‘Ma-ame Erstin!’ a gloomy gendarme with enormous moustaches shouted at
Calais at the barrier through which travellers who have only just landed
from the Dover steamer and been driven by the Customs House and other
overseers into the stone-built barn have to pass one by one into France.
The travellers went up, the gendarme served out the passports, the police
commissioner questioned with his eyes and, where necessary, with his
tongue, and the traveller, approved and found innocuous to the Empire,
vanished behind the barrier.
This time no traveller moved forward at the gendarme’s shout.
‘Ma-ame Ogly Erstin!’ the gendarme shouted, raising his voice and waving
a passport.
No one answered.
‘Why, is there no one of the name?’ shouted the gendarme, and looking at
the passport, added: ‘Mam’zelle Ogly Erstin.’
Only then a little girl of ten, namely my daughter Olga, conjectured
that the guardian of order was calling her with this ferocity. ‘_Avancez
donc, prenez vos papiers!_’ the gendarme commanded savagely. Olga took
her passport, and huddling up to Malwide von Meysenbug, asked her in a
whisper: ‘_Est-ce que c’est l’Empereur?_’
That happened to her in 1860, but something worse happened to me a
year later, and not at the barrier at Calais, which no longer exists,
but everywhere: in a railway carriage, in the street, in Paris, in the
provinces, in my home, in my dreams, in waking life, everywhere I saw
before me the Emperor, with long moustaches waxed to a thread, with
eyes that did not see and a mouth that did not speak. Not only the
gendarmes, who are to a certain extent emperors from their position, but
the soldiers, the shop-boys, the waiters, and especially the conductors
on trains and omnibuses, looked to me like Napoleons. It was only here
in Paris in 1861, before the Hôtel de Ville, before which I had stood
in respect in 1847, before Notre Dame, the Champs-Élysées and the
Boulevards, that I grasped the meaning of the psalm in which King David
with flattering despair complains to Jehovah that he cannot get away
from Him, cannot escape Him: ‘I go into the water,’ he says, ‘thou art
there; into the earth, thou art there; into the sky, and of course thou
art there also.’ If I went to dine at the Maison d’Or, Napoleon in one of
his incarnations was dining the other side of the table and asking for
truffles _à la serviette_; if I went to the theatre, one would be sitting
in the same row and one would walk on to the stage. If I ran away from
him out of town, he followed on my heels beyond the Bois de Boulogne in a
closely buttoned coat and moustaches with stiffly waxed points. Where was
he not? At the ball in Mabille? At mass in the Madeleine? He was sure to
be at both.
_La révolution s’est faite homme._ ‘The revolution is embodied in a man,’
was one of the favourite phrases of the doctrinaire jargon of the days
of Thiers and the liberal historians of the Louis-Philippe period; but
this is rather more cunning: the revolution and the reaction, order and
disorder, the van and the rear, are incarnate in one man, and that man in
his turn is reincarnated in the whole administration, from the ministers
to the rural constables, from the senators to the village mayors, is
scattered in the infantry and afloat in the navy.
This man is not a prophet, not a poet, not a conqueror, not an
eccentricity, not a genius, not a man of talent; but a cold, silent,
surly, plain, prudent, persistent, prosaic ‘middle-aged gentleman,
neither fat nor thin’[69]—_le bourgeois_ of bourgeois France, _l’homme
du destin, le neveu du grand homme_, the plebeian. He obliterates, he
concentrates in himself, all the prominent aspects of the national
character, all the tendencies of the people, as the topmost peak of a
mountain or a pyramid ends in nothing.
In 1849 and in 1850 I had not grasped the significance of Napoleon
III. Carried away by democratic rhetoric, I did not appreciate him.
The year 1861 was one of the very best for the Empire, everything was
going well. Everything had reached equilibrium, was reconciled with and
submissive to the new _régime_. There was precisely enough opposition
and daring thought to give shadow and some spiciness to the mixture.
Laboulaye[70] very cleverly praised New York to the disadvantage of
Paris, Prévost-Paradol[71] Austria to the disadvantage of France.
Anonymous hints were made with regard to the Mirès case.[72] People were
quietly allowed to abuse the Pope and show some slight sympathy for the
Polish movement. There were circles who met together to display their
_frondeur_ spirit, as we used to meet in the ’forties in Moscow at the
house of some old friend. They even had their dissatisfied celebrities,
rather after the fashion of our Yermolov, but turned civilian, such
as Guizot. All the rest had been beaten flat by the storm. And no one
complained, they even liked the repose of it, as people like the first
week of Lent with its horse-radish and cabbage after the seven days of
feasting and drinking in Carnival. Those who did not like lenten fare
were hard to find; they had vanished for shorter or longer periods, and
would come back with taste corrected from Lambessa or from the Mazas
prison. The police, _la grande police_ which had replaced _la grande
armée_, was everywhere at all times. Literary style was all at a dead
level—wretched boatmen floating calmly in wretched boats over the once
stormy sea. The inanity of the plays produced on every stage induced
heavy sleep at night, which was maintained in the morning by the futility
of the newspapers. Journalism in the former sense of the word did not
exist. The leading papers stood not for views but for commercial firms.
After the leading articles of London papers, written in condensed,
sensible language, with ‘nerve,’ as the French say, and ‘muscles,’ one
simply cannot read the Paris _premiers_. Rhetorical flourishes, faded
and frayed, and the same old, high-flown phrases, made more than absurd,
disgusting, through their obvious contrast with facts, took the place of
subject-matter. Oppressed nationalities were continually being invited
as before to rely upon France; she still remained ‘at the head of the
great movement,’ and was still bringing the world-revolution freedom
and the great principles of 1789. Opposition took its stand under the
banner of Buonapartism. These are nuances of precisely the same colour,
and they might all be indicated as sailors indicate the intermediate
winds, N.N.W., N.W.N., N.W.W., W.N.W.... Buonapartism desperate,
furious, moderate; Buonapartism monarchical; Buonapartism republican,
democratic, socialistic; Buonapartism peaceful, military, revolutionary,
conservative; and finally, Buonapartism of the Palais Royal and the
Tuileries.... Late in the evening certain gentlemen run to the newspaper
offices to set the weather-cock of the paper straight, if it should have
turned a little too far to the east or west of the north. They check the
time by the chronometer of the Prefecture, erase and add, and hasten to
bring out the next edition.
Reading in a café an evening paper which stated that Mirès’ lawyer had
refused to disclose how certain sums had been employed, saying that
‘very highly placed persons’ were involved, I said to a man I knew: ‘But
how is it the prosecutor does not compel him to tell, and how is it the
newspapers do not insist upon it?’ My acquaintance gave a tug to my coat,
cast a glance round, and signalled with his eyes, his hands and his
cane. I had not lived in Petersburg for nothing. I understood him, and
began discussing absinthe and seltzer-water.
As I came out of the café, I saw a minute man running towards me with
minute arms outspread to embrace me. As he approached I recognised
Darimon. ‘How happy you must be,’ said the deputy of the Left, ‘to be
back in Paris! _Ah, je m’imagine._’
‘Not particularly so!’
Darimon was petrified.
‘Well, how are Madame Darimon and your little son, who must be by now
your big son, especially if he does not take after his father?’
‘_Toujours le même, ha-ha-ha, très bien_’—and we parted.
I felt oppressed in Paris, and I only breathed freely when a month later,
through the rain and fog, I saw again the dirty white chalky cliffs of
England. Everything that pinched like narrow shoes under Louis-Philippe
pinched now like fetters on the legs. I had not seen the intermediate
processes by which the new _régime_ had been built up and made secure,
but found it after ten years absolutely complete and established....
Moreover, I did not recognise Paris; its rebuilt streets, unfinished
palaces, and, worst of all, the people I met were strange to me. This was
not the Paris I had loved and hated, not the city I had longed to reach
from childhood, not the city I had left with a curse on my lips. This was
a Paris that had lost its individuality, had grown indifferent, and was
no longer boiling. A strong hand oppressed it everywhere and was at every
minute ready to tug at the reins—but that was not necessary; Paris had
accepted the Second Empire _tout de bon_, it barely retained the external
habits of older days. The ‘discontented’ had nothing serious and strong
to set up against the Empire. The memories of the republicans of Tacitus
and the vague ideas of the Socialists could not shake the throne of the
Caesars. The _police de surveillance_ did not combat these ‘fantasies’
seriously, they resented them not as a danger, but as disorderly and
improper. They were more annoyed at the ‘memories’ than at the ‘hopes,’
they kept a stricter hand over the Orleanists. From time to time the
autocratic police unexpectedly dealt some unjust and brutal blow as a
menacing reminder of its power; it purposely aroused terror over two
quarters of the city for two months, and then retreated again into the
crevices of the Prefecture and the corridors of the Government Offices.
In reality, all was still. The two most violent protests were not
French. The attempts of Pianori and Orsini were the revenge of Italy,
the revenge of Rome. The Orsini affair, which terrified Napoleon, was
taken as a sufficient excuse for dealing the last blow, the _coup de
grâce_. It succeeded. A country which puts up with Espinasse’s[73] laws
concerning suspected persons has given its pledge. It was necessary to
frighten people, to show that the police would not stick at anything; it
was necessary to destroy all conceptions of human rights and dignity,
to crush men’s minds by injustice, to accustom them to it, and to prove
the power of the authorities by it. When he cleared Paris of suspected
persons, Espinasse ordered the prefects to discover a conspiracy in
_each_ department, to involve in it not less than ten persons known to be
hostile to the Empire, to arrest them and to put them at the disposition
of the Minister. The Minister had the right to send them to Cayenne or
Lambessa without legal proceedings, without rendering account or being
held responsible. The man so exiled was lost, there could be no defence,
no protest; he was not tried, and his only hope lay in the special mercy
of the Emperor. ‘I received these orders,’ the prefect N. said to our
poet Fyodor Tyutchev[74]—‘what was I to do? I racked my brains.... The
position was difficult and unpleasant. At last a happy thought struck me
how to get out of it. I sent for the commissaire of police and said to
him: “Can you at very short notice find me a dozen desperate rascals,
unconvicted thieves and so on?” The commissaire said that nothing would
be easier. “Well then, make up a list; we will arrest them to-night and
send them to the Minister as revolutionaries.”’
‘Well, what then?’ asked Tyutchev.
‘We collected them, and the Minister sent them off to Cayenne, and the
whole department was delighted and thanked me for getting rid of the
rascals so easily,’ added the worthy prefect, laughing.
The Government tired of the methods of terrorism and violence before
the people and public opinion did. Times of peace, of tranquillity, _de
la sécurité_, followed very shortly. Little by little the lines of care
were smoothed out of the faces of the police; the insolent, provocative
glance of the spy, the ferocious air of the _sergeant de ville_ softened;
the Emperor dreamed of various mild and clever forms of freedom and
decentralisation. Ministers of incorruptible zeal restrained his liberal
ardour.
From 1861 onwards the doors were open, and I passed several times through
Paris. At first I was in haste to leave it; afterwards that feeling
too died away, and I grew accustomed to a new Paris. I was less angry
with it. It was a different town, huge, unfamiliar. Learning and the
intellectual movement, thrust back beyond the Seine, were not to be seen,
political life was not to be heard. Napoleon had granted his ‘broadened
liberties’; the toothless opposition lifted its bald head and intoned
the old phraseology of the ’forties; the working classes put no faith
in them, kept silent and feebly tried co-operation and association.
Paris was becoming more and more the general European market, in which
everything in the world was crowding and jostling: merchants, singers,
bankers, diplomats, aristocrats, artists of all countries, and masses of
Germans unseen in old days. Taste, tone, expressions—all were changed. A
glittering, oppressive luxury, metallic, golden, costly, succeeded the
aesthetic feeling of old days: in dress and in trifles it was not choice
nor taste that was the boast, but costliness, the power to waste, and
people talked incessantly of profit, of gambling, of posts, of the funds.
The _lorettes_ set the tone for the ladies. The education of women sank
to the level of Italy in the past.
_L’Empire, l’Empire_ ... that is the evil, that is the trouble.... No,
the cause lies deeper. ‘_Sire, vous avez un cancer rentré_,’ said the
physician. ‘_Un Waterloo rentré_,’ answered Napoleon. And here we have
two or three revolutions _rentrées, avortées_, stillborn.
Did France not bring them to the birth because she had too hurriedly,
too prematurely conceived them, and wanted to be rid of her interesting
position by a Caesarean operation? Was it because she had spirit enough
for cutting off heads, but not enough for stamping out ideas? Was it
because the Revolution was turned into an army and the rights of man were
sprinkled with holy water? Was it because the masses were plunged in
darkness, and the Revolution was made not for the peasants?
3