The Girl with the Golden Eyes | Page 7

children, whom
these lower middle classes are inevitably driven to exalt. Thus each
sphere directs all its efforts towards the sphere above it. The son of the
rich grocer becomes a notary, the son of the timber merchant becomes a
magistrate. No link is wanting in the chain, and everything stimulates
the upward march of money.
Thus we are brought to the third circle of this hell, which, perhaps, will
some day find its Dante. In this third social circle, a sort of Parisian
belly, in which the interests of the town are digested, and where they
are condensed into the form known as /business/, there moves and
agitates, as by some acrid and bitter intestinal process, the crowd of
lawyers, doctors, notaries, councillors, business men, bankers, big
merchants, speculators, and magistrates. Here are to be found even
more causes of moral and physical destruction than elsewhere. These
people--almost all of them--live in unhealthy offices, in fetid
ante-chambers, in little barred dens, and spend their days bowed down
beneath the weight of affairs; they rise at dawn to be in time, not to be
left behind, to gain all or not to lose, to overreach a man or his money,
to open or wind up some business, to take advantage of some fleeting
opportunity, to get a man hanged or set him free. They infect their
horses, they overdrive and age and break them, like their own legs,

before their time. Time is their tyrant: it fails them, it escapes them;
they can neither expand it nor cut it short. What soul can remain great,
pure, moral, and generous, and, consequently, what face retain its
beauty in this depraving practice of a calling which compels one to bear
the weight of the public sorrows, to analyze them, to weigh them,
estimate them, and mark them out by rule? Where do these folk put
aside their hearts? . . . I do not know; but they leave them somewhere
or other, when they have any, before they descend each morning into
the abyss of the misery which puts families on the rack. For them there
is no such thing as mystery; they see the reverse side of society, whose
confessors they are, and despise it. Then, whatever they do, owing to
their contact with corruption, they either are horrified at it and grow
gloomy, or else, out of lassitude, or some secret compromise, espouse it.
In fine, they necessarily become callous to every sentiment, since man,
his laws and his institutions, make them steal, like jackals, from corpses
that are still warm. At all hours the financier is trampling on the living,
the attorney on the dead, the pleader on the conscience. Forced to be
speaking without a rest, they all substitute words for ideas, phrases for
feelings, and their soul becomes a larynx. Neither the great merchant,
nor the judge, nor the pleader preserves his sense of right; they feel no
more, they apply set rules that leave cases out of count. Borne along by
their headlong course, they are neither husbands nor fathers nor lovers;
they glide on sledges over the facts of life, and live at all times at the
high pressure conduced by business and the vast city. When they return
to their homes they are required to go to a ball, to the opera, into
society, where they can make clients, acquaintances, protectors. They
all eat to excess, play and keep vigil, and their faces become bloated,
flushed, and emaciated.
To this terrific expenditure of intellectual strength, to such multifold
moral contradictions, they oppose--not, indeed pleasure, it would be too
pale a contrast--but debauchery, a debauchery both secret and alarming,
for they have all means at their disposal, and fix the morality of society.
Their genuine stupidity lies hid beneath their specialism. They know
their business, but are ignorant of everything which is outside it. So that
to preserve their self-conceit they question everything, are crudely and
crookedly critical. They appear to be sceptics and are in reality

simpletons; they swamp their wits in interminable arguments. Almost
all conveniently adopt social, literary, or political prejudices, to do
away with the need of having opinions, just as they adapt their
conscience to the standard of the Code or the Tribunal of Commerce.
Having started early to become men of note, they turn into mediocrities,
and crawl over the high places of the world. So, too, their faces present
the harsh pallor, the deceitful coloring, those dull, tarnished eyes, and
garrulous, sensual mouths, in which the observer recognizes the
symptoms of the degeneracy of the thought and its rotation in the circle
of a special idea which destroys the creative faculties of the brain and
the gift of seeing in large, of generalizing and deducing. No man who
has allowed