“It was a question of a plan in which we included you as a superior
person, that is to say, somebody who can put himself above other people.
The constitutional thimble-rig is carried on to-day, dear boy, more
seriously than ever. The infamous monarchy, displaced by the heroism of
the people, was a sort of drab, you could laugh and revel with her; but
La Patrie is a shrewish and virtuous wife, and willy-nilly you must take
her prescribed endearments. Then besides, as you know, authority passed
over from the Tuileries to the journalists, at the time when the Budget
changed its quarters and went from the Faubourg Saint-Germain to the
Chaussee de Antin. But this you may not know perhaps. The Government,
that is, the aristocracy of lawyers and bankers who represent the
country to-day, just as the priests used to do in the time of the
monarchy, has felt the necessity of mystifying the worthy people of
France with a few new words and old ideas, like philosophers of
every school, and all strong intellects ever since time began. So now
Royalist-national ideas must be inculcated, by proving to us that it
is far better to pay twelve million francs, thirty-three centimes to
La Patrie, represented by Messieurs Such-and-Such, than to pay eleven
hundred million francs, nine centimes to a king who used to say _I_
instead of _we_. In a word, a journal, with two or three hundred
thousand francs, good, at the back of it, has just been started, with a
view to making an opposition paper to content the discontented, without
prejudice to the national government of the citizen-king. We scoff
at liberty as at despotism now, and at religion or incredulity quite
impartially. And since, for us, ‘our country’ means a capital where
ideas circulate and are sold at so much a line, a succulent dinner every
day, and the play at frequent intervals, where profligate women swarm,
where suppers last on into the next day, and light loves are hired by
the hour like cabs; and since Paris will always be the most adorable of
all countries, the country of joy, liberty, wit, pretty women, _mauvais
sujets_, and good wine; where the truncheon of authority never makes
itself disagreeably felt, because one is so close to those who wield
it,--we, therefore, sectaries of the god Mephistopheles, have engaged to
whitewash the public mind, to give fresh costumes to the actors, to put
a new plank or two in the government booth, to doctor doctrinaires,
and warm up old Republicans, to touch up the Bonapartists a bit, and
revictual the Centre; provided that we are allowed to laugh _in petto_
at both kings and peoples, to think one thing in the morning and another
at night, and to lead a merry life _a la_ Panurge, or to recline upon
soft cushions, _more orientali_.
“The sceptre of this burlesque and macaronic kingdom,” he went on, “we
have reserved for you; so we are taking you straightway to a dinner
given by the founder of the said newspaper, a retired banker, who, at a
loss to know what to do with his money, is going to buy some brains
with it. You will be welcomed as a brother, we shall hail you as king
of these free lances who will undertake anything; whose perspicacity
discovers the intentions of Austria, England, or Russia before either
Russia, Austria or England have formed any. Yes, we will invest you with
the sovereignty of those puissant intellects which give to the world its
Mirabeaus, Talleyrands, Pitts, and Metternichs--all the clever Crispins
who treat the destinies of a kingdom as gamblers’ stakes, just as
ordinary men play dominoes for _kirschenwasser_. We have given you out
to be the most undaunted champion who ever wrestled in a drinking-bout
at close quarters with the monster called Carousal, whom all bold
spirits wish to try a fall with; we have gone so far as to say that
you have never yet been worsted. I hope you will not make liars of us.
Taillefer, our amphitryon, has undertaken to surpass the circumscribed
saturnalias of the petty modern Lucullus. He is rich enough to infuse
pomp into trifles, and style and charm into dissipation... Are you
listening, Raphael?” asked the orator, interrupting himself.
“Yes,” answered the young man, less surprised by the accomplishment
of his wishes than by the natural manner in which the events had come
about.
He could not bring himself to believe in magic, but he marveled at the
accidents of human fate.
“Yes, you say, just as if you were thinking of your grandfather’s
demise,” remarked one of his neighbors.
“Ah!” cried Raphael, “I was thinking, my friends, that we are in a fair
way to become very great scoundrels,” and there was an ingenuousness in
his tones that set these writers, the hope of young France, in a roar.
“So far our blasphemies have been uttered over our cups; we have passed
our judgments on life while drunk, and taken men and affairs in an
after-dinner frame of mind. We were innocent of action; we were bold in
words. But now we are to be branded with the hot iron of politics;
we are going to enter the convict’s prison and to drop our illusions.
Although one has no belief left, except in the devil, one may regret
the paradise of one’s youth and the age of innocence, when we devoutly
offered the tip of our tongue to some good priest for the consecrated
wafer of the sacrament. Ah, my good friends, our first peccadilloes gave
us so much pleasure because the consequent remorse set them off and lent
a keen relish to them; but nowadays----”
“Oh! now,” said the first speaker, “there is still left----”
“What?” asked another.
“Crime----”
“There is a word as high as the gallows and deeper than the Seine,” said
Raphael.
“Oh, you don’t understand me; I mean political crime. Since this
morning, a conspirator’s life is the only one I covet. I don’t know that
the fancy will last over to-morrow, but to-night at least my gorge rises
at the anaemic life of our civilization and its railroad evenness. I am
seized with a passion for the miseries of retreat from Moscow, for the
excitements of the Red Corsair, or for a smuggler’s life. I should like
to go to Botany Bay, as we have no Chartreaux left us here in France;
it is a sort of infirmary reserved for little Lord Byrons who, having
crumpled up their lives like a serviette after dinner, have nothing left
to do but to set their country ablaze, blow their own brains out, plot
for a republic or clamor for a war----”
“Emile,” Raphael’s neighbor called eagerly to the speaker, “on my honor,
but for the revolution of July I would have taken orders, and gone off
down into the country somewhere to lead the life of an animal, and----”
“And you would have read your breviary through every day.”
“Yes.”
“You are a coxcomb!”
“Why, we read the newspapers as it is!”
“Not bad that, for a journalist! But hold your tongue, we are going
through a crowd of subscribers. Journalism, look you, is the religion of
modern society, and has even gone a little further.”
“What do you mean?”
“Its pontiffs are not obliged to believe in it any more than the people
are.”
Chatting thus, like good fellows who have known their _De Viris
illustribus_ for years past, they reached a mansion in the Rue Joubert.
Emile was a journalist who had acquired more reputation by dint of
doing nothing than others had derived from their achievements. A bold,
caustic, and powerful critic, he possessed all the qualities that his
defects permitted. An outspoken giber, he made numberless epigrams on
a friend to his face; but would defend him, if absent, with courage
and loyalty. He laughed at everything, even at his own career. Always
impecunious, he yet lived, like all men of his calibre, plunged in
unspeakable indolence. He would fling some word containing volumes
in the teeth of folk who could not put a syllable of sense into their
books. He lavished promises that he never fulfilled; he made a pillow of
his luck and reputation, on which he slept, and ran the risk of waking
up to old age in a workhouse. A steadfast friend to the gallows foot,
a cynical swaggerer with a child’s simplicity, a worker only from
necessity or caprice.
“In the language of Maitre Alcofribas, we are about to make a famous
_troncon de chiere lie_,” he remarked to Raphael as he pointed out the
flower-stands that made a perfumed forest of the staircase.
“I like a vestibule to be well warmed and richly carpeted,” Raphael
said. “Luxury in the peristyle is not common in France. I feel as if
life had begun anew here.”
“And up above we are going to drink and make merry once more, my dear
Raphael. Ah! yes,” he went on, “and I hope we are going to come off
conquerors, too, and walk over everybody else’s head.”
As he spoke, he jestingly pointed to the guests. They were entering
a large room which shone with gilding and lights, and there all the
younger men of note in Paris welcomed them. Here was one who had just
revealed fresh powers, his first picture vied with the glories of
Imperial art. There, another, who but yesterday had launched forth a
volume, an acrid book filled with a sort of literary arrogance, which
opened up new ways to the modern school. A sculptor, not far away, with
vigorous power visible in his rough features, was chatting with one of
those unenthusiastic scoffers who can either see excellence anywhere or
nowhere, as it happens. Here, the cleverest of our caricaturists,
with mischievous eyes and bitter tongue, lay in wait for epigrams to
translate into pencil strokes; there, stood the young and audacious
writer, who distilled the quintessence of political ideas better than
any other man, or compressed the work of some prolific writer as he held
him up to ridicule; he was talking with the poet whose works would
have eclipsed all the writings of the time if his ability had been as
strenuous as his hatreds. Both were trying not to say the truth while
they kept clear of lies, as they exchanged flattering speeches. A famous
musician administered soothing consolation in a rallying fashion, to
a young politician who had just fallen quite unhurt, from his rostrum.
Young writers who lacked style stood beside other young writers who
lacked ideas, and authors of poetical prose by prosaic poets.
At the sight of all these incomplete beings, a simple Saint Simonian,
ingenuous enough to believe in his own doctrine, charitably paired them
off, designing, no doubt, to convert them into monks of his order. A
few men of science mingled in the conversation, like nitrogen in the
atmosphere, and several _vaudevillistes_ shed rays like the sparking
diamonds that give neither light nor heat. A few paradox-mongers,
laughing up their sleeves at any folk who embraced their likes or
dislikes in men or affairs, had already begun a two-edged policy,
conspiring against all systems, without committing themselves to any
side. Then there was the self-appointed critic who admires nothing, and
will blow his nose in the middle of a _cavatina_ at the Bouffons, who
applauds before any one else begins, and contradicts every one who says
what he himself was about to say; he was there giving out the sayings
of wittier men for his own. Of all the assembled guests, a future lay
before some five; ten or so should acquire a fleeting renown; as for the
rest, like all mediocrities, they might apply to themselves the famous
falsehood of Louis XVIII., Union and oblivion.
The anxious jocularity of a man who is expending two thousand crowns sat
on their host. His eyes turned impatiently towards the door from time to
time, seeking one of his guests who kept him waiting. Very soon a stout
little person appeared, who was greeted by a complimentary murmur;
it was the notary who had invented the newspaper that very morning.
A valet-de-chambre in black opened the doors of a vast dining-room,
whither every one went without ceremony, and took his place at an
enormous table.
Raphael took a last look round the room before he left it. His wish had
been realized to the full. The rooms were adorned with silk and gold.
Countless wax tapers set in handsome candelabra lit up the slightest
details of gilded friezes, the delicate bronze sculpture, and the
splendid colors of the furniture. The sweet scent of rare flowers, set
in stands tastefully made of bamboo, filled the air. Everything, even
the curtains, was pervaded by elegance without pretension, and there was
a certain imaginative charm about it all which acted like a spell on the
mind of a needy man.
“An income of a hundred thousand livres a year is a very nice beginning
of the catechism, and a wonderful assistance to putting morality into
our actions,” he said, sighing. “Truly my sort of virtue can scarcely
go afoot, and vice means, to my thinking, a garret, a threadbare coat, a
gray hat in winter time, and sums owing to the porter.... I should like
to live in the lap of luxury a year, or six months, no matter! And then
afterwards, die. I should have known, exhausted, and consumed a thousand
lives, at any rate.”
“Why, you are taking the tone of a stockbroker in good luck,” said
Emile, who overheard him. “Pooh! your riches would be a burden to you as
soon as you found that they would spoil your chances of coming out above
the rest of us. Hasn’t the artist always kept the balance true between
the poverty of riches and the riches of poverty? And isn’t struggle a
necessity to some of us? Look out for your digestion, and only look,”
he added, with a mock-heroic gesture, “at the majestic, thrice holy, and
edifying appearance of this amiable capitalist’s dining-room. That man
has in reality only made his money for our benefit. Isn’t he a kind of
sponge of the polyp order, overlooked by naturalists, which should be
carefully squeezed before he is left for his heirs to feed upon? There
is style, isn’t there, about those bas-reliefs that adorn the walls? And
the lustres, and the pictures, what luxury well carried out! If one may
believe those who envy him, or who know, or think they know, the origins
of his life, then this man got rid of a German and some others--his best
friend for one, and the mother of that friend, during the Revolution.
Could you house crimes under the venerable Taillefer’s silvering locks?
He looks to me a very worthy man. Only see how the silver sparkles, and
is every glittering ray like a stab of a dagger to him?... Let us go in,
one might as well believe in Mahomet. If common report speak truth, here
are thirty men of talent, and good fellows too, prepared to dine off the
flesh and blood of a whole family;... and here are we ourselves, a pair
of youngsters full of open-hearted enthusiasm, and we shall be partakers
in his guilt. I have a mind to ask our capitalist whether he is a
respectable character....”
“No, not now,” cried Raphael, “but when he is dead drunk, we shall have
had our dinner then.”
The two friends sat down laughing. First of all, by a glance more rapid
than a word, each paid his tribute of admiration to the splendid general
effect of the long table, white as a bank of freshly-fallen snow, with
its symmetrical line of covers, crowned with their pale golden rolls of
bread. Rainbow colors gleamed in the starry rays of light reflected by
the glass; the lights of the tapers crossed and recrossed each other
indefinitely; the dishes covered with their silver domes whetted both
appetite and curiosity.
Few words were spoken. Neighbors exchanged glances as the Maderia
circulated. Then the first course appeared in all its glory; it would
have done honor to the late Cambaceres, Brillat-Savarin would have
celebrated it. The wines of Bordeaux and Burgundy, white and red, were
royally lavished. This first part of the banquet might been compared in
every way to a rendering of some classical tragedy. The second act grew
a trifle noisier. Every guest had had a fair amount to drink, and had
tried various crus at this pleasure, so that as the remains of the
magnificent first course were removed, tumultuous discussions began;
a pale brow here and there began to flush, sundry noses took a purpler
hue, faces lit up, and eyes sparkled.
While intoxication was only dawning, the conversation did not overstep
the bounds of civility; but banter and bon mots slipped by degrees from
every tongue; and then slander began to rear its little snake’s heard,
and spoke in dulcet tones; a few shrewd ones here and there gave heed to
it, hoping to keep their heads. So the second course found their minds
somewhat heated. Every one ate as he spoke, spoke while he ate, and
drank without heeding the quantity of the liquor, the wine was so
biting, the bouquet so fragrant, the example around so infectious.
Taillefer made a point of stimulating his guests, and plied them with
the formidable wines of the Rhone, with fierce Tokay, and heady old
Roussillon.
The champagne, impatiently expected and lavishly poured out, was a
scourge of fiery sparks to these men; released like post-horses from
some mail-coach by a relay; they let their spirits gallop away into the
wilds of argument to which no one listened, began to tell stories which
had no auditors, and repeatedly asked questions to which no answer was
made. Only the loud voice of wassail could be heard, a voice made up
of a hundred confused clamors, which rose and grew like a crescendo of
Rossini’s. Insidious toasts, swagger, and challenges followed.
Each renounced any pride in his own intellectual capacity, in order to
vindicate that of hogsheads, casks, and vats; and each made noise enough
for two. A time came when the footmen smiled, while their masters all
talked at once. A philosopher would have been interested, doubtless, by
the singularity of the thoughts expressed, a politician would have been
amazed by the incongruity of the methods discussed in the melee of words
or doubtfully luminous paradoxes, where truths, grotesquely caparisoned,
met in conflict across the uproar of brawling judgments, of arbitrary
decisions and folly, much as bullets, shells, and grapeshot are hurled
across a battlefield.
It was at once a volume and a picture. Every philosophy, religion, and
moral code differing so greatly in every latitude, every government,
every great achievement of the human intellect, fell before a scythe as
long as Time’s own; and you might have found it hard to decide whether
it was wielded by Gravity intoxicated, or by Inebriation grown sober and
clear-sighted. Borne away by a kind of tempest, their minds, like the
sea raging against the cliffs, seemed ready to shake the laws which
confine the ebb and flow of civilization; unconsciously fulfilling the
will of God, who has suffered evil and good to abide in nature, and
reserved the secret of their continual strife to Himself. A frantic
travesty of debate ensued, a Walpurgis-revel of intellects. Between the
dreary jests of these children of the Revolution over the inauguration
of a newspaper, and the talk of the joyous gossips at Gargantua’s
birth, stretched the gulf that divides the nineteenth century from the
sixteenth. Laughingly they had begun the work of destruction, and our
journalists laughed amid the ruins.
“What is the name of that young man over there?” said the notary,
indicating Raphael. “I thought I heard some one call him Valentin.”
“What stuff is this?” said Emile, laughing; “plain Valentin, say you?
Raphael DE Valentin, if you please. We bear an eagle or, on a field
sable, with a silver crown, beak and claws gules, and a fine motto:
NON CECIDIT ANIMUS. We are no foundling child, but a descendant of the
Emperor Valens, of the stock of the Valentinois, founders of the cities
of Valence in France, and Valencia in Spain, rightful heirs to the
Empire of the East. If we suffer Mahmoud on the throne of Byzantium, it
is out of pure condescension, and for lack of funds and soldiers.”
With a fork flourished above Raphael’s head, Emile outlined a crown upon
it. The notary bethought himself a moment, but soon fell to drinking
again, with a gesture peculiar to himself; it was quite impossible,
it seemed to say to secure in his clientele the cities of Valence and
Byzantium, the Emperor Valens, Mahmoud, and the house of Valentinois.
“Should not the destruction of those ant-hills, Babylon, Tyre, Carthage,
and Venice, each crushed beneath the foot of a passing giant, serve as
a warning to man, vouchsafed by some mocking power?” said Claude Vignon,
who must play the Bossuet, as a sort of purchased slave, at the rate of
fivepence a line.
“Perhaps Moses, Sylla, Louis XI., Richelieu, Robespierre, and Napoleon
were but the same man who crosses our civilizations now and again, like
a comet across the sky,” said a disciple of Ballanche.
“Why try to fathom the designs of Providence?” said Canalis, maker of
ballads.
“Come, now,” said the man who set up for a critic, “there is nothing
more elastic in the world than your Providence.”
“Well, sir, Louis XIV. sacrificed more lives over digging the
foundations of the Maintenon’s aqueducts, than the Convention expended
in order to assess the taxes justly, to make one law for everybody, and
one nation of France, and to establish the rule of equal inheritance,”
said Massol, whom the lack of a syllable before his name had made a
Republican.
“Are you going to leave our heads on our shoulders?” asked Moreau (of
the Oise), a substantial farmer. “You, sir, who took blood for wine just
now?”
“Where is the use? Aren’t the principles of social order worth some
sacrifices, sir?”
“Hi! Bixiou! What’s-his-name, the Republican, considers a landowner’s
head a sacrifice!” said a young man to his neighbor.
“Men and events count for nothing,” said the Republican, following out
his theory in spite of hiccoughs; “in politics, as in philosophy, there
are only principles and ideas.”
“What an abomination! Then you would ruthlessly put your friends to
death for a shibboleth?”
“Eh, sir! the man who feels compunction is your thorough scoundrel, for
he has some notion of virtue; while Peter the Great and the Duke of Alva
were embodied systems, and the pirate Monbard an organization.”
“But can’t society rid itself of your systems and organizations?” said
Canalis.
“Oh, granted!” cried the Republican.
“That stupid Republic of yours makes me feel queasy. We sha’n’t be able
to carve a capon in peace, because we shall find the agrarian law inside
it.”
“Ah, my little Brutus, stuffed with truffles, your principles are all
right enough. But you are like my valet, the rogue is so frightfully
possessed with a mania for property that if I left him to clean my
clothes after his fashion, he would soon clean me out.”
“Crass idiots!” replied the Republican, “you are for setting a nation
straight with toothpicks. To your way of thinking, justice is more
dangerous than thieves.”
“Oh, dear!” cried the attorney Deroches.
“Aren’t they a bore with their politics!” said the notary Cardot. “Shut
up. That’s enough of it. There is no knowledge nor virtue worth shedding
a drop of blood for. If Truth were brought into liquidation, we might
find her insolvent.”
“It would be much less trouble, no doubt, to amuse ourselves with evil,
rather than dispute about good. Moreover, I would give all the speeches
made for forty years past at the Tribune for a trout, for one of
Perrault’s tales or Charlet’s sketches.”
“Quite right!... Hand me the asparagus. Because, after all, liberty
begets anarchy, anarchy leads to despotism, and despotism back again
to liberty. Millions have died without securing a triumph for any one
system. Is not that the vicious circle in which the whole moral world
revolves? Man believes that he has reached perfection, when in fact he
has but rearranged matters.”
“Oh! oh!” cried Cursy, the _vaudevilliste_; “in that case, gentlemen,
here’s to Charles X., the father of liberty.”
“Why not?” asked Emile. “When law becomes despotic, morals are relaxed,
and vice versa.
“Let us drink to the imbecility of authority, which gives us such an
authority over imbeciles!” said the good banker.
“Napoleon left us glory, at any rate, my good friend!” exclaimed a naval
officer who had never left Brest.
“Glory is a poor bargain; you buy it dear, and it will not keep.
Does not the egotism of the great take the form of glory, just as for
nobodies it is their own well-being?”
“You are very fortunate, sir----”
“The first inventor of ditches must have been a weakling, for society
is only useful to the puny. The savage and the philosopher, at either
extreme of the moral scale, hold property in equal horror.”
“All very fine!” said Cardot; “but if there were no property, there
would be no documents to draw up.”
“These green peas are excessively delicious!”
“And the _cure_ was found dead in his bed in the morning....”
“Who is talking about death? Pray don’t trifle, I have an uncle.”
“Could you bear his loss with resignation?”
“No question.”
“Gentlemen, listen to me! _How to kill an uncle_. Silence! (Cries of
“Hush! hush!”) In the first place, take an uncle, large and stout,
seventy years old at least, they are the best uncles. (Sensation.) Get
him to eat a pate de foie gras, any pretext will do.”
“Ah, but my uncle is a thin, tall man, and very niggardly and
abstemious.”
“That sort of uncle is a monster; he misappropriates existence.”
“Then,” the speaker on uncles went on, “tell him, while he is digesting
it, that his banker has failed.”
“How if he bears up?”
“Let loose a pretty girl on him.”
“And if----?” asked the other, with a shake of the head.
“Then he wouldn’t be an uncle--an uncle is a gay dog by nature.”
“Malibran has lost two notes in her voice.”
“No, sir, she has not.”
“Yes, sir, she has.”
“Oh, ho! No and yes, is not that the sum-up of all religious, political,
or literary dissertations? Man is a clown dancing on the edge of an
abyss.”
“You would make out that I am a fool.”
“On the contrary, you cannot make me out.”
“Education, there’s a pretty piece of tomfoolery. M. Heineffettermach
estimates the number of printed volumes at more than a thousand
millions; and a man cannot read more than a hundred and fifty thousand
in his lifetime. So, just tell me what that word _education_ means. For
some it consists in knowing the name of Alexander’s horse, of the dog
Berecillo, of the Seigneur d’Accords, and in ignorance of the man to
whom we owe the discovery of rafting and the manufacture of porcelain.
For others it is the knowledge how to burn a will and live respected, be
looked up to and popular, instead of stealing a watch with half-a-dozen
aggravating circumstances, after a previous conviction, and so
perishing, hated and dishonored, in the Place de Greve.”
“Will Nathan’s work live?”
“He has very clever collaborators, sir.”
“Or Canalis?”
“He is a great man; let us say no more about him.”
“You are all drunk!”
“The consequence of a Constitution is the immediate stultification of
intellects. Art, science, public works, everything, is consumed by a
horribly egoistic feeling, the leprosy of the time. Three hundred of
your bourgeoisie, set down on benches, will only think of planting
poplars. Tyranny does great things lawlessly, while Liberty will
scarcely trouble herself to do petty ones lawfully.”
“Your reciprocal instruction will turn out counters in human flesh,”
broke in an Absolutist. “All individuality will disappear in a people
brought to a dead level by education.”
“For all that, is not the aim of society to secure happiness to each
member of it?” asked the Saint-Simonian.
“If you had an income of fifty thousand livres, you would not think much
about the people. If you are smitten with a tender passion for the race,
go to Madagascar; there you will find a nice little nation all ready to
Saint-Simonize, classify, and cork up in your phials, but here every one
fits into his niche like a peg in a hole. A porter is a porter, and a
blockhead is a fool, without a college of fathers to promote them to
those positions.”
“You are a Carlist.”
“And why not? Despotism pleases me; it implies a certain contempt for
the human race. I have no animosity against kings, they are so amusing.
Is it nothing to sit enthroned in a room, at a distance of thirty
million leagues from the sun?”
“Let us once more take a broad view of civilization,” said the man of
learning who, for the benefit of the inattentive sculptor, had opened a
discussion on primitive society and autochthonous races. “The vigor of a
nation in its origin was in a way physical, unitary, and crude; then as
aggregations increased, government advanced by a decomposition of the
primitive rule, more or less skilfully managed. For example, in remote
ages national strength lay in theocracy, the priest held both sword and
censer; a little later there were two priests, the pontiff and the king.
To-day our society, the latest word of civilization, has distributed
power according to the number of combinations, and we come to the forces
called business, thought, money, and eloquence. Authority thus divided
is steadily approaching a social dissolution, with interest as its one
opposing barrier. We depend no longer on either religion or physical
force, but upon intellect. Can a book replace the sword? Can discussion
be a substitute for action? That is the question.”
“Intellect has made an end of everything,” cried the Carlist. “Come now!
Absolute freedom has brought about national suicides; their triumph left
them as listless as an English millionaire.”
“Won’t you tell us something new? You have made fun of authority of all
sorts to-day, which is every bit as vulgar as denying the existence of
God. So you have no belief left, and the century is like an old Sultan
worn out by debauchery! Your Byron, in short, sings of crime and its
emotions in a final despair of poetry.”
“Don’t you know,” replied Bianchon, quite drunk by this time, “that
a dose of phosphorus more or less makes the man of genius or the
scoundrel, a clever man or an idiot, a virtuous person or a criminal?”
“Can any one treat of virtue thus?” cried Cursy. “Virtue, the subject of
every drama at the theatre, the denoument of every play, the foundation
of every court of law....”
“Be quiet, you ass. You are an Achilles for virtue, without his heel,”
said Bixiou.
“Some drink!”
“What will you bet that I will drink a bottle of champagne like a flash,
at one pull?”
“What a flash of wit!”
“Drunk as lords,” muttered a young man gravely, trying to give some wine
to his waistcoat.
“Yes, sir; real government is the art of ruling by public opinion.”
“Opinion? That is the most vicious jade of all. According to you
moralists and politicians, the laws you set up are always to go before
those of nature, and opinion before conscience. You are right and wrong
both. Suppose society bestows down pillows on us, that benefit is made
up for by the gout; and justice is likewise tempered by red-tape, and
colds accompany cashmere shawls.”
“Wretch!” Emile broke in upon the misanthrope, “how can you slander
civilization here at table, up to the eyes in wines and exquisite
dishes? Eat away at that roebuck with the gilded horns and feet, and do
not carp at your mother...”
“Is it any fault of mine if Catholicism puts a million deities in a sack
of flour, that Republics will end in a Napoleon, that monarchy dwells
between the assassination of Henry IV. and the trial of Louis XVI., and
Liberalism produces Lafayettes?”
“Didn’t you embrace him in July?”
“No.”
“Then hold your tongue, you sceptic.”
“Sceptics are the most conscientious of men.”
“They have no conscience.”
“What are you saying? They have two apiece at least!”
“So you want to discount heaven, a thoroughly commercial notion. Ancient
religions were but the unchecked development of physical pleasure, but
we have developed a soul and expectations; some advance has been made.”
“What can you expect, my friends, of a century filled with politics
to repletion?” asked Nathan. “What befell _The History of the King of
Bohemia and his Seven Castles_, a most entrancing conception?...”
“I say,” the would-be critic cried down the whole length of the table.
“The phrases might have been drawn at hap-hazard from a hat, ‘twas a
work written ‘down to Charenton.’”
“You are a fool!”
“And you are a rogue!”
“Oh! oh!”
“Ah! ah!”
“They are going to fight.”
“No, they aren’t.”
“You will find me to-morrow, sir.”
“This very moment,” Nathan answered.
“Come, come, you pair of fire-eaters!”
“You are another!” said the prime mover in the quarrel.
“Ah, I can’t stand upright, perhaps?” asked the pugnacious Nathan,
straightening himself up like a stag-beetle about to fly.
He stared stupidly round the table, then, completely exhausted by the
effort, sank back into his chair, and mutely hung his head.
“Would it not have been nice,” the critic said to his neighbor, “to
fight about a book I have neither read nor seen?”
“Emile, look out for your coat; your neighbor is growing pale,” said
Bixiou.
“Kant? Yet another ball flung out for fools to sport with, sir!
Materialism and spiritualism are a fine pair of battledores with which
charlatans in long gowns keep a shuttlecock a-going. Suppose that God
is everywhere, as Spinoza says, or that all things proceed from God, as
says St. Paul... the nincompoops, the door shuts or opens, but isn’t the
movement the same? Does the fowl come from the egg, or the egg from the
fowl?... Just hand me some duck... and there, you have all science.”
“Simpleton!” cried the man of science, “your problem is settled by
fact!”
“What fact?”
“Professors’ chairs were not made for philosophy, but philosophy for the
professors’ chairs. Put on a pair of spectacles and read the budget.”
“Thieves!”
“Nincompoops!”
“Knaves!”
“Gulls!”
“Where but in Paris will you find such a ready and rapid exchange of
thought?” cried Bixiou in a deep, bass voice.
“Bixiou! Act a classical farce for us! Come now.”
“Would you like me to depict the nineteenth century?”
“Silence.”
“Pay attention.”
“Clap a muffle on your trumpets.”
“Shut up, you Turk!”
“Give him some wine, and let that fellow keep quiet.”
“Now, then, Bixiou!”
The artist buttoned his black coat to the collar, put on yellow gloves,
and began to burlesque the _Revue des Deux Mondes_ by acting a squinting
old lady; but the uproar drowned his voice, and no one heard a word of
the satire. Still, if he did not catch the spirit of the century, he
represented the _Revue_ at any rate, for his own intentions were not
very clear to him.
Dessert was served as if by magic. A huge epergne of gilded bronze
from Thomire’s studio overshadowed the table. Tall statuettes, which a
celebrated artist had endued with ideal beauty according to conventional
European notions, sustained and carried pyramids of strawberries, pines,
fresh dates, golden grapes, clear-skinned peaches, oranges brought
from Setubal by steamer, pomegranates, Chinese fruit; in short, all
the surprises of luxury, miracles of confectionery, the most tempting
dainties, and choicest delicacies. The coloring of this epicurean work
of art was enhanced by the splendors of porcelain, by sparkling outlines
of gold, by the chasing of the vases. Poussin’s landscapes, copied
on Sevres ware, were crowned with graceful fringes of moss, green,
translucent, and fragile as ocean weeds.
The revenue of a German prince would not have defrayed the cost of this
arrogant display. Silver and mother-of-pearl, gold and crystal, were
lavished afresh in new forms; but scarcely a vague idea of this almost
Oriental fairyland penetrated eyes now heavy with wine, or crossed the
delirium of intoxication. The fire and fragrance of the wines acted like
potent philters and magical fumes, producing a kind of mirage in the
brain, binding feet, and weighing down hands. The clamor increased.
Words were no longer distinct, glasses flew in pieces, senseless peals
of laughter broke out. Cursy snatched up a horn and struck up a flourish
on it. It acted like a signal given by the devil. Yells, hisses, songs,
cries, and groans went up from the maddened crew. You might have smiled
to see men, light-hearted by nature, grow tragical as Crebillon’s
dramas, and pensive as a sailor in a coach. Hard-headed men blabbed
secrets to the inquisitive, who were long past heeding them. Saturnine
faces were wreathed in smiles worthy of a pirouetting dancer. Claude
Vignon shuffled about like a bear in a cage. Intimate friends began to
fight.
Animal likenesses, so curiously traced by physiologists in human faces,
came out in gestures and behavior. A book lay open for a Bichat if he
had repaired thither fasting and collected. The master of the house,
knowing his condition, did not dare stir, but encouraged his guests’
extravangances with a fixed grimacing smile, meant to be hospitable and
appropriate. His large face, turning from blue and red to a purple shade
terrible to see, partook of the general commotion by movements like the
heaving and pitching of a brig.
“Now, did you murder them?” Emile asked him.
“Capital punishment is going to be abolished, they say, in favor of
the Revolution of July,” answered Taillefer, raising his eyebrows with
drunken sagacity.
“Don’t they rise up before you in dreams at times?” Raphael persisted.
“There’s a statute of limitations,” said the murderer-Croesus.
“And on his tombstone,” Emile began, with a sardonic laugh, “the
stonemason will carve ‘Passer-by, accord a tear, in memory of one that’s
here!’ Oh,” he continued, “I would cheerfully pay a hundred sous to
any mathematician who would prove the existence of hell to me by an
algebraical equation.”
He flung up a coin and cried:
“Heads for the existence of God!”
“Don’t look!” Raphael cried, pouncing upon it. “Who knows? Suspense is
so pleasant.”
“Unluckily,” Emile said, with burlesque melancholy, “I can see no
halting-place between the unbeliever’s arithmetic and the papal _Pater
noster_. Pshaw! let us drink. _Trinq_ was, I believe, the oracular
answer of the _dive bouteille_ and the final conclusion of Pantagruel.”
“We owe our arts and monuments to the _Pater noster_, and our knowledge,
too, perhaps; and a still greater benefit--modern government--whereby a
vast and teeming society is wondrously represented by some five hundred
intellects. It neutralizes opposing forces and gives free play to
_Civilization_, that Titan queen who has succeeded the ancient terrible
figure of the _King_, that sham Providence, reared by man between
himself and heaven. In the face of such achievements, atheism seems like
a barren skeleton. What do you say?”
“I am thinking of the seas of blood shed by Catholicism.” Emile replied,
quite unimpressed. “It has drained our hearts and veins dry to make a
mimic deluge. No matter! Every man who thinks must range himself beneath
the banner of Christ, for He alone has consummated the triumph of spirit
over matter; He alone has revealed to us, like a poet, an intermediate
world that separates us from the Deity.”
“Believest thou?” asked Raphael with an unaccountable drunken smile.
“Very good; we must not commit ourselves; so we will drink the
celebrated toast, _Diis ignotis_!”
And they drained the chalice filled up with science, carbonic acid gas,
perfumes, poetry, and incredulity.
“If the gentlemen will go to the drawing-room, coffee is ready for
them,” said the major-domo.
There was scarcely one of those present whose mind was not floundering
by this time in the delights of chaos, where every spark of intelligence
is quenched, and the body, set free from its tyranny, gives itself up
to the frenetic joys of liberty. Some who had arrived at the apogee of
intoxication were dejected, as they painfully tried to arrest a single
thought which might assure them of their own existence; others, deep in
the heavy morasses of indigestion, denied the possibility of movement.
The noisy and the silent were oddly assorted.
For all that, when new joys were announced to them by the stentorian
tones of the servant, who spoke on his master’s behalf, they all rose,
leaning upon, dragging or carrying one another. But on the threshold
of the room the entire crew paused for a moment, motionless, as if
fascinated. The intemperate pleasures of the banquet seemed to fade away
at this titillating spectacle, prepared by their amphitryon to appeal to
the most sensual of their instincts.
Beneath the shining wax-lights in a golden chandelier, round about a
table inlaid with gilded metal, a group of women, whose eyes shone
like diamonds, suddenly met the stupefied stare of the revelers. Their
toilettes were splendid, but less magnificent than their beauty, which
eclipsed the other marvels of this palace. A light shone from their
eyes, bewitching as those of sirens, more brilliant and ardent than the
blaze that streamed down upon the snowy marble, the delicately carved
surfaces of bronze, and lit up the satin sheen of the tapestry. The
contrasts of their attitudes and the slight movements of their heads,
each differing in character and nature of attraction, set the heart
afire. It was like a thicket, where blossoms mingled with rubies,
sapphires, and coral; a combination of gossamer scarves that flickered
like beacon-lights; of black ribbons about snowy throats; of gorgeous
turbans and demurely enticing apparel. It was a seraglio that appealed
to every eye, and fulfilled every fancy. Each form posed to admiration
was scarcely concealed by the folds of cashmere, and half hidden, half
revealed by transparent gauze and diaphanous silk. The little slender
feet were eloquent, though the fresh red lips uttered no sound.
Demure and fragile-looking girls, pictures of maidenly innocence, with
a semblance of conventional unction about their heads, were there like
apparitions that a breath might dissipate. Aristocratic beauties with
haughty glances, languid, flexible, slender, and complaisant, bent their
heads as though there were royal protectors still in the market. An
English-woman seemed like a spirit of melancholy--some coy, pale,
shadowy form among Ossian’s mists, or a type of remorse flying from
crime. The Parisienne was not wanting in all her beauty that consists
in an indescribable charm; armed with her irresistible weakness, vain of
her costume and her wit, pliant and hard, a heartless, passionless siren
that yet can create factitious treasures of passion and counterfeit
emotion.
Italians shone in the throng, serene and self-possessed in their bliss;
handsome Normans, with splendid figures; women of the south, with black
hair and well-shaped eyes. Lebel might have summoned together all the
fair women of Versailles, who since morning had perfected all their
wiles, and now came like a troupe of Oriental women, bidden by the slave
merchant to be ready to set out at dawn. They stood disconcerted and
confused about the table, huddled together in a murmuring group
like bees in a hive. The combination of timid embarrassment with
coquettishness and a sort of expostulation was the result either of
calculated effect or a spontaneous modesty. Perhaps a sentiment of which
women are never utterly divested prescribed to them the cloak of modesty
to heighten and enhance the charms of wantonness. So the venerable
Taillefer’s designs seemed on the point of collapse, for these unbridled
natures were subdued from the very first by the majesty with which woman
is invested. There was a murmur of admiration, which vibrated like a
soft musical note. Wine had not taken love for traveling companion;
instead of a violent tumult of passions, the guests thus taken by
surprise, in a moment of weakness, gave themselves up to luxurious
raptures of delight.
Artists obeyed the voice of poetry which constrains them, and studied
with pleasure the different delicate tints of these chosen examples of
beauty. Sobered by a thought perhaps due to some emanation from a
bubble of carbonic acid in the champagne, a philosopher shuddered at the
misfortunes which had brought these women, once perhaps worthy of the
truest devotion, to this. Each one doubtless could have unfolded a cruel
tragedy. Infernal tortures followed in the train of most of them, and
they drew after them faithless men, broken vows, and pleasures atoned
for in wretchedness. Polite advances were made by the guests, and
conversations began, as varied in character as the speakers. They broke
up into groups. It might have been a fashionable drawing-room where
ladies and young girls offer after dinner the assistance that coffee,
liqueurs, and sugar afford to diners who are struggling in the toils
of a perverse digestion. But in a little while laughter broke out,
the murmur grew, and voices were raised. The saturnalia, subdued for a
moment, threatened at times to renew itself. The alternations of sound
and silence bore a distant resemblance to a symphony of Beethoven’s.
The two friends, seated on a silken divan, were first approached by
a tall, well-proportioned girl of stately bearing; her features were
irregular, but her face was striking and vehement in expression, and
impressed the mind by the vigor of its contrasts. Her dark hair fell
in luxuriant curls, with which some hand seemed to have played havoc
already, for the locks fell lightly over the splendid shoulders that
thus attracted attention. The long brown curls half hid her queenly
throat, though where the light fell upon it, the delicacy of its fine
outlines was revealed. Her warm and vivid coloring was set off by the
dead white of her complexion. Bold and ardent glances came from under
the long eyelashes; the damp, red, half-open lips challenged a kiss. Her
frame was strong but compliant; with a bust and arms strongly developed,
as in figures drawn by the Caracci, she yet seemed active and elastic,
with a panther’s strength and suppleness, and in the same way the
energetic grace of her figure suggested fierce pleasures.
But though she might romp perhaps and laugh, there was something
terrible in her eyes and her smile. Like a pythoness possessed by the
demon, she inspired awe rather than pleasure. All changes, one after
another, flashed like lightning over every mobile feature of her face.
She might captivate a jaded fancy, but a young man would have feared
her. She was like some colossal statue fallen from the height of a Greek
temple, so grand when seen afar, too roughly hewn to be seen anear.
And yet, in spite of all, her terrible beauty could have stimulated
exhaustion; her voice might charm the deaf; her glances might put life
into the bones of the dead; and therefore Emile was vaguely reminded of
one of Shakespeare’s tragedies--a wonderful maze, in which joy
groans, and there is something wild even about love, and the magic of
forgiveness and the warmth of happiness succeed to cruel storms of rage.
She was a siren that can both kiss and devour; laugh like a devil, or
weep as angels can. She could concentrate in one instant all a woman’s
powers of attraction in a single effort (the sighs of melancholy and
the charms of maiden’s shyness alone excepted), then in a moment rise
in fury like a nation in revolt, and tear herself, her passion, and her
lover, in pieces.
Dressed in red velvet, she trampled under her reckless feet the stray
flowers fallen from other heads, and held out a salver to the two
friends, with careless hands. The white arms stood out in bold relief
against the velvet. Proud of her beauty; proud (who knows?) of her
corruption, she stood like a queen of pleasure, like an incarnation of
enjoyment; the enjoyment that comes of squandering the accumulations of
three generations; that scoffs at its progenitors, and makes merry over
a corpse; that will dissolve pearls and wreck thrones, turn old men into
boys, and make young men prematurely old; enjoyment only possible to
giants weary of their power, tormented by reflection, or for whom strife
has become a plaything.
“What is your name?” asked Raphael.
“Aquilina.”
“Out of _Venice Preserved_!” exclaimed Emile.
“Yes,” she answered. “Just as a pope takes a new name when he is exalted
above all other men, I, too, took another name when I raised myself
above women’s level.”
“Then have you, like your patron saint, a terrible and noble lover, a
conspirator, who would die for you?” cried Emile eagerly--this gleam of
poetry had aroused his interest.
“Once I had,” she answered. “But I had a rival too in La Guillotine. I
have worn something red about me ever since, lest any happiness should
carry me away.”
“Oh, if you are going to get her on to the story of those four lads
of La Rochelle, she will never get to the end of it. That’s enough,
Aquilina. As if every woman could not bewail some lover or other, though
not every one has the luck to lose him on the scaffold, as you have
done. I would a great deal sooner see a lover of mine in a trench at the
back of Clamart than in a rival’s arms.”
All this in the gentlest and most melodious accents, and pronounced by
the prettiest, gentlest, and most innocent-looking little person that
a fairy wand ever drew from an enchanted eggshell. She had come
up noiselessly, and they became aware of a slender, dainty figure,
charmingly timid blue eyes, and white transparent brows. No ingenue
among the naiads, a truant from her river spring, could have been shyer,
whiter, more ingenuous than this young girl, seemingly about sixteen
years old, ignorant of evil and of the storms of life, and fresh from
some church in which she must have prayed the angels to call her to
heaven before the time. Only in Paris are such natures as this to be
found, concealing depths of depravity behind a fair mask, and the most
artificial vices beneath a brow as young and fair as an opening flower.
At first the angelic promise of those soft lineaments misled the
friends. Raphael and Emile took the coffee which she poured into the
cups brought by Aquilina, and began to talk with her. In the eyes of the
two poets she soon became transformed into some sombre allegory, of
I know not what aspect of human life. She opposed to the vigorous
and ardent expression of her commanding acquaintance a revelation
of heartless corruption and voluptuous cruelty. Heedless enough to
perpetrate a crime, hardy enough to feel no misgivings; a pitiless demon
that wrings larger and kinder natures with torments that it is incapable
of knowing, that simpers over a traffic in love, sheds tears over a
victim’s funeral, and beams with joy over the reading of the will.
A poet might have admired the magnificent Aquilina; but the winning
Euphrasia must be repulsive to every one--the first was the soul of sin;
the second, sin without a soul in it.
“I should dearly like to know,” Emile remarked to this pleasing being,
“if you ever reflect upon your future?”
“My future!” she answered with a laugh. “What do you mean by my future?
Why should I think about something that does not exist as yet? I never
look before or behind. Isn’t one day at a time more than I can concern
myself with as it is? And besides, the future, as we know, means the
hospital.”
“How can you forsee a future in the hospital, and make no effort to
avert it?”
“What is there so alarming about the hospital?” asked the terrific
Aquilina. “When we are neither wives nor mothers, when old age draws
black stockings over our limbs, sets wrinkles on our brows, withers up
the woman in us, and darkens the light in our lover’s eyes, what could
we need when that comes to pass? You would look on us then as mere
human clay; we with our habiliments shall be for you like so much
mud--worthless, lifeless, crumbling to pieces, going about with the
rustle of dead leaves. Rags or the daintiest finery will be as one to us
then; the ambergris of the boudoir will breathe an odor of death and dry
bones; and suppose there is a heart there in that mud, not one of you
but would make mock of it, not so much as a memory will you spare to
us. Is not our existence precisely the same whether we live in a fine
mansion with lap-dogs to tend, or sort rags in a workhouse? Does it make
much difference whether we shall hide our gray heads beneath lace or a
handkerchief striped with blue and red; whether we sweep a crossing with
a birch broom, or the steps of the Tuileries with satins; whether we sit
beside a gilded hearth, or cower over the ashes in a red earthen pot;
whether we go to the Opera or look on in the Place de Greve?”
“_Aquilina mia_, you have never shown more sense than in this depressing
fit of yours,” Euphrasia remarked. “Yes, cashmere, _point d’Alencon_,
perfumes, gold, silks, luxury, everything that sparkles, everything
pleasant, belongs to youth alone. Time alone may show us our folly, but
good fortune will acquit us. You are laughing at me,” she went on, with
a malicious glance at the friends; “but am I not right? I would sooner
die of pleasure than of illness. I am not afflicted with a mania for
perpetuity, nor have I a great veneration for human nature, such as God
has made it. Give me millions, and I would squander them; I should not
keep one centime for the year to come. Live to be charming and have
power, that is the decree of my every heartbeat. Society sanctions my
life; does it not pay for my extravagances? Why does Providence pay me
every morning my income, which I spend every evening? Why are hospitals
built for us? And Providence did not put good and evil on either hand
for us to select what tires and pains us. I should be very foolish if I
did not amuse myself.”
“And how about others?” asked Emile.
“Others? Oh, well, they must manage for themselves. I prefer laughing
at their woes to weeping over my own. I defy any man to give me the
slightest uneasiness.”
“What have you suffered to make you think like this?” asked Raphael.
“I myself have been forsaken for an inheritance,” she said, striking an
attitude that displayed all her charms; “and yet I had worked night and
day to keep my lover! I am not to be gulled by any smile or vow, and I
have set myself to make one long entertainment of my life.”
“But does not happiness come from the soul within?” cried Raphael.
“It may be so,” Aquilina answered; “but is it nothing to be conscious of
admiration and flattery; to triumph over other women, even over the most
virtuous, humiliating them before our beauty and our splendor? Not only
so; one day of our life is worth ten years of a bourgeoise existence,
and so it is all summed up.”
“Is not a woman hateful without virtue?” Emile said to Raphael.
Euphrasia’s glance was like a viper’s, as she said, with an irony in her
voice that cannot be rendered:
“Virtue! we leave that to deformity and to ugly women. What would the
poor things be without it?”
“Hush, be quiet,” Emile broke in. “Don’t talk about something you have
never known.”
“That I have never known!” Euphrasia answered. “You give yourself for
life to some person you abominate; you must bring up children who will
neglect you, who wound your very heart, and you must say, ‘Thank you!’
for it; and these are the virtues you prescribe to woman. And that is
not enough. By way of requiting her self-denial, you must come and
add to her sorrows by trying to lead her astray; and though you are
rebuffed, she is compromised. A nice life! How far better to keep one’s
freedom, to follow one’s inclinations in love, and die young!”
“Have you no fear of the price to be paid some day for all this?”
“Even then,” she said, “instead of mingling pleasures and troubles, my
life will consist of two separate parts--a youth of happiness is secure,
and there may come a hazy, uncertain old age, during which I can suffer
at my leisure.”
“She has never loved,” came in the deep tones of Aquilina’s voice. “She
never went a hundred leagues to drink in one look and a denial with
untold raptures. She has not hung her own life on a thread, nor tried
to stab more than one man to save her sovereign lord, her king, her
divinity.... Love, for her, meant a fascinating colonel.”
“Here she is with her La Rochelle,” Euphrasia made answer. “Love comes
like the wind, no one knows whence. And, for that matter, if one of
those brutes had once fallen in love with you, you would hold sensible
men in horror.”
“Brutes are put out of the question by the Code,” said the tall,
sarcastic Aquilina.
“I thought you had more kindness for the army,” laughed Euphrasia.
“How happy they are in their power of dethroning their reason in this
way,” Raphael exclaimed.
“Happy?” asked Aquilina, with dreadful look, and a smile full of pity
and terror. “Ah, you do not know what it is to be condemned to a life of
pleasure, with your dead hidden in your heart....”
A moment’s consideration of the rooms was like a foretaste of Milton’s
Pandemonium. The faces of those still capable of drinking wore a hideous
blue tint, from burning draughts of punch. Mad dances were kept up with
wild energy; excited laughter and outcries broke out like the explosion
of fireworks. The boudoir and a small adjoining room were strewn like
a battlefield with the insensible and incapable. Wine, pleasure,
and dispute had heated the atmosphere. Wine and love, delirium and
unconsciousness possessed them, and were written upon all faces, upon
the furniture; were expressed by the surrounding disorder, and brought
light films over the vision of those assembled, so that the air seemed
full of intoxicating vapor. A glittering dust arose, as in the luminous
paths made by a ray of sunlight, the most bizarre forms flitted through
it, grotesque struggles were seen athwart it. Groups of interlaced
figures blended with the white marbles, the noble masterpieces of
sculpture that adorned the rooms.
Though the two friends yet preserved a sort of fallacious clearness
in their ideas and voices, a feeble appearance and faint thrill of
animation, it was yet almost impossible to distinguish what was real
among the fantastic absurdities before them, or what foundation there
was for the impossible pictures that passed unceasingly before their
weary eyes. The strangest phenomena of dreams beset them, the lowering
heavens, the fervid sweetness caught by faces in our visions, and
unheard-of agility under a load of chains,--all these so vividly, that
they took the pranks of the orgy about them for the freaks of some
nightmare in which all movement is silent, and cries never reach
the ear. The valet de chambre succeeded just then, after some little
difficulty, in drawing his master into the ante-chamber to whisper to
him:
“The neighbors are all at their windows, complaining of the racket,
sir.”
“If noise alarms them, why don’t they lay down straw before their
doors?” was Taillefer’s rejoinder.
Raphael’s sudden burst of laughter was so unseasonable and abrupt, that
his friend demanded the reason of his unseemly hilarity.
“You will hardly understand me,” he replied. “In the first place, I must
admit that you stopped me on the Quai Voltaire just as I was about to
throw myself into the Seine, and you would like to know, no doubt, my
motives for dying. And when I proceed to tell you that by an almost
miraculous chance the most poetic memorials of the material world had
but just then been summed up for me as a symbolical interpretation of
human wisdom; whilst at this minute the remains of all the intellectual
treasures ravaged by us at table are comprised in these two women, the
living and authentic types of folly, would you be any the wiser? Our
profound apathy towards men and things supplied the half-tones in a
crudely contrasted picture of two theories of life so diametrically
opposed. If you were not drunk, you might perhaps catch a gleam of
philosophy in this.”
“And if you had not both feet on that fascinating Aquilina, whose
heavy breathing suggests an analogy with the sounds of a storm about
to burst,” replied Emile, absently engaged in the harmless amusement of
winding and unwinding Euphrasia’s hair, “you would be ashamed of your
inebriated garrulity. Both your systems can be packed in a phrase, and
reduced to a single idea. The mere routine of living brings a stupid
kind of wisdom with it, by blunting our intelligence with work; and on
the other hand, a life passed in the limbo of the abstract or in the
abysses of the moral world, produces a sort of wisdom run mad. The
conditions may be summed up in brief; we may extinguish emotion, and so
live to old age, or we may choose to die young as martyrs to contending
passions. And yet this decree is at variance with the temperaments with
which we were endowed by the bitter jester who modeled all creatures.”
“Idiot!” Raphael burst in. “Go on epitomizing yourself after that
fashion, and you will fill volumes. If I attempted to formulate those
two ideas clearly, I might as well say that man is corrupted by the
exercise of his wits, and purified by ignorance. You are calling the
whole fabric of society to account. But whether we live with the wise
or perish with the fool, isn’t the result the same sooner or later? And
have not the prime constituents of the quintessence of both systems been
before expressed in a couple of words--_Carymary_, _Carymara_.”
“You make me doubt the existence of a God, for your stupidity is greater
than His power,” said Emile. “Our beloved Rabelais summed it all up in
a shorter word than your ‘_Carymary_, _Carymara_’; from his _Peut-etre_
Montaigne derived his own _Que sais-je_? After all, this last word of
moral science is scarcely more than the cry of Pyrrhus set betwixt good
and evil, or Buridan’s ass between the two measures of oats. But let
this everlasting question alone, resolved to-day by a ‘Yes’ and a ‘No.’
What experience did you look to find by a jump into the Seine? Were you
jealous of the hydraulic machine on the Pont Notre Dame?”
“Ah, if you but knew my history!”
“Pooh,” said Emile; “I did not think you could be so commonplace; that
remark is hackneyed. Don’t you know that every one of us claims to have
suffered as no other ever did?”
“Ah!” Raphael sighed.
“What a mountebank art thou with thy ‘Ah’! Look here, now. Does some
disease of the mind or body, by contracting your muscles, bring back
of a morning the wild horses that tear you in pieces at night, as with
Damiens once upon a time? Were you driven to sup off your own dog in a
garret, uncooked and without salt? Have your children ever cried, ‘I am
hungry’? Have you sold your mistress’ hair to hazard the money at play?
Have you ever drawn a sham bill of exchange on a fictitious uncle at a
sham address, and feared lest you should not be in time to take it up?
Come now, I am attending! If you were going to drown yourself for some
woman, or by way of a protest, or out of sheer dulness, I disown you.
Make your confession, and no lies! I don’t at all want a historical
memoir. And, above all things, be as concise as your clouded intellect
permits; I am as critical as a professor, and as sleepy as a woman at
her vespers.”
“You silly fool!” said Raphael. “When has not suffering been keener for
a more susceptible nature? Some day when science has attained to a pitch
that enables us to study the natural history of hearts, when they
are named and classified in genera, sub-genera, and families; into
crustaceae, fossils, saurians, infusoria, or whatever it is,--then, my
dear fellow, it will be ascertained that there are natures as tender
and fragile as flowers, that are broken by the slight bruises that some
stony hearts do not even feel----”
“For pity’s sake, spare me thy exordium,” said Emile, as, half
plaintive, half amused, he took Raphael’s hand.