Through the Window: Seventeen Essays and a Short Story (Vintage International)

by Julian Barnes

  Take three famous remarks – call them maxims, epigrams, apophthegms as you will. Connolly: ‘Imprisoned in every fat man is a thin one wildly signalling to be let out.’ Consider the fat men you know. Every? Wildly? We are not just talking Weight Watchers here. Is the line, as written, true of many more than the corpulent Connolly himself? Wilde: ‘Work is the curse of the drinking classes.’ A ritzy, easily made reversal of a common saying. But true? True at all? Or just a look-at-me piece of verbal prestidigitation – one finally as ignorant as it is snooty. La Rochefoucauld: ‘There are those who would have never fallen in love had they not first heard love being talked about.’ This is much more impressive and authoritative. But, in the end, true? We can all think of people who fall in love ‘for the wrong reasons’, or who in our view claim to be in love when they aren’t; but that isn’t what La Rochefoucauld is saying. Again, the contention falls by claiming too much. Life, we might conclude, is rarely a one-liner.

  Chamfort is not like this. Camus makes the distinction between the writer of maxims and the moralist. A maxim is like a mathematical equation – its terms are often reversible – and it is no coincidence that the same century, the seventeenth, was in France the great age both of mathematics and of the maxim. But ‘all its truth lies within itself, and it no more corresponds to experience than does an algebraic formula’. So much for La Rochefoucauld. Whereas a moralist like Chamfort rarely writes maxims, rarely depends on antithesis and formula. There is little of the Quote of the Week about him. As the Goncourts put it in their journal in 1866, Chamfort is ‘way beyond a man of letters penning his reflections. He offers us a condensation of the understanding of the world, the bitter elixir of experience.’

  He was born illegitimate in the Auvergne; brains, wit, charm and good looks took him to the heights of Parisian society. He was the friend of Talleyrand, d’Alembert and Helvétius; Mirabeau said that his head was ‘electric’, and you only had to rub it for it to spark with ideas. He was a familiar of the intellectual salons, and elected to the Académie; Louis XV gave him a pension for a mediocre play which stirred the royal tear ducts. Such straightforward and visible success would have satisfied the normally ambitious; but Chamfort was too intelligent – or too proud, or too self-hating – to be rendered anything as simple as satisfied, let alone happy. His success merely pointed up both his inner contradictions and those of the society which had applauded him. Here is his self-portrait (Reflection 2):

  My whole life is an apparent contradiction of my principles: I dislike monarchy and serve a prince and princess. I am well known for my republican principles yet I have a number of aristocratic friends plastered with royal decorations. I’ve chosen to be poor and enjoy it, while spending my time with the rich. I despise honours, and yet, when offered, have accepted some. Literature is almost my only consolation but I don’t frequent any bright, witty people – nor do I attend sessions of the French Academy. What’s more, I think that men need illusions, while having none myself. I consider that passion has more to offer than reason and I no longer feel any sort of passion. Indeed, the list is endless.

  This fault line running down the middle is partly what makes Chamfort engaging, human, modern. In his condemnation of human motive he can be as fierce and sarcastic as La Rochefoucauld. But when La Rochefoucauld propounds a system under which self-interest is the impulse for all human activity, the implication remains that La Rochefoucauld himself is somehow exempt from the charge; he is above the moral riff-raff he is anatomising. Chamfort is different in this key respect: his condemnation of humanity includes himself, very specifically. ‘If I am anything to go by, man is a foolish animal.’

  Wisdom is also more likely to arise from a familiarity with weakness, failure and misery than with strength and wealth. ‘It seems to me that, assuming they’re both equally discerning and intelligent, a man born rich will never know nature, society or the human heart as well as the man who’s poor. The fact is that where the rich man was enjoying himself, the poor man was finding consolation in thought.’ Chamfort was only poor in comparison to those he frequented; the true poor usually have no time or energy for the ‘consolation of thought’. But he knew the stigma of illegitimacy; he suffered disfiguring disease (syphilis, leprosy and elephantiasis have all been suggested – modern opinion has settled on granuloma-tosis); and his experience of love was levelling. Having been a rakish bachelor and part-time misogynist until the great age of forty, he suddenly fell deeply in love with the wife of a surgeon, and she with him. Happily, the wife soon became a widow, whereupon the couple moved to the country to live out every townee’s pastoral idyll. Six months later she died.

  A second fault line runs through Chamfort’s work – one whose irony he might have appreciated. Everything he published in his lifetime, everything by which he made his name – the plays, the essays, journalism, tributes to literary greats – has been completely forgotten. Whereas the only thing he wasn’t known for in his lifetime has made his limited but lasting fame. At some point in the mid-1780s, Chamfort began jotting down on small bits of paper his conclusions about life, along with supporting anecdotes, quotations and scraps of dialogue. There is no indication of what he wrote when, or of what, if anything, he intended doing with this accumulation; whether it was to be published, and if so, how it was to be arranged. Further, between his death and the first printed selection of his intellectual leavings, many items – perhaps as many as two thousand – were removed by a person or persons unknown, presumably on the grounds of being incriminating or defamatory. As his new translator Douglas Parmée notes, the result is ‘an academic nightmare – and a paradise for the anthologist, who can juggle them at will’. Their occasional republication has kept Chamfort’s name alive, though we, as posterity, shouldn’t praise ourselves too openly for having the wit to appreciate him. ‘Posterity’, he wrote, ‘merely consists of the opinion of a series of publics. And just look at today’s!’

  Sainte-Beuve, the most industrious and influential critic of the mid-nineteenth century, judged Chamfort rather harshly: some of his phrases were ‘coin which still keeps its value’, but many were more like whistling, sharp-tipped arrows. His Reflections were ‘horrifying and corrosive’; while his talent was inferior to his wit and his ideas. The moralist had elevated his own isolation and perceived misfortune into a bitter system. When he wrote ‘Anyone who’s not a misanthrope by the time he’s forty has never felt the slightest affection for the human race’, it was true ‘only for a bachelor’. More generally, Chamfort’s supposedly universal conclusions refer only to the highest ranks of a society now long dead. ‘Happily, they cease to be true if you look at a less artificial society, one where the sense of family is maintained, and where natural feelings have not been abolished.’ For Sainte-Beuve, Chamfort fails the final test of truth.

  How to answer the charge of narrowness? First, by pointing out that while representative social samples are a requisite for Gallup polls, they are not necessarily essential for wisdom: are Freud’s truths only applicable to the narrow, dead world of Viennese neurotics? Next, we might examine a few of these supposedly localised dicta. Here is one about fame: ‘In a country where everyone’s keen to show off, many people must, and indeed do, prefer to be a bankrupt rather than be a nobody.’ Here is one about status: ‘If you want to discover how men are corrupted by their social status, take a look at what they’re like in their old age, after long exposure to its influence. Look at old courtiers, judges, lawyers and surgeons, for instance.’ And here is one about politics: ‘You imagine ministers and other high officials have principles because you’ve heard them say so. As a result, you avoid asking them to do anything that might cause them to break those principles. However, you soon discover you’ve been hoodwinked when you see ministers doing things which prove that they’re quite unprincipled: it’s nothing but a habit they’ve got into, an automatic reflex.’

  Do these seem out-of-date truths? Chamfort quotes Mirabeau to the effect that once a polit
ical system has been properly set up, the choice of a particular minister is irrelevant – ‘It’s like dogs turning a spit, all they need to do is keep their paws moving, their pedigree’s unimportant, they don’t need to be clever or have a good nose, the spit goes on turning and the meal will be more or less edible.’ We can all think of contemporary canine ministers to whom this applies.

  Political structures change; political instincts and habits barely develop. Social structures decay and pass; social ambition and techniques of self-advancement continue. Sex and love and their consequences? Chamfort might seem dated and circumscribed in his more than occasional misogyny; and Camus berated him for sharing ‘one of the commonest and stupidest sentiments, that is to say a generalised scorn for women’. But – this being Chamfort, and therefore complicated, divided, human – he is also one who observed (almost sentimentally): ‘In spite of all the jokes about marriage, I can’t see what anyone can say against a man of sixty who marries a woman of fifty-six.’ And could the following insight into love be made by a man who was merely a bachelor, or merely a misogynist? ‘In love, everything is both true and false; it’s the one subject on which it’s impossible to say anything absurd.’ Chamfort is various, contradictory, but always stimulating, never one to flatter the reader’s complacency; and while there are dicta to quarrel with, there are very few to which the response will be, ‘That’s just not true – wasn’t true then, isn’t true now.’ One of my favourite lines is also aimed, you feel, at the author himself: ‘Having lots of ideas doesn’t mean you’re clever, any more than having lots of soldiers means you’re a good general.’

  Camus, without naming Sainte-Beuve, deals with the charge of narrowness rather differently. Yes, he says, Chamfort was writing about a social elite; but no, he wasn’t generalising about the whole race from that narrow basis. The true moralist – as opposed to the maker of maxims – is an observer of human particularity in the same way as a novelist is. Hence the Reflections are ‘a kind of disorganised novel’, ‘an unadmitted novel’, ‘a satirical novel’. Indeed, ‘if you could only restore to the work the coherence which the author declined to give it, you would have something far superior to the collection of pensées than it appears to be’.

  This is a generous and imaginative (and slightly overstated) claim, which indicates well the broader nature of Chamfort’s work. The Reflections contain long-pondered conclusions about human nature and behaviour, but also anecdotes, stories, brief character descriptions, and jokes. (Reflection 67: ‘The most misspent day in any life is the one when you’ve failed to laugh.’) This is what gives the book its tone and texture; also the sense of an author addressing a reader. Chamfort the shadow novelist wants to share his wisdom with us, but he also wants to share his gossip:

  Louis XV said to one of his mistresses: ‘You’ve been to bed with all my subjects.’

  ‘Oh, Your Majesty!’

  ‘You’ve had the Duc de Choiseul.’

  ‘He’s so powerful …’

  ‘Maréchal de Richelieu.’

  ‘He’s so witty …’

  ‘Manville.’

  ‘He has such lovely legs …’

  ‘And what about the Duc d’Aumont, who hasn’t got any of these fine qualities?’

  ‘Oh sire, he’s so devoted to Your Majesty!’

  Chamfort’s ambivalence about the society whose acclaim he had sought led first to periods of withdrawal and philosophical seclusion; later, to support for the organised rejection of that society known as the Revolution. Though this might seem logical as well as principled, his detailed motivation is less clear. Chateaubriand was astonished that someone with such a deep understanding of humankind could end up embracing any cause. Sainte-Beuve’s theory was that Chamfort’s mortal grudge against the ancien régime was at bottom literary: it had judged him to be merely a nice young poet, and had patronisingly treated him as such. Connolly pointed to the ‘temperament of a love-child’, which produced both a great need for love and ‘that equally violent feeling, so familiar to bastards, of a grievance against society’.

  Whichever motive we prefer, it led to ‘The Predicament of Chamfort’, as Connolly called it in The Unquiet Grave:

  His predicament is one with which we are all familiar … that of the revolutionary whose manners and way of life are attached to the old regime, whose ideals and loyalties belong to the new, and who by a kind of courageous exhibitionism is impelled to tell the truth about both, and to expect from the commissars of King Stork the same admiration for his sallies as they received from the courtiers of King Log.

  When the Revolution broke out, Chamfort sided with his friend Mirabeau; he spoke at street corners, coined popular slogans (‘War upon the chateaux, peace upon the cottages’), and was one of the first to enter the stormed Bastille. He supported the Revolution longer and harder than others of his kind: ‘Do you imagine you can make revolutions to the smell of rose water?’ he asked one waverer. But his independent habit of mind did not desert him. When the Jacobin slogan ‘Fraternity or death!’ was being chalked on walls, he knew politics and human nature well enough to reformulate it without the spin: ‘Be my brother or I’ll kill you.’

  It was not long before King Stork dipped his bill. Chamfort was denounced, imprisoned, released, and threatened with fresh arrest; deciding to take the philosopher’s way out, he put a pistol to his head. But all he succeeded in doing was to smash his nose and put out his right eye. Then he took a razor – or in some accounts a knife – and hacked at his throat, wrists and ankles, before collapsing in a pool of blood which streamed under the door. Amazingly, he survived, and characteristically complained that poverty had yet again undone him: ‘Seneca was rich, he had everything he needed, including a warm bath to do it in, and the best of surroundings, whereas I’m just a poor devil who can’t afford any of that … Still, at least I’ve got a bullet in my head, that’s the main thing.’ It was and it wasn’t; indeed, he seemed on the way to recovery when the maladroitness of a doctor did for him. His last words were: ‘I am leaving this world in which the heart must either break, or else turn to bronze.’ True? Partly true? Not at all true? Discuss.

  THE MAN WHO SAVED OLD FRANCE

  IFIRST STARTED GOING to France almost fifty years ago, on motoring holidays with my parents and brother. The towns and villages we then visited – quaintly, they were still filled with nothing but French people – had a solid, unchanging feel to them and a recognisable morphology: from smart mairie and PTT to dilapidated lavoir and rank pissoir, from war memorial listing unforgotten dead to blank walls pasted with the huge words ‘DEFENSE D’AFFICHER – LOI DU 29 JUILLET 1881’ (a proclamation far more strident than the flyers it was designed to deter). Behind this ordinary, diurnal France, giving it wider and deeper meaning, was the monumental France to which my schoolteacher parents introduced me (at times, inflicted upon me): the chateaux and cathedrals, museums and public buildings, artworks and ruins – a France of history, power and money, a France of official, national beauty. There seemed an extraordinary amount of it around, its symbols leaping out from every fold of the yellow Michelin road map. A back-seat navigator, I would prepare my parents for what lay round the next bend. A solid black oblong denoted a chateau worth slowing down for; a similar oblong with legs at each corner one worth a stop; a triangle of black dots meant a ruined castle; while a curious mark, like a wonky version of the pi symbol, indicated some prehistoric vestige. All this seemed just as solid and eternal as the daily life, if not more so.

  When we toured the chateaux of the Loire, I couldn’t help noticing that many of these great palaces seemed remarkably empty of furniture, and was given to understand that it had all disappeared in the Revolution. Into my mind came vague images – perhaps culled from the film of A Tale of Two Cities – of looting sans-culottes with wild eyes and bad shaves. The green Michelin guidebooks to which we referred for our facts were, I now realise, written and edited by a team diplomatically keen not to offend any strand of French o
pinion; so there was much elision, and a tactical unwillingness to take any controversial (or even discernible) side in France’s long internecine history. Nor did the books indicate how precarious had been the earlier life of this solid monumentality we dutifully visited. Still less did they mention, let alone salute, the man without whose decisive influence and actions what the French now call their patrimony would have been considerably diminished: Prosper Mérimée.

  On this side of the Channel, Mérimée (1803–70) is mainly remembered as the author of the novella from which Carmen was drawn; though Bizet’s opera, in the words of Mérimée’s best British biographer, Alan Raitt, is ‘no more than an emasculated and prettified version of Mérimée’s tale’. He wrote fiction – specialising in themes of cruelty, revenge and the Implacable Woman – plays and poetry. He was a serious Anglophile, who once proposed marriage to Mary Shelley, and was so well known at the British Museum that the guards used to salute him when he arrived; he was also passionate about Spain, and in later life a Russophile who translated Pushkin, Turgenev and Gogol. He was a traveller, a courtier, an Academician, friend of Stendhal, lover of George Sand, truffler of the sexual lowlife, and a senator under Napoleon III. But his true, if largely forgotten, claim to enduring fame is as the second Inspector General of Historic Monuments, a post he occupied from 1834 to 1860.

  There had been previous attempts to catalogue and protect France’s architectural history, most of them either compromised or half-hearted. If the French Revolution had been at times revengefully destructive, it also introduced for the first time the idea of officially conserving works of art and architecture. So each decree of confiscation also included a demand for protection: these buildings, these paintings, these tapestries were now in the care of the people. Between 1790 and 1795 there was a Commission of Monuments, set up to make an inventory, with the help of regional correspondents, of all that was worth preserving. Although what was worth preserving above all was the Revolution itself, and when it came under attack from counter-revolutionaries and foreign armies, there was much patriotic handing in of silver, gold, rich cloth, vases, and so on. Bronze statuary was melted down, while the lead roof of Chartres Cathedral was stripped off in Year III on the grounds that ‘our prime concern is to crush our enemies’. The Commission hoped to protect the royal tombs at Saint-Denis – ‘not out of love for them, but for the sake of history and the philosophic idea’. But the Convention, intent upon expunging the very idea of monarchy, authorised the destruction of ‘these monuments to pride and flattery’. Since what later becomes a nation’s patrimony (and its list of tourist attractions) normally starts off as just such vainglorious display, it is fortunate this principle was not more widely applied.