Sentimental Education (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) (58 page)

“Your health!”

Frédéric touched glasses with him. He had, out of politeness, drunk a little too much. Besides, the strong sunlight dazzled him; and when they went up the Rue Vivienne together again, their shoulders touched each other in a fraternal fashion.

When he got home, Frédéric slept till seven o’clock. After that he called on the Maréchale. She had gone out with somebody—with Arnoux, perhaps! Not knowing what to do with himself, he continued his promenade along the boulevard, but could not get past the Porte Saint-Martin, because of the great crowd that blocked the way.

Poverty had left a considerable number of workmen to their own devices, and they used to come there every evening, no doubt to take stock of the situation and await a signal.

In spite of the law against riotous assemblies, these clubs of despair increased frightfully, and many citizens went along every day to the spot through bravado, and because it was the fashion.

All of a sudden Frédéric caught a glimpse, three yards away, of M. Dambreuse along with Martinon. He turned his head away, for since M. Dambreuse had gotten himself nominated as a representative of the people, he bore a grudge against him. But the capitalist stopped him.

“One word, my dear monsieur! I owe you an explanation.”

“I am not asking you for any.”

“Pray listen to me!”

It was not his fault in any way. Appeals had been made to him; pressure had, to a certain extent, been placed on him. Martinon immediately endorsed all that he had said. Some of the electors of Nogent had presented themselves in a deputation at his house.

“Besides, I expected to be free as soon as—”

A crush of people on the sidewalk forced M. Dambreuse to get out of the way. A minute after he reappeared, saying to Martinon:

“This is a great service you have done for me, really, and you won’t have any reason to regret—”

All three stood leaning against a shop in order to be able to chat more easily.

From time to time there was a cry of, “Long live Napoléon! Long live Barbès! Down with Marie!”
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The countless throng kept talking very loudly and all these voices, echoing off of the houses, made, a noise like the continuous ripple of waves in a harbour. At intervals they ceased; and then voices could be heard singing the “Marseillaise.”

Under the carriage-gates, mysterious men offered sword-sticks to those who passed. Sometimes two individuals, passing one another, would wink, and then quickly hurry away. The sidewalks were filled with groups of staring idlers. A dense crowd swayed to and fro on the pavement. Entire bands of police-officers, emerging from the alleys, had scarcely made their way into the midst of the multitude when they were swallowed up in the mass of people. Little red flags here and there looked like flames. Coachmen high up on their boxes waved their arms energetically, and then turned to go back. It was a case of perpetual movement—one of the strangest sights that could be imagined.

“How all this,” said Martinon, “would have amused Mademoiselle Cécile!”

“My wife, as you are aware, does not like my niece to come with us,” returned M. Dambreuse with a smile.

One could scarcely recognise in him the same man. For the past three months he had been crying, “Long live the Republic!” and he had even voted in favour of the banishment of Orleans. But there should be an end of concessions. He exhibited his rage so far as to carry a tomahawk in his pocket.

Martinon had one, too. Judicial posts no longer being a lifetime appointment, he had withdrawn from the Public Prosecutor’s Office and surpassed M. Dambreuse in his show of violence.

The banker especially hated Lamartine (for having supported Ledru-Rollin) and, at the same time, Pierre Leroux, Proudhon, Considérant, Lamennais,
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and all the cranks, all the Socialists.

“For in fact, what is it they want? The duty on meat has been abolished and so has imprisonment for debt. Now plans for a mortgage bank are under consideration; the other day it was a national bank; and there are five millions in the Budget for the workingmen! But luckily, it is over, thanks to Monsieur de Falloux!
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Good-bye to them! let them go!”

In fact, not knowing how to maintain the three hundred thousand men in the national workshops, the Minister of Public Works had that very day signed an order inviting all citizens between the ages of eighteen and twenty to serve as soldiers, or else head to the provinces to cultivate the ground there.

They were indignant at the alternative thus put before them, convinced that the object was to destroy the Republic. They were aggrieved by the thought of having to live at a distance from the capital, as if it were a kind of exile. They saw themselves dying of fevers in desolate parts of the country. To many of them, moreover, who had been accustomed to work of a refined nature, agriculture seemed a degradation; it was, in short, a mockery, a decisive breach of all the promises which had been made to them. If they offered any resistance, force would be employed against them. They had no doubt of it, and made preparations to anticipate it.

About nine o’clock the riotous assemblies which had formed at the Bastille and at the Châtelet ebbed back towards the boulevard. From the Porte Saint-Denis to the Porte Saint-Martin nothing could be seen save an enormous swarm of people, a single mass of a dark blue shade, nearly black. The men of whom one caught a glimpse all had burning eyes, pale complexions, faces emaciated with hunger and excited with a sense of wrong.

Meanwhile, some clouds had gathered. The stormy sky electrified the people, and they kept whirling about of their own accord with the great swaying movements of a swelling sea, and one felt that there was an incalculable force in the depths of this excited throng, and as it were, the energy of force of nature. Then they all began exclaiming: “Lights! Lights!” Many windows had no illumination, and stones were flung at the panes. M. Dambreuse deemed it prudent to withdraw from the scene. The two young men accompanied him home. He predicted great disasters. The people might once more invade the Chamber, and on this point he told them how he would have been killed on the fifteenth of May had it not been for the devotion of a National Guardsman.

“But I had forgotten! he is a friend of yours—your friend the earthenware manufacturer—Jacques Arnoux!” The rioters had been actually throttling him, when that brave citizen caught him in his arms and put him safely out of their reach.

So it was that, since then, there had been a kind of intimacy between them.

“It would be necessary, one of these days, to dine together, and, since you often see him, give him the assurance that I like him very much. He is an excellent man, and has, in my opinion, been slandered; and he has his wits about him in the morning. My compliments once more! A very good evening!”

Frédéric, after he had left M. Dambreuse, went back to the Maréchale, and, in a very gloomy fashion, said that she should choose between him and Arnoux. She replied sweetly that she did not understand “talk of this sort,” that she did not care about Arnoux, and had no attachment to him. Frédéric was thirsting to get out of Paris. She did not offer any opposition to this whim; and next morning they set out for Fontainebleau.
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The hotel at which they stayed could be distinguished from others by a fountain splashing in the middle of its courtyard. The doors of the various rooms opened out on a corridor, as in monasteries. The room assigned to them was large, well-furnished, hung with chintz, and quiet, due to the scarcity of tourists. Alongside the houses, people who had nothing to do kept passing up and down; then, under their windows, when the day was declining, children in the street were running races; and this tranquillity, following so soon the tumult they had witnessed in Paris, filled them with astonishment and exercised over them a soothing influence.

Every morning at an early hour, they went to pay a visit to the chateau. As they passed in through the gate, they had a view of its entire front, with the five pavilions covered with pointed roofs, and its horseshoe-shaped staircase at the far end of the courtyard, which is flanked by two lower buildings. On the paved ground lichens blended their colours with the tawny hue of bricks, and the entire appearance of the palace, rust-coloured like old armour, had about it something of the impassiveness of royalty—a sort of melancholy military grandeur.

At last, a man-servant made his appearance with a bunch of keys in his hand. He first showed them the apartments of the queen, the Pope’s oratory, the gallery of Francis I, the mahogany table on which the Emperor signed his abdication, and in one of the rooms cut in two the old Galerie des Cerfs, the place where Christine had Monaldeschi assassinated.
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Rosanette listened to this narrative attentively, then, turning towards Frédéric:

“No doubt it was jealousy? Better watch out!” After this they passed through the Council Chamber, the Guards’ Room, the Throne Room, and the drawing-room of Louis XIII. The uncurtained windows sent forth a white light. The handles of the window-latches and the brass feet of the consoles were slightly tarnished and dusty. The armchairs were hidden under coarse linen covers. Above the doors could be seen hunting-scenes of Louis XIV, and here and there hangings representing the gods of Olympus, Psyche, or the battles of Alexander.

As she was passing in front of the mirrors, Rosanette stopped for a moment to smooth her hair.

After passing through the Turret-Court and the Saint-Saturnin Chapel, they reached the Banqueting Hall.

They were dazzled by the magnificence of the ceiling, which was divided into octagonal sections set off with gold and silver, more finely chiselled than a jewel, and by the vast number of paintings covering the walls, from the immense fireplace, where the arms of France were surrounded by crescents and quivers, down to the musicians’ gallery, which had been erected at the other end along the entire width of the hall. The ten arched windows were wide open; the sun made the pictures gleam; the blue sky continued the ultramarine of the arches in an endless curve; and from the depths of the forest, where the lofty summits of the trees filled up the horizon, there seemed to come an echo of flourishes blown by ivory trumpets, and mythological ballets, princesses and nobles gathering together under the foliage disguised as nymphs or satyrs—an epoch of primitive science, of violent passions, and sumptuous art, when the ideal was to sweep away the world in a vision of the Hesperides, and when the mistresses of kings mingled their glory with the stars. There was a portrait of one of the most beautiful of these celebrated women in the form of Diana the huntress, and even the Infernal Diana, no doubt in order to indicate the power which she possessed even beyond the limits of the tomb. All these symbols confirmed her glory, and there remained about the spot something of her, an indistinct voice, a radiation that stretched out indefinitely. A mysterious feeling of retrospective lust took possession of Frédéric.

In order to divert these passionate longings he began to gaze tenderly on Rosanette, and asked her would she not like to have been this woman?

“What woman?”

“Diane de Poitiers!”
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He repeated:

“Diane de Poitiers, the mistress of Henry II.”

She uttered a little “Ah!” that was all.

Her silence clearly demonstrated that she knew nothing about the matter, and had failed to comprehend his meaning, so that out of kindness he said to her:

“Perhaps you are getting tired of this?”

“No, no—quite the opposite.” And lifting up her chin, and casting around her a vague glance Rosanette let these words escape her lips:

“It brings back memories!”

Meanwhile, it was easy to trace on her face a strained expression, a certain sense of awe; and, as this air of gravity made her look all the prettier, Frédéric overlooked it.

The carps’ pond amused her more. For a quarter of an hour she kept flinging pieces of bread into the water in order to see the fishes skipping about.

Frédéric had seated himself by her side under the linden-trees. He saw in imagination all the people who had haunted these walls—Charles V, the Valois Kings, Henry IV, Peter the Great, Jean Jacques Rousseau, and “the beautiful ladies who wept in the stage-boxes,” Voltaire, Napoleon, Pius VII, and Louis Philippe; and he felt himself surrounded, jostled, by these tumultuous dead. He was stunned by such a confusion of images, even though he found a certain fascination in contemplating them.

At last they descended into the flower-garden.

It is a vast rectangle, which presents to the spectator, at the first glance, its wide yellow walks, its square grass-plots, its ribbons of box-wood, its yew-trees shaped like pyramids, its low-lying green shrubs, and its narrow borders, in which scattered flowers stood out in spots on the grey soil. At the end of the garden is a park along whose entire length stretches a canal.

Royal residences have attached to them a peculiar kind of melancholy, due, no doubt, to their dimensions being much too large for the limited number of guests entertained within them, to the silence which one feels astonished to find in them after so many flourishes of trumpets, to the unchanging luxury, which attests by its antiquity to the transitory character of dynasties, the eternal misery of all things; and this emanation of the centuries, overwhelming and funereal, like the scent of a mummy, makes itself felt even in the simplest minds. Rosanette yawned greatly. They went back to the hotel.

After their breakfast an open carriage came round for them. They started from Fontainebleau at a point where several roads diverged, then went up at a walking pace a gravelly road leading towards a little pine-wood. The trees became larger, and, from time to time, the driver would say, “This is the Frères Siamois, the Pharamond, the Bouquet de Roi,” not forgetting a single one of these notable sites, sometimes even drawing up to enable them to admire the scene.