The Girl with the Golden Eyes | Page 8

himself to be caught in the revolutions of the gear of these
huge machines can ever become great. If he is a doctor, either he has
practised little or he is an exception--a Bichat who dies young. If a
great merchant, something remains--he is almost Jacques Coeur. Did
Robespierre practise? Danton was an idler who waited. But who,
moreover has ever felt envious of the figures of Danton and
Robespierre, however lofty they were? These men of affairs, /par
excellence/, attract money to them, and hoard it in order to ally
themselves with aristocratic families. If the ambition of the working-
man is that of the small tradesman, here, too, are the same passions.
The type of this class might be either an ambitious bourgeois, who,
after a life of privation and continual scheming, passes into the Council
of State as an ant passes through a chink; or some newspaper editor,
jaded with intrigue, whom the king makes a peer of France-- perhaps to
revenge himself on the nobility; or some notary become mayor of his
parish: all people crushed with business, who, if they attain their end,
are literally /killed/ in its attainment. In France the usage is to glorify
wigs. Napoleon, Louis XVI., the great rulers, alone have always wished
for young men to fulfil their projects.
Above this sphere the artist world exists. But here, too, the faces
stamped with the seal of originality are worn, nobly indeed, but worn,
fatigued, nervous. Harassed by a need of production, outrun by their
costly fantasies, worn out by devouring genius, hungry for pleasure, the
artists of Paris would all regain by excessive labor what they have lost
by idleness, and vainly seek to reconcile the world and glory, money

and art. To begin with, the artist is ceaselessly panting under his
creditors; his necessities beget his debts, and his debts require of him
his nights. After his labor, his pleasure. The comedian plays till
midnight, studies in the morning, rehearses at noon; the sculptor is bent
before his statue; the journalist is a marching thought, like the soldier
when at war; the painter who is the fashion is crushed with work, the
painter with no occupation, if he feels himself to be a man of genius,
gnaws his entrails. Competition, rivalry, calumny assail talent. Some, in
desperation, plunge into the abyss of vice, others die young and
unknown because they have discounted their future too soon. Few of
these figures, originally sublime, remain beautiful. On the other hand,
the flagrant beauty of their heads is not understood. An artist's face is
always exorbitant, it is always above or below the conventional lines of
what fools call the /beau-ideal/. What power is it that destroys them?
Passion. Every passion in Paris resolves into two terms: gold and
pleasure. Now, do you not breathe again? Do you not feel air and space
purified? Here is neither labor nor suffering. The soaring arch of gold
has reached the summit. From the lowest gutters, where its stream
commences, from the little shops where it is stopped by puny
coffer-dams, from the heart of the counting-houses and great
workshops, where its volume is that of ingots--gold, in the shape of
dowries and inheritances, guided by the hands of young girls or the
bony fingers of age, courses towards the aristocracy, where it will
become a blazing, expansive stream. But, before leaving the four
territories upon which the utmost wealth of Paris is based, it is fitting,
having cited the moral causes, to deduce those which are physical, and
to call attention to a pestilence, latent, as it were, which incessantly acts
upon the faces of the porter, the artisan, the small shopkeeper; to point
out a deleterious influence the corruption of which equals that of the
Parisian administrators who allow it so complacently to exist!
If the air of the houses in which the greater proportion of the middle
classes live is noxious, if the atmosphere of the streets belches out cruel
miasmas into stuffy back-kitchens where there is little air, realize that,
apart from this pestilence, the forty thousand houses of this great city
have their foundations in filth, which the powers that be have not yet
seriously attempted to enclose with mortar walls solid enough to

prevent even the most fetid mud from filtering through the soil,
poisoning the wells, and maintaining subterraneously to Lutetia the
tradition of her celebrated name. Half of Paris sleeps amidst the putrid
exhalations of courts and streets and sewers. But let us turn to the vast
saloons, gilded and airy; the hotels in their gardens, the rich, indolent,
happy moneyed world. There the faces are lined and scarred with
vanity. There nothing is real. To seek for pleasure is it not to find
/ennui/? People in society have