The Girl with the Golden Eyes | Page 5

and
pleasure of his fellow-citizens. This man solves the problem of
sufficing at once to his amiable wife, to his hearth, to the
/Constitutionnel/, to his office, to the National Guard, to the opera, and
to God; but, only in order that the /Constitutionnel/, his office, the
National Guard, the opera, his wife, and God may be changed into coin.
In fine, hail to an irreproachable pluralist. Up every day at five o'clock,
he traverses like a bird the space which separates his dwelling from the
Rue Montmartre. Let it blow or thunder, rain or snow, he is at the
/Constitutionnel/, and waits there for the load of newspapers which he

has undertaken to distribute. He receives this political bread with
eagerness, takes it, bears it away. At nine o'clock he is in the bosom of
his family, flings a jest to his wife, snatches a loud kiss from her, gulps
down a cup of coffee, or scolds his children. At a quarter to ten he puts
in an appearance at the /Mairie/. There, stuck upon a stool, like a parrot
on its perch, warmed by Paris town, he registers until four o'clock, with
never a tear or a smile, the deaths and births of an entire district. The
sorrow, the happiness, of the parish flow beneath his pen--as the
essence of the /Constitutionnel/ traveled before upon his shoulders.
Nothing weighs upon him! He goes always straight before him, takes
his patriotism ready made from the newspaper, contradicts no one,
shouts or applauds with the world, and lives like a bird. Two yards
from his parish, in the event of an important ceremony, he can yield his
place to an assistant, and betake himself to chant a requiem from a stall
in the church of which on Sundays he is the fairest ornament, where his
is the most imposing voice, where he distorts his huge mouth with
energy to thunder out a joyous /Amen/. So is he chorister. At four
o'clock, freed from his official servitude, he reappears to shed joy and
gaiety upon the most famous shop in the city. Happy is his wife, he has
no time to be jealous: he is a man of action rather than of sentiment.
His mere arrival spurs the young ladies at the counter; their bright eyes
storm the customers; he expands in the midst of all the finery, the lace
and muslin kerchiefs, that their cunning hands have wrought. Or, again,
more often still, before his dinner he waits on a client, copies the page
of a newspaper, or carries to the doorkeeper some goods that have been
delayed. Every other day, at six, he is faithful to his post. A permanent
bass for the chorus, he betakes himself to the opera, prepared to
become a soldier or an arab, prisoner, savage, peasant, spirit, camel's
leg or lion, a devil or a genie, a slave or a eunuch, black or white;
always ready to feign joy or sorrow, pity or astonishment, to utter cries
that never vary, to hold his tongue, to hunt, or fight for Rome or Egypt,
but always at heart--a huckster still.
At midnight he returns--a man, the good husband, the tender father; he
slips into the conjugal bed, his imagination still afire with the illusive
forms of the operatic nymphs, and so turns to the profit of conjugal
love the world's depravities, the voluptuous curves of Taglioni's leg.

And finally, if he sleeps, he sleeps apace, and hurries through his
slumber as he does his life.
This man sums up all things--history, literature, politics, government,
religion, military science. Is he not a living encyclopaedia, a grotesque
Atlas; ceaselessly in motion, like Paris itself, and knowing not repose?
He is all legs. No physiognomy could preserve its purity amid such
toils. Perhaps the artisan who dies at thirty, an old man, his stomach
tanned by repeated doses of brandy, will be held, according to certain
leisured philosophers, to be happier than the huckster is. The one
perishes in a breath, and the other by degrees. From his eight industries,
from the labor of his shoulders, his throat, his hands, from his wife and
his business, the one derives--as from so many farms--children, some
thousands of francs, and the most laborious happiness that has ever
diverted the heart of man. This fortune and these children, or the
children who sum up everything for him, become the prey of the world
above, to which he brings his ducats and his daughter or his son, reared
at college, who, with more education than his father, raises higher his
ambitious gaze. Often the son of a retail tradesman would fain be
something in the State.
Ambition of that sort carries on our thought to the second Parisian
sphere. Go up one story, then, and