On a fine evening in the month of September, 1836, a man about thirty
years of age was leaning on the parapet of that quay from which
a spectator can look up the Seine from the Jardin des Plantes to
Notre-Dame, and down, along the vast perspective of the river, to the
Louvre. There is not another point of view to compare with it in the
capital of ideas. We feel ourselves on the quarter-deck, as it were,
of a gigantic vessel. We dream of Paris from the days of the Romans
to those of the Franks, from the Normans to the Burgundians, the
Middle-Ages, the Valois, Henri IV., Louis XIV., Napoleon, and
Louis-Philippe. Vestiges are before us of all those sovereignties,
in monuments that recall their memory. The cupola of Sainte-Genevieve
towers above the Latin quarter. Behind us rises the noble apsis of the
cathedral. The Hotel de Ville tells of revolutions; the Hotel-Dieu, of
the miseries of Paris. After gazing at the splendors of the Louvre we
can, by taking two steps, look down upon the rags and tatters of that
ignoble nest of houses huddling between the quai de la Tournelle and the
Hotel-Dieu,--a foul spot, which a modern municipality is endeavoring at
the present moment to remove.
In 1836 this marvellous scene presented still another lesson to the eye:
between the Parisian leaning on the parapet and the cathedral lay the
“Terrain” (such was the ancient name of this barren spot), still strewn
with the ruins of the Archiepiscopal Palace. When we contemplate from
that quay so many commemorating scenes, when the soul has grasped the
past as it does the present of this city of Paris, then indeed Religion
seems to have alighted there as if to spread her hands above the sorrows
of both banks and extend her arms from the faubourg Saint-Antoine to
the faubourg Saint-Marceau. Let us hope that this sublime unity may be
completed by the erection of an episcopal palace of the Gothic order;
which shall replace the formless buildings now standing between the
“Terrain,” the rue d’Arcole, the cathedral, and the quai de la Cite.
This spot, the heart of ancient Paris, is the loneliest and most
melancholy of regions. The waters of the Seine break there noisily, the
cathedral casts its shadows at the setting of the sun. We can easily
believe that serious thoughts must have filled the mind of a man
afflicted with a moral malady as he leaned upon that parapet. Attracted
perhaps by the harmony between his thoughts and those to which these
diverse scenes gave birth, he rested his hands upon the coping and gave
way to a double contemplation,--of Paris, and of himself! The shadows
deepened, the lights shone out afar, but still he did not move, carried
along as he was on the current of a meditation, such as comes to many of
us, big with the future and rendered solemn by the past.
After a while he heard two persons coming towards him, whose voices had
caught his attention on the bridge which joins the Ile de la Cite with
the quai de la Tournelle. These persons no doubt thought themselves
alone, and therefore spoke louder than they would have done in more
frequented places. The voices betrayed a discussion which apparently,
from the few words that reached the ear of the involuntary listener,
related to a loan of money. Just as the pair approached the quay, one
of them, dressed like a working man, left the other with a despairing
gesture. The other stopped and called after him, saying:--
“You have not a sou to pay your way across the bridge. Take this,” he
added, giving the man a piece of money; “and remember, my friend,
that God Himself is speaking to us when a good thought comes into our
hearts.”
This last remark made the dreamer at the parapet quiver. The man who
made it little knew that, to use a proverbial expression, he was killing
two birds with one stone, addressing two miseries,--a working life
brought to despair, a suffering soul without a compass, the victim
of what Panurge’s sheep call progress, and what, in France, is called
equality. The words, simple in themselves, became sublime from the tone
of him who said them, in a voice that possesses a spell. Are there
not, in fact, some calm and tender voices that produce upon us the same
effect as a far horizon outlook?
By his dress the dreamer knew him to be a priest, and he saw by the last
gleams of the fading twilight a white, august, worn face. The sight of a
priest issuing from the beautiful cathedral of Saint-Etienne in Vienna,
bearing the Extreme Unction to a dying person, determined the celebrated
tragic author Werner to become a Catholic. Almost the same effect was
produced upon the dreamer when he looked upon the man who had, all
unknowing, given him comfort; on the threatening horizon of his future
he saw a luminous space where shone the blue of ether, and he followed
that light as the shepherds of the Gospel followed the voices that cried
to them: “Christ, the Lord, is born this day.”
The man who had said the beneficent words passed on by the wall of the
cathedral, taking, as a result of chance, which often leads to great
results, the direction of the street from which the dreamer came, and to
which he was now returning, led by the faults of his life.
This dreamer was named Godefroid. Whoever reads this history will
understand the reasons which lead the writer to use the Christian names
only of some who are mentioned in it. The motives which led Godefroid,
who lived in the quarter of the Chaussee-d’Antin, to the neighborhood of
Notre-Dame at such an hour were as follows:--
The son of a retail shopkeeper, whose economy enabled him to lay by a
sort of fortune, he was the sole object of ambition to his father and
mother, who dreamed of seeing him a notary in Paris. For this reason,
at the age of seven, he was sent to an institution, that of the Abbe
Liautard, to be thrown among children of distinguished families who,
during the Empire, chose this school for the education of their sons
in preference to the lyceums, where religion was too much overlooked.
Social inequalities were not noticeable among schoolmates; but in 1821,
his studies being ended, Godefroid, who was then with a notary, became
aware of the distance that separated him from those with whom he had
hitherto lived on familiar terms.
Obliged to go through the law school, he there found himself among a
crowd of the sons of the bourgeoisie, who, without fortunes to inherit
or hereditary distinctions, could look only to their own personal
merits or to persistent toil. The hopes that his father and mother, then
retired from business, placed upon him stimulated the youth’s vanity
without exciting his pride. His parents lived simply, like the thrifty
Dutch, spending only one fourth of an income of twelve thousand francs.
They intended their savings, together with half their capital, for the
purchase of a notary’s practice for their son. Subjected to the rule
of this domestic economy, Godefroid found his immediate state so
disproportioned to the visions of himself and his parents, that he
grew discouraged. In some feeble natures discouragement turns to envy;
others, in whom necessity, will, reflection, stand in place of talent,
march straight and resolutely in the path traced out for bourgeois
ambitions. Godefroid, on the contrary, revolted, wished to shine, tried
several brilliant ways, and blinded his eyes. He endeavored to succeed;
but all his efforts ended in proving the fact of his own impotence.
Admitting at last the inequality that existed between his desires
and his capacities, he began to hate all social supremacies, became
a Liberal, and attempted to reach celebrity by writing a book; but he
learned, to his cost, to regard talent as he did nobility. Having tried
the law, the notariat, and literature, without distinguishing himself in
any way, his mind now turned to the magistracy.
About this time his father died. His mother, who contented herself
in her old age with two thousand francs a year, gave the rest of the
fortune to Godefroid. Thus possessed, at the age of twenty-five, of ten
thousand francs a year, he felt himself rich; and he was so, relatively
to the past. Until then his life had been spent on acts without will, on
wishes that were impotent; now, to advance with the age, to act, to play
a part, he resolved to enter some career or find some connection that
should further his fortunes. He first thought of journalism, which
always opens its arms to any capital that may come in its way. To be the
owner of a newspaper is to become a personage at once; such a man works
intellect, and has all the gratifications of it and none of the labor.
Nothing is more tempting to inferior minds than to be able to rise in
this way on the talents of others. Paris has seen two or three parvenus
of this kind,--men whose success is a disgrace, both to the epoch and to
those who have lent them their shoulders.
In this sphere Godefroid was soon outdone by the brutal Machiavellianism
of some, or by the lavish prodigality of others; by the fortunes of
ambitious capitalists, or by the wit and shrewdness of editors. Meantime
he was drawn into all the dissipations that arise from literary
or political life, and he yielded to the temptations incurred by
journalists behind the scenes. He soon found himself in bad company; but
this experience taught him that his appearance was insignificant, that
he had one shoulder higher than the other, without the inequality being
redeemed by either malignancy or kindness of nature. Such were the
truths these artists made him feel.
Small, ill-made, without superiority of mind or settled purpose, what
chance was there for a man like that in an age when success in any
career demands that the highest qualities of the mind be furthered by
luck, or by tenacity of will which commands luck.
The revolution of 1830 stanched Godefroid’s wounds. He had the courage
of hope, which is equal to that of despair. He obtained an appointment,
like other obscure journalists, to a government situation in the
provinces, where his liberal ideas, conflicting with the necessities
of the new power, made him a troublesome instrument. Bitten with
liberalism, he did not know, as cleverer men did, how to steer a course.
Obedience to ministers he regarded as sacrificing his opinions. Besides,
the government seemed to him to be disobeying the laws of its own
origin. Godefroid declared for progress, where the object of the
government was to maintain the _statu quo_. He returned to Paris almost
poor, but faithful still to the doctrines of the Opposition.
Alarmed by the excesses of the press, more alarmed still by the
attempted outrages of the republican party, he sought in retirement
from the world the only life suitable for a being whose faculties were
incomplete, and without sufficient force to bear up against the rough
jostling of political life, the struggles and sufferings of which confer
no credit,--a being, too, who was wearied with his many miscarriages;
without friends, for friendship demands either striking merits or
striking defects, and yet possessing a sensibility of soul more dreamy
than profound. Surely a retired life was the course left for a young man
whom pleasure had more than once misled,--whose heart was already aged
by contact with a world as restless as it was disappointing.
His mother, who was dying in the peaceful village of Auteuil, recalled
her son to live with her, partly to have him near her, and partly to
put him in the way of finding an equable, tranquil happiness which might
satisfy a soul like his. She had ended by judging Godefroid, finding him
at twenty-eight with two-thirds of his fortune gone, his desires dulled,
his pretended capacities extinct, his activity dead, his ambition
humbled, and his hatred against all that reached legitimate success
increased by his own shortcomings.
She tried to marry him to an excellent young girl, the only daughter of
a retired merchant,--a woman well fitted to play the part of guardian
to the sickened soul of her son. But the father had the business
spirit which never abandons an old merchant, especially in matrimonial
negotiations, and after a year of attentions and neighborly intercourse,
Godefroid was not accepted. In the first place, his former career seemed
to these worthy people profoundly immoral; then, during this very year,
he had made still further inroads into his capital, as much to dazzle
the parents as to please the daughter. This vanity, excusable as it
was, caused his final rejection by the family, who held dissipation
of property in holy horror, and who now discovered that in six years
Godefroid had spent or lost a hundred and fifty thousand francs of his
capital.
This blow struck the young man’s already wounded heart the more deeply
because the girl herself had no personal beauty. But, guided by his
mother in judging her character, he had ended by recognizing in the
woman he sought the great value of an earnest soul, and the vast
advantages of a sound mind. He had grown accustomed to the face; he had
studied the countenance; he loved the voice, the manners, the glance of
that young girl. Having cast on this attachment the last stake of his
life, the disappointment he endured was the bitterest of all. His mother
died, and he found himself, he who had always desired luxury, with five
thousand francs a year for his whole fortune, and with the certainty
that never in his future life could he repair any loss whatsoever;
for he felt himself incapable of the effort expressed in that terrible
injunction, to _make his way_.
Weak, impatient grief cannot easily be shaken off. During his mourning,
Godefroid tried the various chances and distractions of Paris; he dined
at table-d’hotes; he made acquaintances heedlessly; he sought society,
with no result but that of increasing his expenditures. Walking along
the boulevards, he often suffered deeply at the sight of a mother
walking with a marriageable daughter,--a sight which caused him as
painful an emotion as he formerly felt when a young man passed him
riding to the Bois, or driving in an elegant equipage. The sense of
his impotence told him that he could never hope for the best of even
secondary positions, nor for any easily won career; and he had heart
enough to feel constantly wounded, mind enough to make in his own breast
the bitterest of elegies.
Unfitted to struggle against circumstances, having an inward
consciousness of superior faculties without the will that could put them
in action, feeling himself incomplete, without force to undertake any
great thing, without resistance against the tastes derived from his
earlier life, his education, and his indolence, he was the victim of
three maladies, any one of which would be enough to sicken of life a
young man long alienated from religious faith.
Thus it was that Godefroid presented, even to the eye, the face that we
meet so often in Paris that it might be called the type of the Parisian;
in it we may see ambitions deceived or dead, inward wretchedness, hatred
sleeping in the indolence of a life passed in watching the daily and
external life of Paris, apathy which seeks stimulation, lament without
talent, a mimicry of strength, the venom of past disappointments
which excites to cynicism, and spits upon all that enlarges and grows,
misconceives all necessary authority, rejoicing in its embarrassments,
and will not hold to any social form. This Parisian malady is to the
active and permanent impulse towards conspiracy in persons of energy
what the sapwood is to the sap of the trees; it preserves it, feeds it,
and conceals it.