“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.
Works of Honore De Balzac Page 1101