by Stendhal
There is no income of a hundred thousand crowns a year and no blue ribbon which could sustain a contest against such a code of salon etiquette.
The slightest live idea appeared a crudity. In spite of the prevailing good form, perfect politeness, and desire to please, ennui was visible in every face. The young people who came to pay their calls were frightened of speaking of anything which might make them suspected of thinking or of betraying that they had read something prohibited, and relapsed into silence after a few elegant phrases about Rossini and the weather.
Julien noticed that the conversation was usually kept alive by two viscounts and five barons whom M. de la Mole had known at the time of the emigration. These gentlemen enjoyed an income of from six to eight hundred thousand francs. Four swore by the Quotidienne and three by the Gazette de France. One of them had every day some anecdote to tell about the Château, in which he made lavish use of the word admirable. Julien noticed that he had five crosses, the others as a rule only had three.
By way of compensation six footmen in livery were to be seen in the ante-room, and during the whole evening ices or tea were served every quarter-of-an-hour, while about midnight there was a kind of supper with champagne.
This was the reason that sometimes induced Julien to stay till the end. Apart from this he could scarcely understand why any one could bring himself to take seriously the ordinary conversation in this magnificently gilded salon. Sometimes he would look at the talkers to see if they themselves were not making fun of what they were saying. “My M. de Maistre, whom I know by heart,” he thought, “has put it a hundred times better, and all the same he is pretty boring.”
Julien was not the only one to appreciate this stifling moral atmosphere. Some consoled themselves by taking a great quantity of ices, others by the pleasure of saying all the rest of the evening, “I have just come from the Hotel de la Mole where I learnt that Russia, etc.”
Julien learnt from one of the toadies that scarcely six months ago Madame de la Mole had rewarded more than twenty years of assiduous attention by promoting the poor baron Le Bourguignon, who had been a sub-prefect since the restoration, to the rank of prefect.
This great event had whetted the zeal of all these gentlemen. Previously there were few things to which they would have objected, now they objected to nothing. There was rarely any overt lack of consideration, but Julien had already caught at meals two or three little short dialogues between the marquis and his wife which were cruel to those who were seated near them. These noble personages did not conceal their sincere contempt for everyone who was not sprung from people who were entitled to ride in the carriages of the King. Julien noticed that the word crusade was the only word which gave their face an expression of deep seriousness akin to respect. Their ordinary respect had always a touch of condescension. In the middle of this magnificence and this boredom Julien was interested in nothing except M. de la Mole. He was delighted to hear him protest one day that he had had nothing to do with the promotion of that poor Le Bourguignon, it was an attention to the marquise. Julien knew the truth from the Abbé Pirard.
The Abbé was working in the marquis’s library with Julien one morning at the eternal de Frilair lawsuit.
“Monsieur,” said Julien suddenly, “is dining every day with madame la marquise one of my duties or a special favour that they show to me?”
“It’s a special honour,” replied the scandalised Abbé. “M. the academician, who has been cultivating the family for fifteen years, has never been able to obtain so much for his M. Tanbeau.”
“I find it, sir, the most painful part of my employment. I was less bored at the seminary. Some times I see even Mademoiselle de la Mole yawn, and yet she ought to be accustomed to the social charms of the friends of the house. I am frightened of falling asleep. As a favour, obtain permission for me to go and get a forty sous’ dinner in some obscure inn.”
The Abbé, who was a true snob, was very appreciative of the honour of dining with a great lord. While he was endeavouring to get Julien to understand this point of view, a slight noise made them turn round. Julien saw Mademoiselle de la Mole listening. He reddened. She had come to fetch a book and had heard everything. She began to entertain some respect for Julien. “He has not been born servile,” she thought, “like that old Abbé. Heavens, how ugly he is.”
At dinner Julien did not venture to look at Mademoiselle de la Mole but she was kind enough to speak to him. They were expecting a lot of visitors that day and she asked him to stay. The young girls of Paris are not at all fond of persons of a certain age, especially when they are slovenly. Julien did not need much penetration to realise that the colleagues of M. le Bourguignon who remained in the salon had the privilege of being the ordinary butt of Mademoiselle de la Mole’s jokes. On this particular day, whether or not by reason of some affectation on her part, she proved cruel to bores.
Mademoiselle de la Mole was the centre of a little knot which used to form nearly every evening behind the marquise’s immense armchair. There were to be found there the Marquis de Croisenois, the Comte de Caylus, the Vicomte de Luz and two or three other young officers, the friends of Norbert or his sister. These gentlemen used to sit down on a large blue sofa. At the end of the sofa, opposite the part where the brilliant Mathilde was sitting, Julien sat in silence on a little, rather low straw chair. This modest position was envied by all the toadies; Norbert kept his father’s young secretary in countenance by speaking to him, or mentioning him by name once or twice in the evening. On this particular occasion Mademoiselle de la Mole asked him what was the height of the mountain on which the citadel of Besançon is planted. Julien had never any idea if this mountain was higher or lower than Montmartre. He often laughed heartily at what was said in this little knot, but he felt himself incapable of inventing anything analogous. It was like a strange language which he understood but could not speak.
On this particular day Mathilde’s friends manifested a continuous hostility to the visitors who came into the vast salon. The friends of the house were the favoured victims at first, inasmuch as they were better known. You can form your opinion as to whether Julien paid attention; everything interested him, both the substance of things and the manner of making fun of them.
“And there is M. Descoulis,” said Mathilde; “he doesn’t wear a wig any more. Does he want to get a prefectship through sheer force of genius? He is displaying that bald forehead which he says is filled with lofty thoughts.”
“He is a man who knows the whole world,” said the Marquis de Croisenois. “He also goes to my uncle the cardinal’s. He is capable of cultivating a falsehood with each of his friends for years on end, and he has two or three hundred friends. He knows how to nurse friendship, that is his talent. He will go out, just as you see him, in the worst winter weather, and be at the door of one of his friends by seven o’clock in the morning.
“He quarrels from time to time and he writes seven or eight letters for each quarrel. Then he has a reconciliation and he writes seven or eight letters to express his bursts of friendship. But he shines most brilliantly in the frank and sincere expansiveness of the honest man who keeps nothing up his sleeve. This manœuvre is brought into play when he has some favour to ask. One of my uncle’s grand vicars is very good at telling the life of M. Descoulis since the restoration. I will bring him to you.”
“Bah! I don’t believe all that, it’s professional jealousy among the lower classes,” said the Comte de Caylus.
“M. Descoulis will live in history,” replied the marquis. “He brought about the restoration together with the Abbé de Pradt and messieurs de Talleyrand and Pozzo di Borgo.”
“That man has handled millions,” said Norbert, “and I can’t conceive why he should come here to swallow my father’s epigrams which are frequently atrocious. ‘How many times have you betrayed your friends, my dear Descoulis?’ he shouted at him one day from one end of the table to the other.”
“But is it true that he has play
ed the traitor?” asked Mademoiselle de la Mole. “Who has not played the traitor?”
“Why!” said the Comte de Caylus to Norbert, “do you have that celebrated Liberal, M. Sainclair, in your house? What the devil’s he come here for? I must go up to him and speak to him and make him speak. He is said to be so clever.”
“But how will your mother receive him?” said M. de Croisenois. “He has such extravagant, generous and independent ideas.”
“Look,” said Mademoiselle de la Mole, “look at the independent man who bows down to the ground to M. Descoulis while he grabs hold of his hand. I almost thought he was going to put it to his lips.”
“Descoulis must stand better with the powers that be than we thought,” answered M. de Croisenois.
“Sainclair comes here in order to get into the academy,” said Norbert. “See how he bows to the baron L——, Croisenois.”
“It would be less base to kneel down,” replied M. de Luz.
“My dear Sorel,” said Norbert, “you are extremely smart, but you come from the mountains. Mind you never bow like that great poet is doing, even to God the Father.”
“Ah there’s a really witty man, M. the Baron Bâton,” said Mademoiselle de la Mole, imitating a little the voice of the flunkey who had just announced him.
“I think that even your servants make fun of him. What a name—Baron Bâton,” said M. de Caylus.
“‘What’s in a name?’ he said to us the other day,” went on Mathilde. “Imagine the Duke de Bouillon announced for the first time. So far as I am concerned the public only need to get used to me.”
Julien left the vicinity of the sofa.
Still insufficiently appreciative of the charming subtleties of a delicate raillery to laugh at a joke, he considered that a jest ought to have some logical foundation. He saw nothing in these young peoples’ conversation except a vein of universal scandal-mongering and was shocked by it. His provincial or English prudery went so far as to detect envy in it, though in this he was certainly mistaken.
“Count Norbert,” he said to himself, “who has had to make three drafts for a twenty-line letter to his colonel, would be only too glad to have written once in his whole life one page as good as M. Sainclair.”
Julien approached successively the several groups and attracted no attention by reason of his lack of importance. He followed the Baron Bâton from a distance and tried to hear him.
This witty man appeared nervous and Julien did not see him recover his equanimity before he had hit upon three or four stinging phrases. Julien thought that this kind of wit had great need of space.
The Baron could not make epigrams. He needed at least four sentences of six lines each, in order to be brilliant.
“That man argues, he does not talk,” said someone behind Julien. He turned round and reddened with pleasure when he heard the name of the Comte Chalvet. He was the subtlest man of the century. Julien had often found his name in the Memorial of St. Helena and in the portions of history dictated by Napoleon. The diction of Comte Chalvet was laconic, his phrases were flashes of lightning—just, vivid, deep. If he talked about any matter, the conversation immediately made a step forward; he imported facts into it; it was a pleasure to hear him. In politics, however, he was a brazen cynic.
“I am independent, I am,” he was saying to a gentleman with three stars, of whom apparently he was making fun. “Why insist on my having to-day the same opinion I had six weeks ago? In that case my opinion would be my master.”
Four grave young men who were standing round scowled; these gentlemen did not like flippancy. The comte saw that he had gone too far. Luckily he perceived the honest M. Balland, a veritable hypocrite of honesty. The count began to talk to him; people closed up, for they realised that poor Balland was going to be the next victim.
M. Balland, although he was horribly ugly and his first steps in the world were almost unmentionable, had by dint of his morals and his morality married a very rich wife who had died; he subsequently married a second very rich one who was never seen in society. He enjoyed, in all humility, an income of sixty thousand francs, and had his own flatterers. Comte Chalvet talked to him pitilessly about all this. There was soon a circle of thirty persons around them. Everybody was smiling, including the solemn young men who were the hope of the century.
“Why does he come to M. de la Mole where he is obviously only a laughing stock?” thought Julien. He approached the Abbé Pirard to ask him.
M. Balland made his escape.
“Good,” said Norbert, “there is one of the spies of my father gone; there is only the little limping Napier left.”
“Can that be the key of the riddle?” thought Julien, “but if so, why does the marquis receive M. Balland?”
The stern Abbé Pirard was scowling in a corner of the salon listening to the lackeys announcing the names.
“This is nothing more than a den,” he was saying like another Basil, “I see none but shady people come in.”
As a matter of fact the severe Abbé did not know what constitutes high society. But his friends the Jansenites, had given him some very precise notions about those men who only get into society by reason of their extreme subtlety in the service of all parties, or of their monstrous wealth. For some minutes that evening he answered Julien’s eager questions fully and freely, and then suddenly stopped short, grieved at having always to say ill of everyone, and thinking he was guilty of a sin. Bilious Jansenist as he was, and believing as he did in the duty of Christian charity, his life was a perpetual conflict.
“How strange that Abbé Pirard looks,” said Mademoiselle de la Mole, as Julien came near the sofa.
Julien felt irritated, but she was right all the same. M. Pirard was unquestionably the most honest man in the salon, but his pimply face, which was suffering from the stings of conscience, made him look hideous at this particular moment. “Trust physiognomy after this,” thought Julien, “it is only when the delicate conscience of the Abbé Pirard is reproaching him for some trifling lapse that he looks so awful; while the expression of that notorious spy Napier shows a pure and tranquil happiness.” The Abbé Pirard, however, had made great concessions to his party. He had taken a servant, and was very well dressed.
Julien noticed something strange in the salon; it was that all eyes were being turned towards the door, and there was a semi-silence. The flunkey was announcing the famous Baron Tolly, who had just become publicly conspicuous by reason of the elections. Julien came forward and had a very good view of him. The baron had been the president of an electoral college; he had the brilliant idea of spiriting away the little squares of paper which contained the votes of one of the parties. But to make up for it he replaced them by an equal number of other little pieces of paper containing a name agreeable to himself. This drastic manœuvre had been noticed by some of the voters, who had made an immediate point of congratulating the Baron de Tolly. The good fellow was still pale from this great business. Malicious persons had pronounced the word galleys. M. de la Mole received him coldly. The poor Baron made his escape.
“If he leaves us so quickly it’s to go to M. Comté’s,”4 said Comte Chalvet and everyone laughed.
Little Tanbeau was trying to win his spurs by talking to some silent noblemen and some intriguers who, though shady, were all men of wit, and were on this particular night in great force in M. de la Mole’s salon (for he was mentioned for a place in the ministry). If he had not yet any subtlety of perception he made up for it, as one will see, by the energy of his words.
“Why not sentence that man to ten years’ imprisonment?” he was saying at the moment when Julien approached his knot. “Those reptiles should be confined in the bottom of a dungeon; they ought to languish to death in gaol, otherwise their venom will grow and become more dangerous. What is the good of sentencing him to a fine of a thousand crowns? He is poor, so be it, all the better, but his party will pay for him. What the case required was a five hundred francs fine and ten years in a dungeon
.”
“Well to be sure, who is the monster they are speaking about?” thought Julien who was viewing with amazement the vehement tone and hysterical gestures of his colleague. At this moment the thin, drawn, little face of the academician’s nephew was hideous. Julien soon learnt that they were talking of the greatest poet of the century.
“You monster,” Julien exclaimed half aloud, while tears of generosity moistened his eyes. “You little rascal,” he thought, “I will pay you out for this.”
“Yet,” he thought, “those are the unborn hopes of the party of which the marquis is one of the chiefs. How many crosses and how many sinecures would that celebrated man whom he is now defaming have accumulated if he had sold himself—I won’t say to the mediocre min-istry of M. de Nerval—but to one of those reasonably honest ministries which we have seen follow each other in succession.”
The Abbé Pirard motioned to Julien from some distance off; M. de la Mole had just said something to him. But when Julien, who was listening at the moment with downcast eyes to the lamentations of the bishop, had at length got free and was able to get near his friend, he found him monopolised by the abominable little Tanbeau. The little beast hated him as the cause of Julien’s favour with the marquis, and was now making up to him.
“When will death deliver us from that aged rottenness,” it was in these words of a biblical energy that the little man of letters was now talking of the venerable Lord Holland. His merit consisted in an excellent knowledge of the biography of living men, and he had just made a rapid review of all the men who could aspire to some influence under the reign of the new King of England.