Sentimental Education (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) (29 page)

Sénécal wore the gloomy look of a Puritan arriving in the midst of a party.

Deslauriers gave him a single comprehensive glance; then, with a very low bow:

“My lord, allow me to pay my respects to you!”

Dussardier threw his arms around him. “So you are a rich man now. Ah! upon my soul, so much the better!”

Cisy made his appearance with a black band on his hat. Since the death of his grandmother, he was enjoying a considerable fortune, and was less bent on amusing himself than on being distinguished from others—not being the same as everyone else—in short, on “having the proper stamp.” This was his favourite phrase.

However, it was now midday, and they were all yawning.

Frédéric was waiting for some one.

At the mention of Arnoux’s name, Pellerin made a wry face. He looked on him as a renegade since he had abandoned the fine arts.

“Suppose we forget him—what do you say to that?”

They all approved of this suggestion.

The door was opened by a man-servant wearing spats; and the dining-room could be seen with its lofty oak plinths with gold details, and its two sideboards laden with plates.

The bottles of wine were heating on the stove; the blades of new knives were glittering beside oysters. In the milky tint of the enamelled glasses there was a kind of alluring softness; and the table disappeared from view under its load of game, fruit, and meats of the rarest quality.

These attentions were lost on Sénécal. He began by asking for homemade bread (as dense as possible), and in connection with this subject, spoke of the murders of Buzançais and the crisis arising from a shortage of food.
⁶

Nothing of this sort could have happened if agriculture had been better protected, if everything had not been given up to competition, to anarchy, and to the deplorable maxim of “Laissez faire! Vive the free market!”
^ad
It was in this way that the feudalism of money was established—the worst form of feudalism. But let them take care! The people in the end will get tired of it, and may make the capitalist pay for their sufferings either by bloody proscriptions or by the plunder of their houses.

Frédéric saw, as if by a lightning-flash, a flood of men with bare arms invading Madame Dambreuse’s drawing-room, and smashing the mirrors with blows of pikes.

Sénécal went on to say that the workman, owing to the insufficiency of wages, was more unfortunate than the slave, the negro, and the pariah, especially if he has children.

“Should he get rid of them by asphyxiation, as some English doctor,—a disciple of Malthus—would suggest?”

And, turning towards Cisy: “Are we to follow the advice of the infamous Malthus?”
⁷

Cisy, who was ignorant of the infamy and even of the existence of Malthus, said by way of reply, that after all, much was being done to help the less fortunate, and that the higher classes—

“Ha! the higher classes!” said the Socialist, with a sneer. “In the first place, there are no higher classes. ’Tis the heart alone that makes anyone higher than another. We want no charity, understand! but equality, the fair division of goods.”

What he demanded was that the workman might become a capitalist, just as the soldier might become a colonel. The trade-guilds, at least, in limiting the number of apprentices, prevented workmen from growing inconveniently numerous, and the sentiment of fraternity was kept up by means of the fetes and the banners.

Hussonnet, as a poet, missed the banners; so did Pellerin,—a predilection which had taken possession of him at the Café Dagneaux, while listening to the Phalansterians talking. He expressed the opinion that Fourier was a great man.
⁸

“Come now!” said Deslauriers. “An old fool who sees in the overthrow of governments the effects of Divine vengeance. He is just like my lord Saint-Simon and his church, with his hatred of the French Revolution
⁹
—a set of buffoons who would re-establish Catholicism.”

M. de Cisy, no doubt in order to get information or to make a good impression, broke in with this remark, which he uttered in a mild tone:

“These two men of science are not, then, of the same way of thinking as Voltaire?”

“That fellow! You can have him!”

“What?” “Why, I thought—”

“Oh! no, he did not love the people!”

Then the conversation came down to contemporary events: the Spanish marriages, the squanderings of Rochefort, the new chapter of Saint-Denis, which had led to taxes being doubled. Nevertheless, according to Sénécal, people were already paying more than enough!

“And why are they paid? My God! to erect the palace for apes at the zoo in the Jardin des Plantes,
^ae
to make showy staff-officers parade along our squares, or to maintain out-dated etiquette amongst the servants of the Château!”

“I have read in
La Mode,”
said Cisy, “that at the Tuileries ball on the feast of Saint-Ferdinand, everyone was disguised as dandies.”

“How pitiful!” said the Socialist, with a shrug of his shoulders, as if to indicate his disgust.

“And the Museum of Versailles!” exclaimed Pellerin. “Let us talk about that! These idiots have cropped a Delacroix and lengthened a Gros!
^af
At the Louvre they have restored, scratched, and roughed up the canvases so much, that in ten years probably not one will be left. As for the errors in the catalogue, a German has written a whole volume on the subject. Upon my word, the foreigners are laughing at us.”

“Yes, we are the laughing-stock of Europe,” said Sénécal.

“ ’Tis because Art is subject to the Crown.”

“As long as you don’t have universal suffrage—”

“Let me speak!”—for the artist, having been rejected at every
salon
for the last twenty years, was filled with rage against Authority.

“Ah! let them not bother us! As for me, I ask for nothing. Only the Chambers ought to pass enactments in the interests of Art. A chair of æsthetics should be established with a professor who, being an artist as well as a philosopher, would succeed, I hope, in uniting the masses. You would do well, Hussonnet, to touch on this matter with a word or two in your newspaper?”

“Are the newspapers free? are we ourselves free?” said Deslauriers in an angry tone. “When one reflects that there might be as many as twenty-eight different formalities to keep a boat on the river, it makes me feel a longing to go and live amongst the cannibals! The Government is eating us up. Everything belongs to it—philosophy, law, the arts, the very air we breathe; and France, weakened and groaning, lies under the gendarme’s boot and the priest’s cassock.

The future Mirabeau thus poured out his bile in abundance. Finally he took his glass in his right hand, raised it, and with his other hand on his hip, and his eyes flashing:

“I drink to the utter destruction of the existing order of things—that is to say, of everything included in the words Privilege, Monopoly, Regulation, Hierarchy, Authority, State!”—and in a louder voice—“which I would like to smash as I do this!” dashing the beautiful wine-glass on the table, which broke into a thousand pieces.

They all applauded, and especially Dussardier.

The spectacle of injustices made his heart pound with indignation. Barbès had his sympathy.
¹⁰
He was one of those men who would fling himself under a carriage to help a fallen horse. His learning was limited to two works, one entitled
Crimes of Kings,
and the other
Mysteries of the Vatican.
He had listened to the lawyer with open-mouthed delight. At length, unable to stand it any longer:

“For my part, the thing I blame Louis Philippe for is abandoning the Poles!”
¹¹

“One moment!” said Hussonnet. “In the first place, Poland does not exist; ’tis an invention of Lafayette! The Poles, as a general rule, all belong to the Faubourg Saint-Marceau, the real ones having been drowned with Poniatowski.”
¹²
In short, “he no longer believed in all that;” he had “gotten over all that sort of thing; it was just like the sea-serpent, the revocation of the Edict of Nantes, and that antiquated nonsense about the Saint-Bartholomew massacre!”
¹³

Sénécal, while he did not defend the Poles, extolled the latest remarks made by the man of letters. The Popes had been slandered, and after all they, defended the people, and he called the League
^ag
“the dawn of Democracy, a great egalitarian movement against Protestant individualism.”

Frédéric was a little surprised at these views. They probably bored Cisy, for he changed the conversation to the
tableaux vivants
at the Gymnase Theatre, which at that time attracted a great number of people.
¹⁴

Sénécal regarded them with disfavour. Such exhibitions corrupted the daughters of the proletariat. Afterwards, it was noticeable that they showed off with shameless luxury. Therefore, he approved of the conduct of the Bavarian students who insulted Lola Montès.
^ah
Like Rousseau, he showed more esteem for the wife of a coal-burner than for the mistress of a king.

“You spit on pearls!” retorted Hussonnet in a majestic tone. And he took up the defense of ladies of this class in order to praise Rosanette. Then, as he happened to make an allusion to the ball at her house and to Arnoux’s costume, Pellerin remarked:

“People say that he is in trouble.”

The art-dealer had just been involved in a lawsuit with reference to his property at Belleville, and he was actually in a kaolin company in Lower Brittany with other jokers of his sort.

Dussardier knew more about him, for his own master, M. Moussinot, having made enquiries about Arnoux from the banker, Oscar Lefébvre, the latter had said in reply that he considered him by no means solvent, as he knew about extensions of credit he had requested.

The dessert was over; they passed into the drawing-room, which was covered, like that of the Maréchale, in yellow damask in the style of Louis XVI.

Pellerin found fault with Frédéric for not having chosen the Neo-Greek style; Sénécal struck matches against the wall hangings; Deslauriers did not make any remarks. He did make one in the library, which he called “a little girl’s library.” The principal contemporary writers were to be found there. It was impossible to speak about their works, for Hussonnet immediately began relating anecdotes with reference to their personal characteristics, criticising their faces, their habits, their dress, glorifying fifth-rate intellects and disparaging those of the first; and all the while making it clear that he deplored modern decadence. Such-and-such a country ditty had more poetry in it than all the lyrics of the nineteenth century. He went on to say that Balzac was overrated, that Byron was discredited, and that Hugo knew nothing about the theatre, etc.

“Why, then,” said Sénécal, “do you not have the volumes of the worker poets?”

And M. de Cisy, who devoted his attention to literature, was astonished at not seeing on Frédéric’s table some of those new physiological studies—the physiology of the smoker, of the angler, of the toll-keeper.

They went on irritating him to such an extent that he felt a longing to shove them out the door.

“But I’m being silly!” And then he drew Dussardier aside, and asked him if there was anything he could do for him.

The honest fellow was moved. He answered that with his cashier job he needed nothing.

After that, Frédéric led Deslauriers into his bedroom, and took out of his secretary two thousand francs:

“Look here, old boy, put this money in your pocket. ’Tis the balance of my old debts to you.”

“But—what about the journal?” said the lawyer. “You are, of course, aware that I spoke about it to Hussonnet.”

And, when Frédéric replied that he was “a little short of cash just now,” the other smiled in a sinister fashion.

After the liqueurs they drank beer, and after the beer, grog; and then they lighted their pipes once more. At last they left, at five o’clock in the evening, and they were walking along at each others’ side without speaking, when Dussardier broke the silence by saying that Frédéric had entertained them in excellent style. They all agreed with him on that point.

Then Hussonnet remarked that the lunch was too heavy. Sénécal found fault with the trivial character of the interior decoration. Cisy took the same view. It was absolutely devoid of “cachet.”

“For my part, I think,” said Pellerin, “he might have had the grace to give me a commission for a painting.”

Deslauriers held his tongue, as he had the bank-notes that had been given to him in his pants’ pocket.

Frédéric was left by himself. He was thinking about his friends, and it seemed to him as if a huge ditch surrounded with shade separated him from them. He had nevertheless held out his hand to them, and they had not responded to his sincerity of heart.

He remembered what Pellerin and Dussardier had said about Arnoux. Undoubtedly it must be a slanderous invention. But why? And he had a vision of Madame Arnoux, broke, weeping, selling her furniture. This idea tormented him all night long. Next day he presented himself at her house.

At a loss to find any way of communicating to her what he had heard, he asked her, as if in casual conversation, whether Arnoux still held possession of his building grounds at Belleville.

“Yes, he has them still.”

“He is now, I believe, a shareholder in a kaolin company in Brittany.”

“That’s true.”

“His earthenware-works are doing very well, are they not?”

“Well—I suppose so—”

And, as he hesitated:

“What is the matter with you? You frighten me!”

He told her the story about the credit extensions. She lowered her head, and said:

“I thought so!”