The Girl with the Golden Eyes | Page 4

and the guillotine, religion and the cholera.
You are always acceptable to this world, you will never be missed by it.
What, then, is the dominating impulse in this country without morals,
without faith, without any sentiment, wherein, however, every
sentiment, belief, and moral has its origin and end? It is gold and
pleasure. Take those two words for a lantern, and explore that great
stucco cage, that hive with its black gutters, and follow the windings of

that thought which agitates, sustains, and occupies it! Consider! And, in
the first place, examine the world which possesses nothing.
The artisan, the man of the proletariat, who uses his hands, his tongue,
his back, his right arm, his five fingers, to live--well, this very man,
who should be the first to economize his vital principle, outruns his
strength, yokes his wife to some machine, wears out his child, and ties
him to the wheel. The manufacturer--or I know not what secondary
thread which sets in motion all these folk who with their foul hands
mould and gild porcelain, sew coats and dresses, beat out iron, turn
wood and steel, weave hemp, festoon crystal, imitate flowers, work
woolen things, break in horses, dress harness, carve in copper, paint
carriages, blow glass, corrode the diamond, polish metals, turn marble
into leaves, labor on pebbles, deck out thought, tinge, bleach, or
blacken everything--well, this middleman has come to that world of
sweat and good-will, of study and patience, with promises of lavish
wages, either in the name of the town's caprices or with the voice of the
monster dubbed speculation. Thus, these /quadrumanes/ set themselves
to watch, work, and suffer, to fast, sweat, and bestir them. Then,
careless of the future, greedy of pleasure, counting on their right arm as
the painter on his palette, lords for one day, they throw their money on
Mondays to the /cabarets/ which gird the town like a belt of mud,
haunts of the most shameless of the daughters of Venus, in which the
periodical money of this people, as ferocious in their pleasures as they
are calm at work, is squandered as it had been at play. For five days,
then, there is no repose for this laborious portion of Paris! It is given up
to actions which make it warped and rough, lean and pale, gush forth
with a thousand fits of creative energy. And then its pleasure, its repose,
are an exhausting debauch, swarthy and black with blows, white with
intoxication, or yellow with indigestion. It lasts but two days, but it
steals to-morrow's bread, the week's soup, the wife's dress, the child's
wretched rags. Men, born doubtless to be beautiful--for all creatures
have a relative beauty--are enrolled from their childhood beneath the
yoke of force, beneath the rule of the hammer, the chisel, the loom, and
have been promptly vulcanized. Is not Vulcan, with his hideousness
and his strength, the emblem of this strong and hideous nation--sublime
in its mechanical intelligence, patient in its season, and once in a

century terrible, inflammable as gunpowder, and ripe with brandy for
the madness of revolution, with wits enough, in fine, to take fire at a
captious word, which signifies to it always: Gold and Pleasure! If we
comprise in it all those who hold out their hands for an alms, for lawful
wages, or the five francs that are granted to every kind of Parisian
prostitution, in short, for all the money well or ill earned, this people
numbers three hundred thousand individuals. Were it not for the
/cabarets/, would not the Government be overturned every Tuesday?
Happily, by Tuesday, this people is glutted, sleeps off its pleasure, is
penniless, and returns to its labor, to dry bread, stimulated by a need of
material procreation, which has become a habit to it. None the less, this
people has its phenomenal virtues, its complete men, unknown
Napoleons, who are the type of its strength carried to its highest
expression, and sum up its social capacity in an existence wherein
thought and movement combine less to bring joy into it than to
neutralize the action of sorrow.
Chance has made an artisan economical, chance has favored him with
forethought, he has been able to look forward, has met with a wife and
found himself a father, and, after some years of hard privation, he
embarks in some little draper's business, hires a shop. If neither
sickness nor vice blocks his way--if he has prospered--there is the
sketch of this normal life.
And, in the first place, hail to that king of Parisian activity, to whom
time and space give way. Yes, hail to that being, composed of saltpetre
and gas, who makes children for France during his laborious nights,
and in the day multiplies his personality for the service, glory,