Literature · Romance

Mademoiselle de Maupin, Volume 1 (of 2) 1

G. Burnham

BurnhamEnglish

THE ETCHINGS ARE BY

FRANÇOIS-XAVIER LE SUEUR

AND DRAWINGS BY

ÉDOUARD TOUDOUZE

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

MADEMOISELLE DE MAUPIN--VOLUME I

MADEMOISELLE DE MAUPIN Front. THE IMAGINARY MISTRESS FIRST MEETING WITH ROSETTE EPISODE OF THE "TOILETTE DE BAL" D'ALBERT AND ROSETTE THE ARRIVAL OF THÉODORE THÉODORE AND THE PAGE ROSETTE'S MORNING AUDIENCE THE ACCIDENTAL DISCOVERY

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTICE

This celebrated novel, the celebrity of which has not been lessened by the very numerous editions that have been published, had a very modest beginning which in no way foreshadowed the great success which it was to obtain later.

The title: Mademoiselle de Maupin--Double Love appeared, we believe, for the first time in Renduel's catalogue in connection with The Life of Hoffman, by Lœve-Weimars, which appeared in October, 1833, announcing the new work of Théophile Gautier as being in press. Renduel had made the acquaintance of the author at Victor Hugo's; he had published in August, 1833, his first volume of prose, Young France, and now it was a question of launching a work in two volumes, a truly daring undertaking for a publisher of that day; especially in the case of the work of an author but little known and only twenty-two years old.

Mademoiselle de Maupin was not, however, destined to see the light so soon. For two years Théophile Gautier, more enamored of freedom than of work, or preferring the task of making two harmonious rhymes to all the beauties of his learned and rhythmic prose, incessantly abandoned and resumed the promised work. A tradition preserved in the family of the poet tells how his father often shut him up in his room at that time, forbidding him to leave it until he had completed a certain number of pages of the Grotesques or of Mademoiselle de Maupin. When the maternal kindness did not come to his aid, the frolicsome author, who then lived with his parents on Place Royale, often found the means of getting away by the window and so escaping a paternal task. Such escapades being frequently renewed, it may well be believed that the novel made but little progress; 1834 was drawing to a close; only the first of the two volumes was finished; the publisher complained, and the author tried to pacify him by notes similar to the following:

"I have just discovered at a bric-à-brac dealer's a charming picture of Boucher in a splendid state of preservation; it is an opportunity that I do not wish to miss, and not having money enough, I take the liberty of asking you for my balance. You will confer on me a real pleasure in sending it to me.

"I am harnessed to La Maupin, and that prevents me from prowling about and calling on you.

"With cordial wishes, I am, yours,

"THÉOPHILE GAUTIER."

Finally, in 1835, the second volume was written in six weeks on Rue du Doyenné, where the poet, having left the paternal nest, had installed himself; the manuscript was delivered to Renduel and we read the following note in Le Monde Dramatique, of September 20th, concerning the biography of the strange person who really bore the name of Maupin, a biography signed by Rochefort and published in that number under the title: Mademoiselle d'Aubigny-Maupin: "One of our collaborators, Monsieur Théophile Gautier, has been busy for a long time on a romance entitled: Mademoiselle (de) Maupin."

The work was now soon to appear; it was issued in November, 1835, in two octavo volumes, printed by Madame Poussin under the title: Mademoiselle de Maupin--Double Love. The first volume bears the date 1835, the second 1836, while the preface is dated May, 1834.

The work produced no very great sensation. A few journals spoke of it, but publicity was not then systematized as it is to-day, and except by some few literary men and the small romantic group of the author's friends, Mademoiselle de Maupin was soon forgotten. Let us remark, nevertheless, that immediately the book appeared, Honoré de Balzac wrote Renduel a note, asking for a copy, this note we have seen ourselves; from this moment dates the admiration that he always professed thereafter for Théophile Gautier. We learn from Monsieur Arsène Houssaye, the old and faithful friend of the poet, that owing to the failure to sell the work, Renduel determined not to publish anything more for his author; La Comédie de la Mort, already announced upon the covers of the work (as well as Capitaine Fracasse), was, in fact, returned to the author, and only appeared in 1838, when it was published by Desessart, at that time one of Arsène Houssaye's publishers; it was the author of La Couronne de Bleuets, who introduced his friend to him and secured a favorable consideration for his collection of verses.

How strange to us and unlikely, even, all this seems, when one recalls the exorbitant prices obtained for some years past for rare, stitched copies in good condition of the first edition of the work that we are now considering. Many have realized one thousand five hundred francs, that is to say, the total sums received by the author as royalty on the first issue of his work. This sum is verified by his receipts to Renduel, which are in our hands.

A curious incident occurred as to Mademoiselle de Maupin. After its appearance, all the opening of the eleventh chapter was inserted in Le Monde Dramatique of January 4, 1836, without mentioning its source, under the title of: La Comédie Romanesque. Since that time, those pages have been frequently reprinted, but not a single one of these reproductions gives any indication of their origin. It must be admitted that Théophile Gautier himself gave rise to this error in La Presse of December 17, 1838, in again quoting these lines, inserted in an unpublished commentary, as an isolated article which had come under his notice by chance. He had forgotten this extract, and believed in good faith to have found in La Monde Dramatique only a newspaper improvisation. This first mistake was the starting-point of all that succeeded, the most striking of which is the insertion in 1858 of this fragment from Mademoiselle de Maupin in the first volume of Théophile Gautier's work: Histoire de l'Art Dramatique in France. It is useless to add that no one noticed this fact.

Time, however, rolled on, and the renown of the poet continued to increase; his appearance in La Presse in 1836, and his critical work, had made a circle of new readers. Then, Fortunio, La Comédie de la Mort, Une Larme du Diable, Tra Los Montès, Les Grotesques, etc., etc., had considerably increased his literary impedimenta. So, when Monsieur Charpentier, the father of the present publisher of Théophile Gautier's complete works, had founded the collection to which he gave his name, he soon thought of reprinting our author's principal works. Monsieur Charpentier, who succeeded in grouping in his catalogue the most select of the remarkable works of his age, was of refined literary taste and held among the publishers of his day a place similar to that then held by Monsieur Buloz in his capacity of director of La Revue des Deux Mondes: it was difficult to obtain an interview with either, and to appear in print in their collections was regarded as a kind of consecration.

It was in 1845 when four of Théophile Gautier's volumes appeared in the Charpentier catalogue; they were Poésies Complètes, Nouvelles, Voyage en Espagne, and Mademoiselle de Maupin. For this reprint, the first since the original edition, the author modified, but very slightly, some phrases of his work, the text of which, from that time, has never been changed.

Here ends, in reality, the history of this work. Since 1845, the number of editions has continued to increase; we will only quote two that appeared in 1878: one in two volumes, 24mo, illustrated with four designs by Eugèn Giraud, and another in a large 12mo volume, upon Holland paper, embellished with a portrait of the heroine by Théophile Gautier himself, the portrait dated 1834. Finally, in 1880, there was added to a reprint of this edition, a reproduction of the medallion of the author by David d'Anger; this reproduction is erroneously dated 1834, instead of 1835, which is the actual year of its execution.

Is it possible, as has often been asserted, that this work, whose incomparable style should have warranted the opening of the doors of the Académie Française to the author, was in part the cause of their remaining stubbornly closed against him?--We do not know; but from another tradition preserved in the poet's family, it would appear that the father himself, when he knew of the completion of the work (only the first volume, as we have seen, was written under his eyes), could not have been without apprehension as to the part which the book would play in the life of his son, and, notwithstanding his admiration for the style of the work, he would often have expressed the fear that the second volume would at times influence the future of the author.

In any case, the renown of Théophile Gautier, like that of his illustrious friend, Honoré de Balzac, who, likewise, was never a member of the Académie, has only increased since his death, and the names of these two rare talents are in truth missed among those of the members of that illustrious body. For Théophile Gautier at least, the Académie itself expressed one day, by the mouth of one of its members, its regret at not having received him. On October 25, 1872, at its public session and at the very hour of the obsequies of the great writer, Monsieur Camille Doucet pronounced the following words which do honor to their author, and we are happy to reproduce them here: "Permit me to digress a moment. When I speak of the fraternity of Letters, I should fail, messieurs, if I appeared longer to forget that at this very hour, upon the threshold of a tomb, which I have left only with regret to come here to fulfil another duty, Letters mourning, weep for a true poet dear to all, a brilliant writer whose wit was thoroughly French and whose heart was still more French. Very many votes have proved to him that his place was indicated among us, and so we deplore the more the sudden stroke to which Théophile Gautier succumbs."

We will add nothing to these touching lines and will close this notice by saying a few words as to the present edition of Mademoiselle de Maupin. It is the first reprint, absolutely conforming to the original text. The work appears in two volumes, divided like those of 1835, and the publishers have exerted every effort to satisfy bibliophiles desirous of possessing as perfect an edition as possible, both as regards the exactness of the text and the technical execution of the work.

Finally, let us say that the designs of E. Toudouze, made especially for this work, will render this edition still more complete. It will rank, we hope, among the most treasured editions of the book.

CHARLES DE LOVENJOUL.

NOTES

PREFACE

One of the most burlesque incidents of the glorious epoch in which we have the good fortune to live side by side with Deutz and General Bugeaud, is, beyond question, the rehabilitation of virtue undertaken by all the newspapers, of whatever color they may be, red, green, or tri-colored.

Virtue is most assuredly a very respectable thing, and we have no wish to fail in our devotion to the excellent, worthy creature--God forbid!--We consider that her eyes shine with sufficient brilliancy through her spectacles, that her stockings are reasonably well put on, that she takes snuff from her gold snuff-box with all imaginable grace, that her little dog courtesies like a dancing-master.--We agree to all that.--We are even willing to admit that her figure is not bad for her age, and that she carries her years as well as any one could. She is a very agreeable grandmother, but she is a grandmother. It seems to me to be natural to prefer to her, especially when one is twenty years old, some little immorality, very pert, very coquettish, very wanton, with the hair a little out of curl, the skirt rather short than long, the foot and eye alluring, the cheek slightly flushed, a smile on the lips and the heart in the hand.--The most horribly virtuous journalists can hardly be of a different opinion; and, if they say the contrary, it is very probable that they do not think it. To think one thing and write another is something that happens every day, especially among virtuous folk.

I remember the epigrams uttered before the Revolution--I refer to the Revolution of July--against the ill-fated and virginal Vicomte Sosthène de la Rochefoucauld, who lengthened the skirts of the dancers at the Opéra and applied with his own patrician hands a chaste plaster around the middle of all the statues.--Monsieur le Vicomte Sosthène de la Rochefoucauld is far surpassed.--Modesty has been greatly perfected since his day, and we go into refinements that he would never have imagined.

I, who am not accustomed to look at statues in certain places, considered, as others did, the vine-leaf cut by the scissors of Monsieur le Chargé des Beaux-Arts, the most absurd thing in the world. It seems that I was wrong, and that the vine-leaf is one of the most meritorious of institutions.

I have been told, but I refused to believe it, it seemed to me so extraordinary, that there were people who, when looking at Michael Angelo's fresco of the Last Judgment, had seen nothing therein but the episode of the lewd priests, and had veiled their faces, crying out at the abomination of desolation!

Such people know nothing of the romance of Rodrigue except the couplet of the snake.--If there is any nudity in a book or a picture, they go straight to it as the swine to the mire, and pay no attention to the blooming flowers or the golden fruit that hang within reach on all sides.

I confess that I am not virtuous enough for that. Dorine, the brazen-faced soubrette, may display before me her swelling bosom, I certainly will not draw my handkerchief to cover it so that it cannot be seen.--I will look at her bosom as at her face, and if it is fair and well-shaped I will take pleasure in it.--But I will not touch Elmire's dress to see if it is soft, nor will I push her reverently upon the table as that poor devil of a Tartuffe did.

This great affectation of morality that reigns to-day would be very laughable if it were not very tiresome.--Every feuilleton becomes a pulpit; every journalist a preacher; only the tonsure and the little neckband are wanting. The weather is rainy and homiletic; one can defend one's self against both by going out only in a carriage and reading Pantagruel between one's bottle and one's pipe.

Blessed Jesus! what an outcry! what a frenzy!--Who bit you? who pricked you? what the devil's the matter with you that you cry so loud, and what has poor vice done to you that you should bear him such a grudge, he is such a good fellow, so easy to live with, and asks nothing except to be allowed to amuse himself and not bore others, if such a thing can be? Act with vice like Serre with the gendarme: embrace and have done with it all.--Believe me, you will be the better for it.--Eh! Mon Dieu! my worthy preachers, what would you do without vice? You would be reduced to beggary to-morrow, if the world should become virtuous to-day.

The theatres would be closed to-night.--What would you take for the subject of your feuilleton?--No more Opéra balls to fill your columns,--no more novels to dissect; for balls, novels, plays, are the real pomps of Satan, if we are to believe our holy Mother Church.--The actress would dismiss her protector and could no longer pay you for puffing her.--Nobody would subscribe to your newspapers; people would read Saint Augustine, they would go to church, they would tell their beads. That would be very praiseworthy, perhaps, but you would gain nothing by it. If people were virtuous, what would you do with your articles on the immorality of the age? You see plainly that vice is good for something.

But it is the fashion nowadays to be virtuous and Christ-like, it is an attitude people affect; they pose as Saint Jeromes just as they used to pose as Don Juans; they are pale and wasted, they wear their hair as the apostles did, they walk with folded hands and eyes glued to the ground, they assume an expression sugared to perfection; they have an open Bible on the mantel, a crucifix and consecrated box-wood above their beds; they never swear, they smoke but little, and they chew almost not at all.--With that they become Christians, they talk about the sanctity of art, the lofty mission of the artist, the poesy of Catholicism, about Monsieur de La Mennais, about the painters of the angelic school, about the Council of Trent, about progressive humanity, and about a thousand other fine things.--Some infuse a little republicanism into their religion, they are not the least interesting. They couple Robespierre and Jesus Christ in the most cheerful way and amalgamate with praiseworthy gravity the Acts of the Apostles and the decrees of the Holy Convention--that is the sacramental title; others add, for a final ingredient, some Saint-Simonian ideas.--These latter are complete, they rest upon a square foundation; after them we can look for nothing better. Human absurdity can go no farther,--has ultra metas--etc. They are the Hercules Pillars of Burlesque.

Christianity is so in vogue by reason of the prevailing hypocrisy, that even Neo-Christianity enjoys a certain amount of favor. They say that it can boast thus far one recruit, Monsieur Drouineau included.

An extremely interesting variety of the moral journalist, properly so-called, is the journalist with a female family.

He carries his modest sensitiveness to the point of anthropophagy, or very nearly that.

His mode of procedure, although it seems at the first glance simple and easy, is none the less clownish and superlatively entertaining, and in my opinion it deserves to be handed down to posterity--to our last nephews, as the old fogies of the so-called Grand Siècle used to say.

In the first place, to pose as a journalist of this variety, you need some few preliminary utensils--such as two or three legitimate wives, a few mothers, as many sisters as possible, a full assortment of daughters, and cousins innumerable.--The second requisite is a play or novel of some sort, a pen, ink, paper, and a printer. Perhaps it would be as well to have an idea or two and several subscribers; but you can do without them, if you have a large stock of philosophy and the shareholders' money.

When you have all these things you can set up as a moral journalist. The two following recipes, varied to suit the occasion, will suffice for the editorial part.

Models of Virtuous Articles Concerning a First Performance.

"After the literature of blood, the literature of mud; after the morgue and the galleys, the alcove and the brothel; after the rags stained by murder, the rags stained by debauchery; after," etc. (according to the necessity of the occasion and the available space, you can continue in this vein from six lines to fifty or more),--"this is as it should be.--This is where neglect of sacred doctrines and romantic licentiousness lead: the stage has become a school of prostitution where one dares not venture, save with fear and trembling, with a woman one respects. You come upon the faith of an illustrious name, and you are obliged to retire at the third act with your young daughter all confused and abashed. Your wife hides her blushes behind her fan; your sister, your cousin," etc. (The degrees of relationship may be diversified at pleasure; it is enough that they be all females.)

NOTE.--There is one man who has carried morality so far as to say: "I will not go to see that play with my mistress."--That man I admire and love; I carry him in my heart, as Louis XVIII. carried all France in his; for he has conceived the most triumphant, the most monumental, the most insane, the most extravagant idea that has passed through the brain of man in this blessed nineteenth century, which has seen the birth of so many and such amusing ideas.

The method of dealing with a book is very expeditious and within the range of every intellect:

"If you choose to read this book, lock yourself securely into your own room; do not leave it lying on the table. If your wife and your daughter should open it, they would be lost.--This is a dangerous book, it advises vicious habits. It would have made a great success, perhaps, in the time of Crébillon, in the houses of kept mistresses, at a duchess's select supper-parties; but now that morals are purified, now that the hand of the people has razed the rotten edifice of aristocracy, and that,--etc., etc.--there must be in every work an idea--an idea--yes, a moral and religious idea which--an exalted and profound aim, answering to the needs of humanity; for it is a deplorable thing that young writers should sacrifice the most sacred things to success, and should expend their talent--a notable talent by the way--in lewd descriptions that would make a captain of dragoons blush."--(The virginity of the captain of dragoons is, after the discovery of America, the most delightful discovery that has been made for a long while.)--"The novel we are considering recalls Justine, the philosophic Thérèse, Félicia, Compère Matthieu, the Contes de Grécourt, the Priapées of the Marquis de Sade." The virtuous journalist is immensely erudite in the matter of filthy novels;--I am very curious to know why.

It may be obtained at Eugène Renduel's, Rue des Grands-Augustins, No. 22. A handsome volume in 8vo. with vignette. Price 7 francs 50 centimes.

Eccò,--ecce,--see it.

It is frightful to think that, through the fault of the newspapers, there are many honest manufacturers who have only these two recipes to live upon, they and the numerous families they employ.

Apparently I am the most monumentally immoral personage to be found in Europe or elsewhere; for I can see nothing more licentious in the novels and plays of the present day than in the novels and plays of an earlier time, and I find it difficult to understand why the ears of the gentlemen of the journals have suddenly become so Jansenically ticklish.

I do not believe that the most innocent newspaper man will dare to say that Pigault-Lebrun, Crébillon Fils, Louvet, Voisenon, Marmontel, and all other writers of novels and tales do not surpass in immorality, since there is such a thing as immorality, the most dissolute and licentious productions of Messieurs Such-an-one and So-and-so, whom I do not name out of regard for their modesty.

One must be most notoriously false to his convictions not to agree to that.

Let not the objection be made that I have cited names little known or unfavorably known. If I have not mentioned the brilliant, imperishable names, it is not because they will not support my assertion with the weight of their great authority.

The novels and tales of Voltaire, aside from the question of merit, are most assuredly no more suitable to be given as prizes to little slips of boarding-school misses than are the immoral tales of our friend the lycanthropist, or even the moral tales of the insipid Marmontel.

What do we find in the comedies of the great Molière? the sacred institution of marriage--as the catechism and the newspapers call it--scoffed at and ridiculed in every scene.

The husband is old, ugly, and peevish; he wears his wig awry; his coat is out of fashion; he has a bill-headed cane, a nose smeared with snuff, short legs, and a paunch as fat as a budget.--He stammers, says nothing but foolish things, and does as many as he says; he sees nothing, he hears nothing; his wife is kissed before his face, and he has no idea what is going on; that state of things lasts until he is well and duly proved a cuckold in his own eyes and in the eyes of the whole audience, who are mightily edified and applaud in a way to bring the walls down.

They who applaud the loudest are they who are the most married.

In Molière, marriage is named George Dandin or Sganarelle.

Adultery is Damis or Clitandre; there is no name sweet and charming enough for it.

The adulterer is always young, handsome, well-made, and a marquis at the very least. He enters from the wings humming the very latest waltz; he takes one or two steps on the stage with the most deliberate, all-conquering air imaginable; he scratches his ear with the pink nail of his deftly spread little finger; he combs his lovely fair hair with his tortoise-shell comb, and arranges his ruffles, which are of great volume. His doublet and his hose are almost covered with bows and knots of ribbon; his neckband is from the best maker; his gloves smell sweeter than balsam and civet; his plumes cost a louis apiece.

How his eye sparkles and his cheek glows! how smiling his mouth! how white his teeth! how soft and well cared for his hand!

He speaks, naught issues from his lips save poesy, perfumed gallantries in the most refined style and with the most charming manner; he has read the latest novels and knows all about poetry, he is brave, and quick to draw his sword, he scatters gold with lavish hand.--And so Angélique, Agnès, Isabelle, can hardly refrain from leaping on his neck, well-bred and great ladies though they be; and so the husband is regularly betrayed in the fifth act, and is very lucky that he was not in the first.

That is how marriage is treated by Molière, one of the loftiest and most serious geniuses who ever lived.--Do you think there is anything stronger in the suits of Indiana and of Valentine?

Paternity is even less respected, if that be possible. Witness Orgon, Géronte, and all the rest of them.

How they are robbed by their sons, cheated by their valets! How their avarice, their obstinacy, their idiocy are laid bare, without mercy for their age!--What practical jokes! what mystifications.--How they are taken by the shoulder and pushed out of life, poor old fellows, who take a long time to die and refuse to give up their money! how much is said about the immortality of parents! what arguments against heredity, and how much more convincing they are than all this Saint-Simonian declamation!

A father is an ogre, an Argus, a jailer, a tyrant, something that at the best is good for nothing but to delay a marriage for three acts until the final reconciliation.--A father is the ridiculous husband perfected.--A son is never ridiculous in Molière; for Molière, like all authors at all possible epochs, paid his court to the young generation at the expense of the old.

And what of the Scapins, with their striped cloaks à la Napolitaine, their caps tilted over their ears, their plumes sweeping the layers of air,--are not they very pious, very chaste individuals, most worthy of canonization?--The galleys are filled with honest folk who have not done the fourth part of what they do. The knavery of Trialph is paltry knavery compared with theirs. And the Lisettes, the Martons, tudieu! what hussies!--The girls of the street are far from being as sharp, as quick at prurient retort as they. How well they understand how to deliver a note! what good watch they keep during assignations!--On my word, they are invaluable girls, serviceable and shrewd advisers.

It is a charming company that walks and fidgets through those comedies and imbroglios.--Duped guardians, cuckold husbands, lewd maids, keen-witted valets, young ladies mad with love, dissolute sons, adulterous wives; are not these quite as bad as the melancholy young beaux and poor, weak women, oppressed and impassioned, of the dramas and novels of the writers in vogue to-day?

And yet the denouements, minus the final blow of the dagger, minus the regulation cup of poison, are as happy as the time-honored ending of a fairy tale, and everybody, even the husband, is perfectly satisfied. In Molière, virtue is always in disgrace, always being pummelled; it is virtue that wears horns and turns her back to Mascarille; morality barely shows its face once at the end of the play, in the somewhat commonplace person of the gendarme Loyal.

All this that we have said is not intended to knock a chip off Molière's pedestal; we are not mad enough to attempt to shake that bronze colossus with our weak arms; we desired simply to show the pious feuilletonistes, who are terrified by recent works and by those of the romantic school, that the old classics, whom they urge us every day to read and imitate, far surpass them in looseness and immorality.

To Molière we might easily add Marivaux and La Fontaine, those two strongly-contrasted exponents of the French mind, and Regnier and Rabelais and Marot, and many others. But it is not our purpose in this place to prepare, from the standpoint of morality, a course in literature for the benefit of the virgin minds of the feuilleton.

It seems to me that we should not raise such a hubbub for so small a matter. Luckily we are not living in the days of the fair Eve, and we cannot, in good conscience, be as primitive and patriarchal as people were in the days of the ark. We are not little girls preparing for our first communion; and when we play crambo, we do not answer cream-pie. We are passably knowing in our innocence, and our virginity has been on the town for a long while; those are things that one does not have twice, and, whatever we may do, we cannot recover them, for there is nothing in the world that runs faster than a fleeing virginity and a vanishing illusion.

After all, perhaps there is no great harm in that, and knowledge of everything is preferable to ignorance of everything. That is a question that I leave for those who know more than I, to discuss. The fact remains that the world has passed the age when one can feign modesty and chastity, and I consider it too old a greybeard to play the child and the virgin without making itself ridiculous.

Since its marriage to civilization, society has lost the right to be artless and bashful. There are certain blushes that are all right for the bridal bed, but can serve no further purpose the next day; for the young wife thinks no more of the maiden, it may be, or if she does think of her, it is a most improper thing and gravely endangers her husband's reputation.

When I chance to read one of the fine sermons that have taken the place of literary criticism in the public sheets, I sometimes feel great remorse and dire apprehension, having on my conscience some paltry equivocal stories, a little too highly spiced, such as a young man of spirit and animation may have to reproach himself for.

Beside these Bossuets of the Café de Paris, these Bourdaloues of the balcony at the Opéra, these Catos at so much a line, who berate the present age in such fine fashion, I esteem myself the most infamous villain that ever marred the face of the earth; and yet, God knows, the list of my sins, capital as well as venial, with the usual blank spaces and leads, would barely, even in the hands of the most skilful publisher, make one or two octavo volumes a day, which is a small matter for one who does not claim to be bound for paradise in the other world and to win the Monthyon prize or be rose-maiden in this.

And then, when I think that I have met under the table, and elsewhere, too, a considerable number of these dragons of virtue, I return to a better opinion of myself, and I consider that, whatever faults I may have, they have another which is, in my eyes, the greatest and worst of all:--I refer to hypocrisy.

By looking carefully one might perhaps find another little vice to add; but this is so hideous that I really hardly dare to name it. Come nearer and I will breathe its name into your ear:--it is envy.

Envy, and nothing else.

It is envy that crawls and wriggles through all these paternal homilies; however careful it may be to hide itself, you can see its flat little viper's head from time to time gleaming above the metaphors and rhetorical figures; you surprise it licking with its forked tongue its lips blue with venom, you hear it hissing softly in the shadow of an insidious epithet.

I am well aware that it is insufferably conceited to say that any one envies you, and that a dandy who boasts of a conquest is almost as nauseating.--I am not so boastful as to believe that I have enemies or envious detractors; that is a piece of good fortune that is not given to everybody, and I probably shall not enjoy it for a long time; so I will speak freely and without reservation as one who is perfectly disinterested in the matter.

An unquestionable fact, and easy of demonstration to those who may doubt it, is the natural antipathy of the critic to the poet--of him who does nothing to him who does something--of the drone to the bee--of the gelding to the stallion.

You do not become a critic until the fact is established to your own satisfaction that you cannot be a poet. Before descending to the pitiful rôle of watching cloaks and counting strokes like a billiard-marker or a tennis-court attendant, you have long courted the Muse, you have tried to seduce her; but you have not sufficient vigor for that; your breath has failed you and you have fallen back, pale and broken-winded, to the foot of the sacred mountain.

I can conceive that antipathy. It is painful to see another take his seat at the banquet to which you are not invited and lie with the woman who would have none of you. I pity with all my heart the poor eunuch who is compelled to assist at the delights of the Great Turk.

He is admitted to the most secret recesses of the Oda; he escorts the sultanas to the bath; he sees their lovely bodies gleaming in the silvery water of the great reservoirs, shedding streams of pearls and smoother than agate; the most hidden charms are disclosed to him unveiled. No one is embarrassed by his presence.--He is a eunuch.--The sultan caresses his favorite before him and kisses her on her pomegranate mouth.--In very truth his is a terribly false position and he must be sadly embarrassed to keep himself in countenance.

It is the same with the critic who sees the poet walking in the garden of poesy with its nine fair odalisques, and disporting himself indolently in the shade of tall green laurels. It is very hard for him not to pick up stones in the road to throw at him and wound him over the wall, if he is skilful enough to do it.

The critic who has produced nothing of his own is a coward; he is like an abbé paying court to a layman's wife: the layman cannot pay him back in his own coin or fight with him.

I think that an account of the different methods of depreciating any sort of work, resorted to during the last month, would be at least as interesting as the story of Tiglath-Pileser, or of Gemmagog, who invented peaked shoes.

There would be enough matter to fill fifteen or sixteen folio volumes, but we will have pity on the reader and confine ourselves to a few lines--a favor for which we demand more than everlasting gratitude.--In a very remote age, lost in the darkness of time--it was fully three weeks ago--the romance of the Middle Ages flourished principally in Paris and the suburbs. The coat of arms was held in high esteem; coiffures à la Hennin were not despised and party-colored trousers were thought well of; the dagger was priceless; the peaked shoe was adored as a fetich.--There was nothing but ogive windows, turrets, colonnettes, stained glass, cathedrals, and fortified châteaux;--the characters were all damoiselles and damoiseaux, pages and varlets, beggars and swash-bucklers, gallant knights and ferocious castellans;--all of which were more innocent certainly than innocent games, and did absolutely no harm to anybody.

The critic did not wait for the second romance before beginning his work of depreciation: as soon as the first appeared, he enveloped himself in his robe of camel's hair, and sprinkled a bushel of ashes on his head; then, in his loud, wailing voice, he began to cry:

"More Middle Ages, nothing but the Middle Ages! who will deliver me from the Middle Ages, from the Middle Ages which are not the Middle Ages?--Paste-board and terra-cotta Middle Ages, which have nothing of the Middle Ages save the name!--Oh! these iron barons, in their iron armor, with iron hearts in their iron breasts! Oh! the cathedrals with their rose-work always in bloom and their stained glass in flower, with their lace-work of granite, with their open-work trefoils, their toothed gables, their chasubles of stone embroidered like a bride's veil, with their tapers, their psalms, their glittering priests, with their people on their knees, their rumbling organ, and their angels soaring aloft and flapping their wings under the arches!--how they have spoiled my Middle Ages, my refined, brightly-colored Middle Ages!--how they have blotted it from sight under a layer of coarse plaster!--what discordant colors!--Ah! ignorant daubers, who fancy you have created an effect by splashing red upon blue, white upon black, and green upon yellow, you have seen only the outer shell of the Middle Ages, you have not divined the true meaning of the Middle Ages, the blood does not circulate beneath the skin in which you have clothed your phantoms, there is no heart in your steel corselets, there are no legs in your tricot trousers, no stomach or breast behind your emblazoned skirts; they are clothes that have the shape of men and that is all.--So, down with the Middle Ages as they are presented to us by the fabricators"--the great word is out, the fabricators!--"The Middle Ages meet no need of the present day, we must have something else."

And the public, seeing how the feuilletonistes snarled at the Middle Ages, was seized with an ardent passion for the Middle Ages, which they claim to have killed at a single blow. The Middle Ages invaded everything, assisted by the obstruction of the newspapers:--dramas, melodramas, novels, tales, poetry--there were even Middle-Age vaudevilles, and Momus recited feudal mummeries.

Beside the romance of the Middle Ages flourished the carrion romance, a very pleasing variety, which nervous petites-maîtresses and blasé cooks consumed in great numbers.

The feuilletonistes speedily came flocking to the stench, like crows to the carrion, and they tore with the beaks of their pens and inhumanly put to death that poor species of novel, which asked nothing more than to be allowed to prosper and putrefy in peace on the greasy shelves of the book-stalls. What did they not say? what did they not write?--Literature of the morgue or the galleys, an executioner's nightmare, hallucination of a drunken butcher, or a convict-keeper with the jail-fever! They benignly gave us to understand that the authors were assassins and vampires, that they had contracted the vicious habit of killing their fathers and mothers, that they drank blood from human skulls, that they used the bones of the legs for forks and cut their bread with a guillotine.

And yet they knew better than any one, from having frequently breakfasted with them, that the authors of those charming slaughters were excellent young men of family, very easy-going and in the best society, white-gloved and fashionably near-sighted,--with a decided preference for beefsteak over human cutlets, and more accustomed to drink Bordeaux wine than the blood of young girls or new-born children.--From having seen and touched their manuscripts, they knew perfectly well that they were written with ink of great virtue upon English paper, and not with blood from the guillotine upon the skin of a Christian flayed alive.

But whatever they might say or do, the age was after carrion, and the charnel-house suited them better than the boudoir; the reader would bite at no hook that was not baited with a little body already turning blue.--A state of things easily conceived; put a rose at the end of your line and the spiders will have time to spin their webs in the crook of your elbow before you catch the tiniest minnow; put on a worm or a piece of rank cheese, and carp, barbel, perch, eels, will all leap three feet out of water to snap at it.--Men are not so different from fish as people generally seem to believe.

One would have said that the newspaper men had become Quakers, Brahmins, or Pythagoreans, or bulls, they had been suddenly seized with such a horror of red and of blood.--Never had they been known to be in such a soft and melting mood;--it was cream and buttermilk.--They admitted the existence of only two colors, sky-blue and apple-green. Pink was only tolerated, and if the public would have allowed them to do as they chose, they would have led it to the banks of the Lignon to feed on spinach beside the sheep of Amaryllis. They had changed their black frock-coats for the dove-colored jacket of Celadon or Silvander, and surrounded their goose-feathers with clusters of roses and ribbons after the style of a shepherd's crook. They let their hair float in the wind like a child's, and had made themselves virgins according to the recipe of Marion Delorme, and about as successfully as she.

They applied to literature the article in the Decalogue:

Thou shalt not kill.

The least little dramatic murder was no longer permissible, and the fifth act had become an impossibility.

They considered the poniard extravagant, poison monstrous, the axe horrible beyond words. They would have liked dramatic heroes to live to the age of Melchisedec; and yet it has been a recognized fact, from time immemorial, that the object of every tragedy is to have a poor devil of a great man, who cannot help himself, murdered in the last act, just as the object of every comedy is to join in matrimony two idiots of jeunes premiers of about sixty years each.

It was about this time that I threw into the fire--after having taken a duplicate, as almost always happens--two superb and magnificent Middle-Age dramas, one in verse, the other in prose, in which the heroes were quartered and boiled on the stage, which would have been very entertaining and decidedly unusual.

To conform to their ideas, I have since composed an antique tragedy in five acts called Héliogabale, the hero of which throws himself into the privy, an extremely novel situation and one that has the merit of introducing a bit of scenery not yet seen on the stage.--I have also written a modern drama, very much superior to Antoni,--Arthur, or L'Homme Fatal, where the providential idea arrives in the shape of a Strasbourg pâté de foie gras, which the hero eats to the last crumb after committing various rapes, and that, combined with his remorse, brings on a frightful attack of indigestion of which he dies.--A moral ending, if ever there was one, which proves that God is just, and that vice is always punished and virtue rewarded.

As for the monstrosity species, you know how they have dealt with that, how they have abused Han d'Islande the cannibal, Habibrah the obi, Quasimodo the bell-ringer, and Triboulet, who is only a hunch-back--all that family so strangely swarming--all those gigantic deformities whom my dear neighbor sends crawling and leaping through the virgin forests and the cathedrals of his romances. Neither the great strokes à la Michael Angelo, nor the curiosities worthy of Callot, nor the effects of light and shade after the fashion of Goya, could find favor before them; they sent him back to his odes when he wrote novels, to his novels when he wrote dramas: the ordinary tactics of journalists who always praise what you have done at the expense of what you are doing. A fortunate man, however, is he who is acknowledged to be superior, even by the feuilletonistes, in all his works,--except, of course, the particular one with whom they are dealing,--and who need only write a theological treatise or a manual of cooking to have his plays admired.

Concerning the romance of the heart, the ardent, impassioned romance, whose father is Werther the German, and its mother Manon Lescaut the French-woman, we had a few words to say, at the beginning of this preface, of the moral scurf that has fastened itself upon it in desperation, on the pretext of religion and good morals. The critical louse is like the body-louse that deserts the dead body for the living. From the corpse of the Middle Ages the critics have passed on to the living body of this age, whose skin is tough and hard and might well break their teeth.

We think, notwithstanding a deep respect for the modern apostles, that the authors of these so-called immoral novels, without being so thoroughly married as the virtuous journalist, generally have a mother, and that several of them have sisters and are provided with an abundance of female relations; but their mothers and sisters do not read novels, even immoral novels; they sew and embroider and look after the house-keeping.--Their stockings, as Monsieur Planard would say, are--entirely white: you can look at them on their legs--they are not blue, and excellent Chrysale, who hated learned women so, would suggest them as models to the skilled Philaminte.

As for these gentlemen's wives, as they have so many of them, however spotless their husbands may be, it seems to my simple mind that there are certain things they ought to know.--Indeed, it may well be that their husbands have never shown them anything. In that case I understand that they are bent upon keeping them in that useful state of blessed ignorance. God is great and Mohammed is his prophet!--Women are inquisitive creatures; may Heaven and morality grant that they gratify their curiosity in a more legitimate way than that adopted by their grandmother Eve, and do not go putting questions to the serpent!

As for their daughters, if they have been at boarding-school, I fail to see what they can learn from these books.

It is as absurd to say that a man is a drunkard because he describes an orgy, or a debauchee because he narrates a debauch, as to claim that a man is virtuous because he has written a book on morals; we see the contrary every day. It is the character that speaks, not the author; his hero may be an atheist, that does not mean that he is an atheist; he represents brigands as acting and talking like brigands, but that does not make him a brigand. On that theory we should have to guillotine Shakespeare, Corneille, and all the writers of tragedy; they have committed more murders than Mandrin and Cartouche; we have not done it, however, and, indeed, I do not believe that we shall do it for a long time to come, however virtuous and moral criticism may become. It is one of the manias of these little shallow-brained scribblers always to substitute the author for the work, and to resort to personalities, in order to give some paltry scandalous interest to their miserable rhapsodies, which they are well aware that nobody would read if they contained only their individual opinions.

We can hardly imagine the tendency of all this wailing, or what good purpose all this indignation and snarling can serve--or who impels these Messieurs Geoffroy on a small scale to set themselves up as the Don Quixotes of morality, and, like genuine literary policemen, to lay hands upon and club, in the name of virtue, every idea that appears in a book with its mob-cap awry or its petticoats raised a little too high.--It is very strange.

Whatever they may say, the present age is immoral,--if the word means anything, which we much doubt,--and we require no other proof of it than the quantity of immoral books it produces and the success they meet with.--Books follow morals, morals do not follow books.--The Regency produced Crébillon, not Crébillon the Regency. Boucher's little shepherdesses were painted and immodest because the little marchionesses of the day were painted and immodest.--Pictures are painted after models, not models after pictures. Somebody or other has said somewhere or other that literature and the arts have a great influence on morals. Whoever he is, he is unquestionably a great fool.--It is as if some one should say: "Green peas make the springtime grow;" on the other hand, green peas grow because it is spring, and cherries because it is summer. The trees bear fruit, the fruit assuredly does not bear the trees--the law is everlasting and invariable in its variations; the centuries succeed one another and each bears its fruit, which differs from that of the preceding century; books are the fruit of morals.

Beside the moral journalists, under this shower of homilies, as if it were a summer shower in a park, there has arisen, between the boards of the Saint-Simonian stage, a school of little mushrooms of a curious new variety, of which we propose to give the natural history.

They are the utilitarian critics,--poor fellows whose noses were so short that they would not hold spectacles, and who could not see to the end of their noses.

When an author tossed upon their desk a volume of any sort,--novel or poetry,--these gentry would lean back nonchalantly in their chairs, balance them on their hind legs, sway back and forth, puffing themselves out with a knowing air, and say:

"What purpose does this book serve? How can it be applied to securing the moral and spiritual well-being of the most numerous and poorest class? What! not a word of the needs of society, nothing civilizing and progressive! How, instead of dealing synthetically with the great problems of humanity, and following, through the events of history, the phases of the regenerating, providential idea, can you waste time writing poetry and novels which lead to nothing, and which do nothing to help the generation forward in the pathway of the future? How can you concern yourself about form and style and rhythm, in presence of such grave interests?--What do we care for rhythm and style and form? that is all right in its place!" (Poor foxes, they are too green!)--"Society is suffering, it has a terrible gnawing at the vitals;" (translate: no one will subscribe to the utilitarian papers.) "It is for the poet to seek the cause of the trouble and cure it. He will find a way by sympathizing heart and soul with humanity;" (philanthropic poets! that would be something rare and charming.) "We await the coming of that poet, we pray for his coming with all our hearts. When he appears, his will be the acclamations of the multitude, his the palm-leaves, his the wreaths, his the Prytaneum."

Very fine; but as we desire the reader to stay awake to the end of this blessed preface, we will not continue this very close imitation of the utilitarian style, which, by its nature, is unusually soporific, and might advantageously replace laudanum and the discourses of the Academy.

No, fools, no, cretins and goitrous creatures that you are, a book does not make gelatine soup;--a novel is not a pair of seamless boots; a sonnet is not a syringe with a continuous stream; a drama is not a railroad,--all essentially civilizing things and tending to assist humanity along the pathway of progress.

By the bowels of all the popes, past, present, and to come, no, two hundred thousand times no.

You cannot make a nightcap out of a metonymy, or wear comparisons by way of slippers; you cannot use antithesis as an umbrella; unluckily we have not the secret of clapping a few variegated rhymes upon the stomach as we put on a waistcoat. I have a firm conviction that the ode is a garment too light for winter, and that one would be no more warmly clad with the strophe, the antistrophe, and the epode, than the wife of the cynic who was contented to have only her virtue as a chemise and went about as naked as your hand, as history tells us.

The famous Monsieur de la Calprenède once had a coat, and when some one asked what kind of cloth it was made of, he answered: Silvandre.--Silvandre was a play of his that had just been produced with success.

Such arguments make one raise his shoulders above his head, higher than the Duke of Gloucester's.

People who claim to be economists and who wish to rebuild society from top to bottom, seriously put forward such trash.

A novel may be useful in two ways:--one material, the other spiritual, if we may use such an expression with reference to a novel.--Its material utility consists, first, of the few thousand francs that go into the author's pocket, and ballast him so that neither the devil nor the wind can whisk him away; to the publisher it is a noble race-horse who stamps and rears with his cabriolet of ebony and steel, as Figaro says; to the paper manufacturer, one more factory on some stream and often the means of spoiling a fine site; to the printers, divers hogsheads of logwood to put their windpipes in shape once a week; to the circulating libraries, piles of big sous covered with proletariat verdigris and a quantity of grease, which if it were carefully collected and utilized would render the whale-fishery useless.--The spiritual utility consists in this: that, while you are reading novels, you fall asleep, and you are not reading utilitarian, virtuous, and progressive newspapers, or other similar indigestible, stupefying drugs.

Let any one say after this that novels do not assist civilization.--I will say nothing of the tobacco agents, grocers, and dealers in fried potatoes, who have a very great interest in this branch of literature, the paper used therein being, as a general rule, of a superior quality to that used by the newspapers.

Verily it is enough to make one split one's sides with laughter to hear messieurs the republican or Saint-Simonian utilitarians hold forth.--In the first place, I should be glad to know the exact meaning of that great lubberly substantive with which they daily lard the empty void of their columns, and which serves them as a sort of shibboleth and sacramental term:--Utility; what is the word, and to what is it applied?

There are two kinds of utilities, and the meaning of the word is always relative. What is useful for one is not for another. You are a cobbler, I am a poet.--It is useful for me to have my first line rhyme with my second.--A dictionary of rhymes is of great utility to me; you have no use for it in cobbling an old pair of boots, and it is fair to say that a cobbler's knife would be of no great use to me in writing an ode.--Now, you will remark that a cobbler is much above a poet, and that we could get along better without the latter than without the former. Without undertaking to cry down the illustrious profession of cobbler, which I honor equally with the profession of constitutional monarch, I will humbly confess that I should prefer to have my shoe down at heel rather than to have my lines haltingly rhymed, and that I should be more willing to go without boots than without poems. As I rarely go out, and walk more readily on my head than on my feet, I wear out fewer shoes than a virtuous republican who does nothing but run from one government department to another trying to induce somebody to toss him an office.

I know that there are those who prefer windmills to churches, and the bread that feeds the body to that that feeds the soul. To them I have nothing to say. They deserve to be economists in this world and also in the other.

Is there anything absolutely useful on this earth and in this life that we live? In the first place, there is very little use in one being on the earth and living. I challenge the most erudite of the band to say of what use we are, unless it be to subscribe neither to the Constitutionnel nor to a journal of any sort.

Secondly, the utility of our existence being admitted a priori, what are the really useful things to maintain it? A plate of soup and a bit of bread twice a day are all that we need to fill the stomach, in the strict acceptation of the word. The man for whom a coffin six feet by two will be enough and more than enough after his death, does not need much more space during his life. A hollow cube, seven or eight feet broad, long and deep, with a hole to breathe through, a single cell in the hive, is all that he needs to lodge him and to keep the rain from falling on his back. A quilt, rolled properly about his body, will protect him from the cold as well as, yes, better than, Staub's most stylish and elegant frock-coat.

With that a man can exist, theoretically. They say that one can live on twenty-five sous a day; but to keep from dying is not living; and I cannot see wherein a city organized on utilitarian principles would be more agreeable to live in than Père La Chaise.

Nothing beautiful is indispensable to life.--If flowers should be suppressed, the world would not suffer materially; and yet who could wish that there were no flowers? I would rather give up potatoes than roses, and I do not believe there is more than one utilitarian in the world capable of digging up a bed of tulips to make room for cabbages.

What good purpose does female beauty serve? Provided that a woman is well-developed physically, in a condition to receive a man and to produce children, she will always be good enough for the economist.

What is the use of music? or painting? Who would be foolish enough to prefer Mozart to Monsieur Carrel, Michael Angelo to the inventor of white mustard?

Nothing is really beautiful but that which cannot be made use of; everything that is useful is ugly, for it is the expression of some need, and the needs of man are vile and disgusting, like his poor, weak nature.--The most useful part of a house is the privy.

I myself, with due respect to those gentlemen, am one of those to whom superfluities are necessaries--and my liking for people and things is in inverse ratio to the services they render me. I prefer a Chinese vase, covered with dragons and mandarins, which is of no use to me at all, to a certain other vase, which is useful to me; and that one of my talents which I prize most highly is my inability to guess riddles and charades. I would very willingly renounce my privileges as a Frenchman and a citizen to see an authentic painting by Raphael, or a beautiful nude woman: the Princess Borghese, for instance, when she posed for Canova, or Julia Grisi when she was in her bath. For my part I would gladly consent to the return of that cannibal of a Charles X., if he would bring me, from his castle in Bohemia, a hamper of Tokay or Johannisberg, and I would agree that the suffrage laws were broad enough, if some of the streets were more so and other things less so.--Although I am not a born dilettante, I prefer the noise of squeaking fiddles and bass drums to that of Monsieur le Président's bell. I would sell my trousers to buy a ring and my daily bread for sweetmeats.--The most becoming occupation for a polished man is, it seems to me, to do nothing, or to smoke his pipe or his cigar analytically. I also have a high regard for those who play at skittles and for those who write good poetry. You see that my principles are very far from being utilitarian, and that I shall never become editor of a virtuous newspaper unless I am converted, which would be droll enough.

Instead of awarding a Monthyon prize as a reward of virtue, I would prefer to give, like Sardanapalus, that great philosopher who has been so misunderstood, a handsome premium to the man who should invent a new form of pleasure; for enjoyment seems to me the true aim of life and the only useful thing in the world. God has so willed it, for it was He who made women, perfumes, light, lovely flowers, good wines, prancing horses, greyhounds, and Angora cats; nor did he say to his angels: "Be virtuous," but: "Love;" and he gave us a mouth, more sensitive than the rest of the skin, with which to kiss women, eyes uplifted to see the light, a subtle sense of smell to inhale the soul of flowers, well-knit thighs to press the sides of stallions and fly swifter than thought without railroad or steamboat, delicate hands with which to caress the long head of the greyhound, the velvety back of the cat, and the gleaming shoulders of creatures of doubtful virtue; in a word, he bestowed only upon us the threefold, glorious privilege of drinking without being thirsty, of striking a light, and of making love at all seasons, which distinguishes us from the brute much more than the custom of reading newspapers and drawing maps.

Mon Dieu! what an idiotic thing is this alleged perfectibility of the human race that is being dinned into our ears! One would say in truth that man is a machine susceptible of improvements, and that the more careful adjustment of a wheel, a counterpoise more conveniently placed, might make it work more smoothly and more handily. When they have succeeded in giving man a double stomach, so that he can chew his cud like an ox, and eyes in the back of his head, like Janus, so that he can see those who stick out their tongues at him behind his back, and contemplate his unworthiness in a less uncomfortable position than that of the Venus Callipyges at Athens, and in planting wings on his shoulder blades so that he will not be obliged to pay six sous to ride in an omnibus; when they have given him a new organ, well and good: then the word perfectibility will begin to mean something.

Since all these fine ameliorations, what has been done that was not done as well and better before the deluge?

Have we succeeded in drinking more than they drank in the days of ignorance and barbarism--old style? Alexander, the doubtful friend of the fair Hephæstion, was no small drinker, although there was no Journal des Connaissances Utiles in his day, and I am unable to conceive how any utilitarian, unless he should become oïnopic and more puffed out than the younger Lepeintre or a hippopotamus, could drain the great beaker which he called Hercules' cup. The Maréchal de Bassompierre, who emptied his long boot to the health of the Thirteen Cantons, seems to me a singularly estimable personage in his way and very hard to improve upon. What economist will enlarge our stomachs so that they will hold as many beefsteaks as the late Milo of Crotona, who ate an ox? The bill of fare at Véfour's Café Anglais, or at any other culinary celebrity's that you choose, seems to me very ill-supplied and commonplace compared to the menu of Trimalcion's dinner.--At whose table in these days are a sow and her twelve shoats served on a single platter? Who has eaten muræna and lampreys fattened on man? Do you really think that Brillat-Savarin has improved upon Apicius? Could Vitellius's big tripe-man find at Chevet's the wherewithal to fill his famous Minerva's shield with pheasants' and peacocks' brains, tongues of flamingoes and scarus livers?--The oysters you eat at the Rocher de Cancale are such a great delicacy compared with the oysters of Lucrin, for which a lake was made expressly.--The little establishments in the suburbs kept by the marquises of the Regency were wretched little boxes, if we compare them with the villas of the Roman patricians at Baiæ, Capri, and Tibur. The Cyclopean splendor of the great voluptuaries who erected everlasting monuments for a day's pleasure should cause us to fall flat on our faces before the genius of antiquity and erase forever from our dictionaries the word perfectibility.

Has a new capital crime been invented? Unfortunately there are only seven of them as before, the number of the just man's backslidings for one day, which is very moderate.--Indeed, I do not think that after a century of progress, at the rate we are travelling, any lover would be capable of renewing the thirteenth labor of Hercules.--Can a man be agreeable to his divinity a single time oftener than in the days of Solomon? Many very illustrious scholars and very respectable ladies answer that question in the negative, and aver that amiability is on the wane. Very good! if that is so, why do you talk of progress?--I know that you will tell me that there is an Upper Chamber and a Lower Chamber, that you hope that everybody will soon be an elector and the number of representatives doubled or trebled. Do you think that there are not enough mistakes in grammar made in the national tribune as it is, and that the deputies are not numerous enough for the vile work they have to do? I can hardly understand the utility of quartering two or three hundred provincials in a wooden barrack, with a ceiling painted by Monsieur Fragonard, there to botch and bungle nobody knows how many absurd or atrocious little laws.--What difference does it make whether it is a sabre, a holy-water sprinkler, or an umbrella that governs us?--It is a club all the same, and I am amazed that progressive men should dispute as to the kind of club that is to make their shoulders tingle, when it would be much more progressive and less expensive to break it and throw the pieces to all the devils.

The only one of you who has any common sense is a madman, a great genius, an imbecile, a divine poet far above Lamartine, Hugo, and Byron; it is Charles Fourrier, the phalansterian, who is all that in his single person: he alone is logical and has the courage to carry his theory through to its inevitable consequence.--He asserts, without hesitation, that man will soon have a tail fifteen feet long with an eye at the end of it; that surely is progress and will permit us to do a thousand fine things we could not do before, such as killing elephants without striking a blow, balancing ourselves on trees without swings, as handily as the most expert ape, doing without sunshade or umbrella by raising the tail above the head like a plume, as squirrels do, who get along very well without umbrellas; and other prerogatives too numerous to mention. Several phalansterians claim that they already have a little tail that asks nothing better than to grow longer, if only God gives them length of days.

Charles Fourrier has invented as many species of animals as George Cuvier, the great naturalist. He invented horses that will be thrice the size of elephants, dogs as large as tigers, fish capable of feeding more people than the three small fishes of the Saviour, which the incredulous Voltaireans believe were poissons d'Avril, and I the text of a noble parable. He has built cities beside which Rome, Tyre, and Babylon are simply mole-hills; he has piled Babels one upon another and built spiral stairways ascending among the clouds to a greater height than all those in John Martinn's engravings; he has conceived I cannot say how many orders of architecture and new sauces; he has drawn a plan for a theatre which would seem immense even to Romans of the Empire, and prepared a dinner menu that Lucius or Nomentanus might have deemed sufficient for a dinner to their friends; he promises to create new forms of pleasure and to develop the organs and the senses; he is to make women fairer and more voluptuous, men more robust and sturdy; he guarantees you children and proposes to reduce the population of the world so that every one will be in easy circumstances; which is more reasonable than to urge paupers to make other paupers, with the idea of shooting them down in the streets when they breed too fast and sending them bullets instead of bread.

Progress is possible in no other way.--All the rest is bitter mockery, buffoonery without wit, which is not even calculated to deceive gullible fools.

The phalanstery is really a step in advance of the abbey of Thélème, and definitely relegates the earthly paradise to the ranks of those things that are altogether superannuated and old-fashioned. The Thousand and One Nights and Madame d'Aulnay's Tales alone can contend successfully with the phalanstery. What fertility! what invention! There is material there from which to supply marvels for three thousand cartloads of romantic or classic poems; and our versifiers, whether academicians or not, are paltry inventors compared to Monsieur Charles Fourrier, the inventor of startling attractions.--This idea of making use of impulses which people have hitherto sought to repress, is most assuredly a lofty and powerful idea.

Ah! you say that we are making progress!--Suppose that a volcano should open its maw to-morrow at Montmartre, and should make a winding-sheet of ashes and a tomb of lava for Paris, as Vesuvius once did for Stabia, Pompeii, and Herculaneum, and that, some thousand years hence, the antiquaries of that day should make excavations and exhume the corpse of the dead city, tell me what monument would remain standing to bear witness to the splendor of the mighty entombed, the Gothic Notre-Dame?--They would form truly a fine idea of our artistic development when they cleared away the rubbish from the Tuileries, redecorated by Monsieur Fontaine! The statues on Pont Louis XV. would look splendid in the museums of those days. And were it not for the pictures of the ancient schools and the statues of antiquity or the Renaissance crowded together in the gallery of the Louvre, that long shapeless conduit; were it not for the ceiling by Ingres, which would show that Paris was not a Barbary camp or a village of Welches or Topinamboux, the things that would be unearthed from the ruins would be very interesting.--Short swords carried by National Guardsmen, firemen's helmets, coins struck from pyriform dies, that is the kind of thing they would find instead of the beautiful, curiously-carved weapons that the Middle Ages left in the recesses of their towers and ruined tombs, the medallions that fill the Etruscan vases and pave the cellars of all Roman buildings. As for our wretched veneered furniture, all the cheap boxes, naked and ugly and shabby, that we call commodes or secretaries, and all our shapeless, fragile utensils,--I trust that time would have been compassionate enough to destroy the last vestige of them.

Once, this whim of erecting a magnificent, pretentious monument took possession of us. In the first place we were obliged to borrow the plan from the old Romans; and even before it was finished, our Panthéon tottered on its legs like a child with the rickets and staggered like a drunken man, so that we had to give it crutches of stone, otherwise it would have measured its shameful length on the ground, in sight of all the world, and would have given the nations something to laugh at for more than a hundred francs.--We thought it better to set up an obelisk on one of our squares; we had to go and filch it at Luxor, and we were two years bringing it home. Old Egypt lined its roads with obelisks as we line ours with poplars; it carried bundles of them under its arm as the market-gardener carries bunches of asparagus, and carved a monolith from the sides of its mountains of granite more easily than we make tooth-picks or ear-picks. A few centuries ago Raphael was living and Michael Angelo; now we have Monsieur Paul Delaroche, all because we are progressing.--You boast of your Opéra; ten Opéras like yours could dance a saraband in a Roman circus. Monsieur Martin, himself, with his tame tiger and his poor gouty lion, sound asleep like a subscriber to the Gazette, makes a very poor showing beside the gladiator of antiquity. Take your benefit performances that last till two o'clock in the morning--what do they amount to when you think of the games that lasted a hundred days, of the plays in which real ships really fought in real water; in which thousands of men conscientiously cut one another in pieces;--aye, turn pale O heroic Franconi!--in which, when the sea retired, the desert arrived with its roaring tigers and lions, awe-inspiring supernumeraries who did duty but once; in which the leading rôle was taken by some robust, athletic Dacian or Pannonian whom they would very often have found it embarrassing to produce at the end of the play, his sweetheart being a lovely and dainty Numidian lioness who had fasted for three days?--Does it not seem to you that the rope-dancing elephant was superior to Mademoiselle Georges? Do you suppose Mademoiselle Taglioni is a better dancer than Arbuscula, and Perrot better than Bathyllus? I am convinced that Roscius could have given points to Bocage, excellent actor though he is,--Galeria Coppiola played ingénue rôles when she was more than a hundred years old. It is fair to say that the oldest of our jeunes premières is but little more than sixty, and that Mademoiselle Mars shows no sign of progress in that direction: they had three or four thousand gods in whom they believed, and we have only one and we hardly believe in him; that is a strange kind of progress.--Was not Jupiter a better man than Don Juan and a much more successful seducer? Verily, I cannot see what we have discovered or even improved.

After the progressive journalists, as if to serve as a foil to them, come the blasé journalists, who are usually twenty or twenty-two years old, who have never left their quarter and have as yet lain only with their housekeeper. Everything bores them, tires them out; they are sated, blasé, used up, inaccessible. They know beforehand what you are going to say to them; they have seen, felt, heard, experienced everything that it is possible to see, feel, hear, and experience; the human heart has no corner so dark that they have not held a lantern to it. They say to you with marvellous self-possession: "The human heart is not like that; women are not made so; that character is falsely drawn;"--or else: "What's this! always love or hatred! always men and women! Can't you talk about something else? Why, man is worn threadbare, and woman, more so, since Monsieur de Balzac took a hand.

"'Who will deliver us from men and women?'

"Do you think your fable is new, monsieur? it is new after the fashion of the Pont-Neuf: nothing in the world could be more common; I read it somewhere or other;--when I was out at nurse or somewhere else; it's been dinned into my ears for ten years.--By the way, monsieur, understand that there's nothing I don't know, that everything is worn threadbare for me, and that even if your idea were as virginal as the Virgin Mary, I would swear, none the less, that I had seen it prostituting itself on street corners to the vilest scribblers and the most contemptible pedants."

Journalists of that stamp are responsible for Jocko, Le Monstre Vert, Les Lions de Mysore, and a thousand other charming conceits.

They are constantly complaining of being obliged to read books and see plays. Apropos of a paltry vaudeville, they will talk about flowering almond-trees, limes that perfume the air, the breezes of spring, the odor of the young foliage; they set up for lovers of nature after the style of young Werther, and yet they have never set foot outside of Paris and could not tell a cabbage from a beet.--If it is winter, they prate about the joys of the domestic fireside, and the crackling fire, and the andirons, and the slippers, and the reverie and the state between sleeping and waking; they never fail to quote Tibullus's famous line:

Quam juvat immites ventos audire cubantem,

by the aid of which they assume a knowing and at the same time ingenuous air, the most fascinating thing imaginable. They pose as men upon whom the work of men can no longer make any impression, whom the emotions aroused by the drama leave as cold and hard as the knife with which they cut their quills, but who exclaim, nevertheless, with Jean Jacques Rousseau: "Ah! there's the periwinkle!" They profess fierce antipathy to the colonels at the Gymnase, the American uncles, the cousins, male and female, the sensitive old grumblers, the romantic widows, and try to cure us of the vaudeville by proving every day by the feuilletons that all Frenchmen are not born wicked.--In truth, we see no great harm in that, but the contrary, and we are glad to acknowledge that the extinction of the vaudeville or the opera-comique in France--national style--would be one of the greatest benefactions that the press and Heaven could bestow.--But I should be very glad to know what species of literature these gentlemen would allow to be established in its place. To be sure, it could be no worse.

Others preach against false taste and translate Seneca the tragedian. Lastly, and to close the procession, a new battalion of critics has been formed, of a species never before seen.

Their formula for estimating a work is the most convenient, the most elastic, the most malleable, the most peremptory, the most superlative, and the most successful that a critic ever could have conceived. Zoilus would certainly have lost nothing thereby.

Hitherto, when it has seemed desirable to depreciate a work of any sort or to cast odium upon it in the eyes of the patriarchal and simple-minded subscriber, the ordinary method has been to make false or cunningly isolated quotations; to maim sentences and mutilate lines in such a way that the author himself would have considered himself the most ridiculous creature on earth; to bring accusations of imaginary plagiarisms; to place passages from his book side by side with passages from ancient or modern authors, which had not the least connection therewith; to accuse him, after the style of a cook and with innumerable solecisms, of not knowing his own language and of degrading the French of Racine and Voltaire; to assert in all seriousness that his book tended toward anthropophagy, and that readers would infallibly become cannibals or have hydrophobia in the course of the week; but all that was paltry, out of date, false and fossilized to the last degree. By dint of having dragged along through feuilletons and Variétés articles, the charge of immorality became insufficient, and so unfit for service that the Constitutionnel, a bashful and progressive journal, as we know, was almost the only one that had the desperate courage to continue to use it.

So they invented the criticism of the future, the Prospective criticism. Can you imagine, at first thought, what a charming thing it is and what a prolific imagination it indicates? The recipe is simple and I can tell you what it is. The book that will be considered fine and will be praised is the book that has not yet appeared. The one that has just appeared is infallibly detestable. The one to appear to-morrow will be superb; but it is always to-day. It is the same with this sort of criticism as with the barber who had these words in huge letters for his sign:

SHAVING FREE HERE TO-MORROW.

All the poor devils who read the placard promised themselves for the next day the ineffable, sovereign sweetness of being barbered once in their lives without unloosing their purse-strings: and the hair on their chins easily grew half a foot during the night that preceded that blessed day; but when they had the napkin around their necks, the barber asked them if they had any money and bade them pay up, or he would treat them like nut-pickers or apple-gatherers of Le Perche; and he swore a mighty sacre dieu that he would cut their throats with his razor unless they paid him; and when the poor devils, whining and whimpering, talked about the sign and the sacrosanct inscription:--"Ha! ha! my little fatties!" said the barber, "you don't know so much after all, and you'd much better go back to school! The sign says: 'To-morrow!' I'm no such whimsical fool as to shave for nothing to-day; my confrères would say I was throwing away my trade.--Come another time, come the week that has two Sundays together, and you'll find everything all right. May I be called a niggardly fellow and a flat, if I don't shave you for nothing, on the word of an honest barber."

Authors who read a prospective article in which an existing work is attacked always flatter themselves that the book they are writing will be the book of the future. They try to accommodate themselves, as much as possible, to the ideas of the critic, and become socialists, progressives, moralizers, palingenetics, mystics, pantheists, buchezists, thinking in that way to escape the anathema; but the same thing happens to them that happened to the barber's customers:--to-day is not the eve of to-morrow. The to-morrow that we hear so much about will never shine upon the world; for the formula is too convenient to be abandoned so soon. Even while decrying the book of which they are jealous and which they would be glad to annihilate, they put on the gloves of the most generous impartiality. They apparently ask nothing better than to approve and praise it, and yet they never do it. This recipe is very superior to the one that we might call retrospective, which consists in vaunting ancient works only--works which no one reads and no one cares about--at the expense of modern books, which people do think about and which wound their self-esteem more directly.

We said, before beginning this review of messieurs the critics, that the material would fill fifteen or sixteen folio volumes, but that we would content ourselves with a few lines; I am beginning to fear that those lines will prove to be each two or three thousand fathoms long and will resemble those thick, bulky pamphlets that a cannon-ball would not make a hole through, which bear the perfidious title: "A word concerning the Revolution," a word concerning this or that. The history of the doings of the manifold loves of the goddess Madeleine de Maupin, would run great risk of being elbowed out of the first book, and you will understand that two whole volumes are not too much to sing worthily the adventures of that lovely Bradamante.--That is why, however much we may desire to continue the blazonry of the illustrious Aristarchuses of the age, we will content ourselves with the partial sketch we have drawn, adding a few reflections concerning the good-nature of our easy-going confrères in Apollo, who, as stupid as the Cassander of pantomime, stand still to receive the blows from Harlequin's lath and the clown's kicks in the stern, without budging any more than an idol.

They resemble a fencing-master, who should fold his arms behind his back during a bout, and receive all his opponent's thrusts in his unprotected breast without attempting a single parry.

It is like the trial of a cause in which the king's attorney only is allowed to speak, or a debate in which no reply is permitted.

The critic puts forward this or that theory. He makes a great dash and ostentatious display. Absurd, detestable, monstrous; it resembles nothing, it resembles everything. A drama is produced, the critic goes to see it; he finds that it bears no resemblance to the drama he had constructed in his head on the strength of the title; thereupon he substitutes, in his feuilleton, his own drama for the author's. He interlards it with his erudite phrases; he relieves himself of all the knowledge he has collected the day before in some library, and belabors people to whom he ought to go to school, and the least of whom could teach greater men than he.

Authors endure this with a magnanimity, a long-suffering which seems to me truly inconceivable. After all is said and done, who are these critics whose tone is so cutting, whose words are so peremptory, that one would say they were veritable sons of the gods? they are simply men who were our school-fellows, and who have evidently profited less by their studies than we, since they have produced nothing and can do nothing but befoul and spoil the work of others like genuine Stymphalian vampires.

Would it not be worth while to criticise the critics? for those disgruntled great men, who are so fond of playing the magnificent and the fastidious, are far from being infallible like the Holy Father. There would be matter enough to fill a daily newspaper of the largest size. Their errors, historical or otherwise, their distorted quotations, their mistakes in grammar, their plagiarism, their drivel, their oft-repeated, ill-bred jests, their paucity of ideas, their lack of intelligence and tact, their ignorance of the simplest things which leads them to mistake the Piræus for a man and Monsieur Delaroche for a painter, would furnish authors with ample material for vengeance, without other labor than that of drawing a line under the passages and reproducing them word for word; for one does not receive a commission as a great writer with a commission as critic, and to reproach others for errors in language or taste is not enough to ensure one against making them himself; our critics prove it every day.--If Chateaubriand, Lamartine, and other men of that stamp should become critics, I could understand that people might go down on their knees and worship them; but that Messieurs Z. K. Y. V. Q. X., or any other letter of the alphabet between Alpha and Omega, should set themselves up as little Quintilians and scold you in the name of morality and good literature--that is what always disgusts me and sends me into an unparalleled rage. I would like to have a police ordinance issued prohibiting certain names from attacking certain others. To be sure, a cat may look at a king, and Saint-Peter's at Rome, giant that it is, cannot prevent the Transteverins from defiling its base in strange fashion; but I do not believe, nevertheless, that it would be a bad idea to inscribe upon certain monumental reputations:

NO FILTH DEPOSITED HERE.

Charles X. alone understood the question. By ordering the suppression of newspapers he conferred a great service upon the arts and civilization. Newspapers are in a certain sense courtiers or jobbers, who interpose between artists and public, between king and people. We know the fine things that resulted therefrom. This perpetual barking and snarling benumbs inspiration and causes such a feeling of distrust in the heart and mind, that no one dares place his confidence either in a poet or in a government; the result being that royalty and poesy, the two greatest things in the world, become impossible, to the great detriment of the people, who sacrifice their well-being to the paltry pleasure of reading every morning a few vile sheets printed on vile paper, besmeared with vile ink, and filled with vile stuff. There was no criticism of art under Julius II., and I never heard of any feuilleton on the subject of Daniel de Volterra, Sebastiano del Piombo, Michael Angelo, Raphael, Ghiberti della Porta, or Benvenuto Cellini; and yet I think that, for people who had no newspapers, who did not know the word art or the word artistic, they had a fair share of talent and acquitted themselves reasonably well at their trade. The reading of newspapers hinders the growth of genuine scholars and genuine artists; it is like daily dissipation that brings you, enervated and weak, to the bed of the Muses, those harsh, exacting damsels who will have none but fresh and lusty lovers. The newspaper kills the book, as the book has killed architecture, as artillery has killed physical courage and muscular strength. No one realizes the pleasures that the newspapers deprive us of. They strip everything of its virginity; they prevent us from having anything of our own, even from owning a book all by ourselves; they deprive us of the pleasure of being surprised at the theatre by telling us beforehand how every play ends; they deprive us of the pleasure of spreading idle gossip and tittle-tattle and slander, of inventing false news or peddling genuine news for a whole week through every salon in society. They drone ready-made opinions to us, do what we will, and warn us against things we might like; by their means, dealers in phosphorous matches, although they have poor memories, discuss literature as impertinently as provincial academicians; by their means we hear, all day long, in place of artless opinions or individual nonsense, ill-digested fragments of newspapers, which resemble omelets half cooked on one side and burned on the other,--and we are pitilessly stuffed with news three or four hours old, which children at the breast already know; they deaden our taste, they make us like those people who drink spiced brandy, and those who swallow lemons and grape-stalks, and lose the flavor of the most generous wines and cannot appreciate their delicate, perfumed bouquet. If Louis-Philippe should suppress all literary and political journals once for all, I should be infinitely grateful to him and I would dash off on the spot a fine, rambling dithyramb, in soaring verse with alternate rhymes; signed: "Your most humble and loyal subject," etc. Pray do not imagine that there would be no further interest in literature; in the days when there were no newspapers, a quatrain engrossed all Paris for a week, and a first performance for six months.

It is true that this step would result in the loss of advertisements and puffs at thirty sous a line, and notoriety would be less sudden and less overwhelming. But I have thought out a very ingenious way of replacing advertisements. If, between now and the day when this magnificent novel is placed on sale, my gracious sovereign shall have suppressed the newspapers, I shall most assuredly make use of it, and I anticipate wonders therefrom. When the great day arrives, twenty-four mounted criers, in the livery of Renduel, with his address on their backs and breasts, carrying banners in their hands with the title of the novel embroidered on both sides, each preceded by a drummer and kettle-drummer, will ride through the city, and, halting on all the squares and corners, will shout in a loud, distinct voice: "To-day, not yesterday or to-morrow, is placed on sale the admirable, the inimitable, the divine and more than divine novel by the most illustrious Théophile Gautier, Mademoiselle de Maupin, which Europe, not to mention other parts of the world and Polynesia, has been awaiting so impatiently for a year and more. It is selling at the rate of five hundred a minute, and editions follow one another from half-hour to half-hour; the nineteenth is already on sale. A detachment of municipal guards is stationed at the door of the shop, holding back the crowd and preventing all confusion." Surely that would be worth as much as three lines in the Débats or the Courrier Français, between advertisements of elastic belts, hoop-skirts, nursing-bottles with indestructible teats, Regnault paste, and remedies for fluor albus.

May, 1834.

MADEMOISELLE DE MAUPIN

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