of the wounded and the last words of the dying.
He would sometimes relate anecdotes which, without any malicious
intention, gave one an idea of the ignorance of those decorated and
beplumed warriors, who were in the main lion-hearted, but also, for
the most part, of dull intellect, and infinitely less brilliant in any
drawing-room than on a battlefield. When Larrey returned from Egypt he
brought back a curiosity that is not thought much of nowadays, in the
shape of a mummy, but which at that time raised scientific curiosity to
the highest pitch. When he met Augereau, he said to him--
"Ah! come now and dine with me to-morrow; I will show you a mummy I
have brought back from the Pyramids."
"With pleasure," Augereau replied; and he went next day to dinner.
"Well," he said at dessert, "why have we not seen that mummy yet?"
"Because it is in my study," said Larrey. "Follow me, and you shall see
it."
Larrey led the way, Augereau following full of curiosity. When they
reached the study, Larrey went to the box, which was leaning up against
the wall, opened it, and revealed the mummy. Then Augereau approached
and touched it with his finger.
"I declare," he exclaimed contemptuously, "it is dead!"
Larrey was so astonished by this exclamation that he did not even
bethink himself to offer apologies to Augereau for having disturbed him
to look at so uninteresting an object as a _dead mummy._
But throughout that period everybody was literary, not in themselves,
or from choice, but from tradition. No one had yet forgotten that
Bonaparte had signed his own proclamations to the Army of Egypt, and
that Napoleon had accosted M. de Fontanes every time he met him with
the question--
"Well, Monsieur de Fontanes, have you found me a poet?"
But the day and the appointed hour had come for all those poets who had
escaped the notice of M. de Fontanes and Napoleon's munificent offers.
They were springing up, blossoming and glowing like hawthorn in the
month of May; and their names had already begun to give promise of the
immense sensation they were to create in the future. Their names were
Lamartine, Hugo, de Vigny, Sainte-Beuve, Méry, Soulié, Barbier, Alfred
de Musset, Balzac; these were already filling, at the cost of their
heart's blood, that great and unique stream of poetry from which France
and Europe and the whole world were to drink during the nineteenth
century.
But the movement was taking place not only amidst that _pléiade_ which
I have just named; a whole host of others was fighting, each helping
forward the general cause by separate attacks, to make a breach in the
walls of the old school of poetry. Dittmer and Cavé were publishing the
_Soirées de Neuilly_; Vitet, the _Barricades_ and the _États de Blois_;
Mérimée the _Théâtre de Clara Gazul._ And note carefully that all these
movements took place away from the stage whereon the real struggle took
place, and apart from its manifestations. The real struggle was that in
which I, and Victor Hugo (I put myself first for chronological reasons)
were to take part. I was preparing for it not only by the continuation
of my _Christine_, but still more by studying humanity as a whole,
combined with individual characterisations.
I have referred to the immense service the English actors had done me;
Macready, Kean, Young had in turn completed the work begun by Kemble
and Miss Smithson. I had seen _Hamlet_, _Romeo_, _Shylock_, _Othello_,
_Richard III._ and _Macbeth._ I had read and devoured not only the
whole of Shakespeare, but even the whole of the foreign dramatic
output. I had recognised that, in the theatrical world, everything
emanated from Shakespeare, just as in the external world everything
owes its existence to the sun; that nothing could be compared with him;
for, coming before everyone else, he was yet as supreme in tragedy as
Corneille, in comedy as Molière, as original as Calderon, as full of
thought as Goethe, as passionate as Schiller. I realised that his works
contained as many types as the works of all the others put together. I
recognised, in short, that, after the Creator Himself, Shakespeare had
created more than any other being. As I have stated, when I saw these
English artists, actors who forgot that they were on a stage,--the
life of the imagination became actual life through the power of Art;
their convincing words and gestures seeming to transform them from
actors into creatures of God, with their virtues and their vices, their
passions and their failings,--from that moment my career was decided.
I felt I had received that special call which comes to every man. I
felt a confidence in my own powers that I had lacked until then, and
I boldly hurled myself upon the unknown future that had hitherto held
such terrors for me. But, at the same time, I did not disguise from
myself the difficulties in the way of the career to which I had devoted
my life; I knew that it would require deeper and more special study
than any other profession; that before I could experiment successfully
on living nature I must first perseveringly study the works of others.
So I did not rest satisfied with a superficial study. One after the
other, I took the works of men of genius, like Shakespeare, Molière,
Corneille, Calderon, Goethe and Schiller, laid them out as bodies on a
dissecting table, and, scalpel in hand, I spent whole nights in probing
them to the heart in order to find the sources of life and the secret
of the circulation of their blood. And after a while I discovered with
what admirable science they galvanised nerve and muscle into life, and
by what skill they modelled the differing types of flesh that were
destined to cover the one unchangeable human framework of bone. For man
does not invent. God has given the created world into his hands, and
left him to apply it to his needs. Progress simply means the daily,
monthly and everlasting conquest of man over matter. Each individual
as he appears on the scene takes possession of the knowledge of his
fathers, works it up in different ways, and then dies after he has
added one ray more to the sum of human knowledge which he bequeaths
to his sons,--one star in the Milky Way! I was then not only trying
to complete my dramatic work but also my dramatic education. But that
is an error, one's work may be finished some day, but one's education
never!
I had just about concluded my play, after two months' peace and
encouragement in my humble post in the Archives Office, when I received
notice from the Secretariat that, as my position was almost a sinecure,
it had been done away with, and that I must hold myself ready to enter
the Forestry Department--under M. Deviolaine. So the storm that had
been hanging over my head for long had burst at last. I said good-bye
to old father Bichet with tears in my eyes, and to his two friends MM.
Pieyre and Parseval de Grandmaison, who promised to follow my career
with sympathetic interest wherever I might be. The reader knows M.
Deviolaine. During the five years I had been in the Government offices
I had been looked upon as a _bête-noir_, so I entered upon my new
official work under no very favourable auspices.
The struggle began immediately I took up my new duties. They wanted
to herd me together with five or six of my fellow-clerks in one large
room, and I revolted against the proceeding. My companions were
good enough to explain to me in all innocence that they found it an
advantageous way of killing time--that deadly enemy to employés--to
sit together, for then they could talk. Now, talk was just what I most
dreaded; to them it was a pleasure, to me a torture, for chattering
distracted my own ever-increasing imaginative ideas. No, instead of
wanting to be in this big office, strewn thick with supernumeraries,
clerks and assistants, I had my eye on a sort of recess separated by a
simple partition from the office-boy's cubicle, and in which he kept
the ink-bottles that were returned to him empty. I asked if I might
take possession of this place. I might as well have asked for the
archbishopric of Cambrai, which was just vacant. A fearful clamour went
up at this demand, from the office boy to the head of the department
_(directeur général)._ The office boy asked the clerks in the big
room where he could put his empty bottles henceforth; the clerks in
the big room asked the assistant head clerk (the one who had never
heard of Byron) whether I thought myself too good to work with them;
the assistant head clerk asked the chief clerk whether I had come to
the Forestry Department to give or to receive orders; the chief clerk
asked the head of the department if it were usual for a clerk paid
fifteen hundred francs to have an office to himself, as though he were
a head clerk at four thousand. The head of the department replied
that it was not only absolutely contrary to administrative customs,
but that no such precedent would be allowed me, and that my claim was
most presumptuous! I was trying to fit myself into the unlucky recess
which, for the moment, formed the sum of my ambition, when the head
clerk walked haughtily from the office of the head of the department,
bearing the verbal command that the rebellious employé, who had dared
for one moment to entertain the ambitious hope of leaving the ordinary
ranks, should at once return to his place there. He transmitted the
order immediately to the assistant head clerk, who passed it on to the
ordinary clerks of the large office, who transmitted it to the office
boy! There was joy throughout the department: a fellow-clerk was to be
humiliated and, if he did not take his humiliation in a humble spirit,
he I would lose his situation! The office boy opened the door between
his cubicle and mine; he had just come from making a general clearance
throughout the office and had brought back all the empty bottles he
could manage to unearth.
"But, my dear Féresse," I said, watching him uneasily, "how do you
think I can manage here with all those bottles, or, rather, how are all
those bottles going to fit in with me,--unless I live in one of them,
after the style of _le Diable boiteux?_"
"That's just it!" leered Féresse, as he deposited fresh bottles by the
old ones. "_M. le Directeur général_ does not look upon it in that
light: he wishes me to keep this room for myself, and does not intend a
new-comer to lay down the law."
I walked up to him, the blood mantling my face.
"The new-comer, however insignificant he may be, is still your
superior," I said; "so you should speak to him with your head
uncovered. Take your cap off, you young cub!"
And, at the same moment, I gave the lad a back-hander that sent his
hat flying against the wall, and took my departure. All this happened
in the absence of M. Deviolaine; therefore I had not the last word in
the matter. M. Deviolaine would not return for two or three days; so
I decided to go home to my poor mother, and there await his return.
But, before I left the office, I went and told Oudard all that had
happened, who said he could not do anything in the matter, and I
told M. Pieyre, who said that he could not do much. My mother was in
a state of despair: it reminded her too much of my return home from
Maître Lefèvre's in 1823. She rushed off to Madame Deviolaine. Madame
Deviolaine was an excellent woman but narrow-minded, and she could
not understand why a clerk should have any other ambition beyond that
of ultimately becoming a first class clerk; why a first class clerk
should desire to become anything beyond an assistant chief clerk; why
an assistant chief clerk should have any other ambition than that
of becoming chief clerk, and so forth. So she did not hold out any
promises to my mother; for that matter, the poor woman had not much
influence over her husband, as she well knew, and she but rarely tried
to exercise what little she did possess. Meanwhile, I had begged
Porcher to come to our house. I showed him my almost completed tragedy,
and I asked him whether, in case of adverse circumstances, he would
advance me a certain sum.
"Confound it!" Porcher replied--"a tragedy!... If it had been a
vaudeville I do not say but that I would!... However, _get it received_
and we will see."
"Get it received!" Therein, of course, lay the whole question.
My mother returned at that moment, and Porcher's answer was not of
the kind to reassure her. I wrote to M. Deviolaine, and begged that
my letter might be given him on his return; then I waited. We spent
three days of suspense; but during those three days I stayed in bed
and worked incessantly. Why did I stop in bed? That requires an
explanation. Whilst I was at the Secretariat, and had to be at the
office from ten in the morning until five in the evening, returning
there from eight until ten o'clock, I had to traverse the distance
between the faubourg Saint-Denis No. 53 to the rue Saint-Honoré No.
216, eight times a day, and I was so tired out that I could rarely
work if I sat up. So I went to bed and slept, first putting my work
on the table near my bed; I slept for two hours, and then at midnight
my mother woke me and went to sleep in her turn. That was the reason
I worked in bed. This habit of working in bed attained such hold of
me that I kept it up long after I had gained freedom of action, doing
all my theatrical work thus. Perhaps this revelation may satisfy those
physiologists who dilated upon the kind of rude passion which has been
noted in my earliest works, and with which, perhaps not unreasonably,
I have been reproached. I contracted another habit, too, at that time,
and that was to write my dramas in a backward style of handwriting:
this habit I never lost, like the other, and to this day I have one
style of handwriting for my dramas and another for my romances. During
those three days I made immense progress with _Christine._ On the
fourth day, I received a letter from M. Deviolaine, summoning me to his
office. I hurried there, and this time my heart did not beat any the
faster; I had faced the worst that could happen and I was prepared for
anything.
"Ah! there you are, you cursed blockhead!" cried M. Deviolaine, when he
saw me.
"Yes, monsieur, here I am."
"So! so, monsieur!"
I made no reply.
"So we are too grand a lord to work with ordinary mortals?" M.
Deviolaine continued.
"You are mistaken ... quite the contrary. I am not a sufficiently grand
lord to work with the others, that is why I want to work alone."
"And you ask for an office to yourself, on purpose to do nothing in it
but to write your dirty plays?"
"I ask for an office to myself so that I can have the right to think
while I am working."
"And if I do not let you have an office to yourself?"
"I shall try to earn my living as an author. You know I have no other
resource."
"And if I do not immediately send you packing, you may be very sure it
is for your mother's sake and not for your own."
"I am fully aware of that, and I am grateful to you on my mother's
account."
"Very well, take your office to yourself, then; but I give you warning
that...."
"You will give me double the work of any other clerk?"
"Exactly so."
"It will be unjust, that is all; but, since I am not the stronger, I
shall submit."
"Unjust! unjust!" shrieked M. Deviolaine. "I would have you know that I
have never done an unjust thing in my life."
"It would seem there is a beginning for everything."
"Did you ever see--oh, did you ever see such a young rip!" continued M.
Deviolaine, as he paced up and down his office,--"did you ever see! did
you ever see!..."
Then, turning to me again, he said--
"Very well, I will not treat you unjustly; no, indeed no, you shall not
have more work to do than the others; but you shall have as much, and
you shall be watched to see that you get through it! M. Fossier shall
receive orders from me to carry out this inspection."
I moved my lips.
"What next! Have you something now to say against M. Fossier?"
"No, only that I think him ugly."
"Well, what then?"
"Why, I would much rather he were good-looking, on his own account
first and also on my own."
"But what does it matter to you whether M. Fossier be ugly or
beautiful?"
"If I have to meet a face three or four times in a day I should much
prefer it to be agreeable rather than disagreeable."
"Well, I never met such a cursed young puppy in all my days! You will
soon want me to choose my head clerks to suit your taste!... Get out!
Go back to your office, and try to make up for lost time."
"I will do so; but, first, I want to ask a promise from you, monsieur."
"Well, upon my word, if he isn't actually going to impose his own
conditions on me!"
"You will accept this one, I am sure."
"Now, what do you wish, Monsieur le poëte?"
"I should like you yourself each day to overlook the work I have done
and see how I have done it."
"Well, I promise you that.... And when is the first performance to take
place?"
"I can hardly tell you; but I am very sure you will be present at it!"
"Yes, I will be there, in more senses than one; you may be quite easy
on that score.... Now, go and behave yourself!"
And he made a threatening gesture, upon which I went out.
M. Deviolaine kept his word to me. He gave me plenty of work to do
without overdoing me. But, as he had promised, M. Fossier always came
and brought the work to me himself, and if, by ill luck, I was not at
my desk, M. Deviolaine was instantly informed of my absence.