The Brotherhood of Consolation | Page 5

in whom necessity, will, reflection, stand in place of talent,
march straight and resolutely in the path traced out for bourgeois
ambitions. Godefroid, on the contrary, revolted, wished to shine, tried
several brilliant ways, and blinded his eyes. He endeavored to succeed;
but all his efforts ended in proving the fact of his own impotence.
Admitting at last the inequality that existed between his desires and his
capacities, he began to hate all social supremacies, became a Liberal,
and attempted to reach celebrity by writing a book; but he learned, to
his cost, to regard talent as he did nobility. Having tried the law, the
notariat, and literature, without distinguishing himself in any way, his
mind now turned to the magistracy.
About this time his father died. His mother, who contented herself in
her old age with two thousand francs a year, gave the rest of the fortune
to Godefroid. Thus possessed, at the age of twenty-five, of ten thousand
francs a year, he felt himself rich; and he was so, relatively to the past.
Until then his life had been spent on acts without will, on wishes that
were impotent; now, to advance with the age, to act, to play a part, he

resolved to enter some career or find some connection that should
further his fortunes. He first thought of journalism, which always opens
its arms to any capital that may come in its way. To be the owner of a
newspaper is to become a personage at once; such a man works
intellect, and has all the gratifications of it and none of the labor.
Nothing is more tempting to inferior minds than to be able to rise in
this way on the talents of others. Paris has seen two or three parvenus
of this kind,--men whose success is a disgrace, both to the epoch and to
those who have lent them their shoulders.
In this sphere Godefroid was soon outdone by the brutal
Machiavellianism of some, or by the lavish prodigality of others; by the
fortunes of ambitious capitalists, or by the wit and shrewdness of
editors. Meantime he was drawn into all the dissipations that arise from
literary or political life, and he yielded to the temptations incurred by
journalists behind the scenes. He soon found himself in bad company;
but this experience taught him that his appearance was insignificant,
that he had one shoulder higher than the other, without the inequality
being redeemed by either malignancy or kindness of nature. Such were
the truths these artists made him feel.
Small, ill-made, without superiority of mind or settled purpose, what
chance was there for a man like that in an age when success in any
career demands that the highest qualities of the mind be furthered by
luck, or by tenacity of will which commands luck.
The revolution of 1830 stanched Godefroid's wounds. He had the
courage of hope, which is equal to that of despair. He obtained an
appointment, like other obscure journalists, to a government situation
in the provinces, where his liberal ideas, conflicting with the necessities
of the new power, made him a troublesome instrument. Bitten with
liberalism, he did not know, as cleverer men did, how to steer a course.
Obedience to ministers he regarded as sacrificing his opinions. Besides,
the government seemed to him to be disobeying the laws of its own
origin. Godefroid declared for progress, where the object of the
government was to maintain the /statu quo/. He returned to Paris almost
poor, but faithful still to the doctrines of the Opposition.
Alarmed by the excesses of the press, more alarmed still by the
attempted outrages of the republican party, he sought in retirement
from the world the only life suitable for a being whose faculties were

incomplete, and without sufficient force to bear up against the rough
jostling of political life, the struggles and sufferings of which confer no
credit,--a being, too, who was wearied with his many miscarriages;
without friends, for friendship demands either striking merits or
striking defects, and yet possessing a sensibility of soul more dreamy
than profound. Surely a retired life was the course left for a young man
whom pleasure had more than once misled,--whose heart was already
aged by contact with a world as restless as it was disappointing.
His mother, who was dying in the peaceful village of Auteuil, recalled
her son to live with her, partly to have him near her, and partly to put
him in the way of finding an equable, tranquil happiness which might
satisfy a soul like his. She had ended by judging Godefroid, finding
him at twenty-eight with two-thirds of his fortune gone, his desires
dulled, his pretended capacities extinct, his activity dead, his ambition
humbled, and his hatred against all that reached legitimate success
increased