The Girl with the Golden Eyes | Page 9

at an early age warped their nature.
Having no occupation other than to wallow in pleasure, they have
speedily misused their sense, as the artisan has misused brandy.
Pleasure is of the nature of certain medical substances: in order to
obtain constantly the same effects the doses must be doubled, and death
or degradation is contained in the last. All the lower classes are on their
knees before the wealthy, and watch their tastes in order to turn them
into vices and exploit them. Thus you see in these folk at an early age
tastes instead of passions, romantic fantasies and lukewarm loves.
There impotence reigns; there ideas have ceased--they have evaporated
together with energy amongst the affectations of the boudoir and the
cajolements of women. There are fledglings of forty, old doctors of
sixty years. The wealthy obtain in Paris ready-made wit and
science--formulated opinions which save them the need of having wit,
science, or opinion of their own. The irrationality of this world is
equaled by its weakness and its licentiousness. It is greedy of time to
the point of wasting it. Seek in it for affection as little as for ideas. Its
kisses conceal a profound indifference, its urbanity a perpetual
contempt. It has no other fashion of love. Flashes of wit without
profundity, a wealth of indiscretion, scandal, and above all,
commonplace. Such is the sum of its speech; but these happy fortunates
pretend that they do not meet to make and repeat maxims in the manner
of La Rochefoucauld as though there did not exist a mean, invented by
the eighteenth century, between a superfluity and absolute blank. If a
few men of character indulge in witticism, at once subtle and refined,
they are misunderstood; soon, tired of giving without receiving, they
remain at home, and leave fools to reign over their territory. This
hollow life, this perpetual expectation of a pleasure which never comes,
this permanent /ennui/ and emptiness of soul, heart, and mind, the
lassitude of the upper Parisian world, is reproduced on its features, and

stamps its parchment faces, its premature wrinkles, that physiognomy
of the wealthy upon which impotence has set its grimace, in which gold
is mirrored, and whence intelligence has fled.
Such a view of moral Paris proves that physical Paris could not be
other than it is. This coroneted town is like a queen, who, being always
with child, has desires of irresistible fury. Paris is the crown of the
world, a brain which perishes of genius and leads human civilization; it
is a great man, a perpetually creative artist, a politician with
second-sight who must of necessity have wrinkles on his forehead, the
vices of a great man, the fantasies of the artist, and the politician's
disillusions. Its physiognomy suggests the evolution of good and evil,
battle and victory; the moral combat of '89, the clarion calls of which
still re-echo in every corner of the world; and also the downfall of 1814.
Thus this city can no more be moral, or cordial, or clean, than the
engines which impel those proud leviathans which you admire when
they cleave the waves! Is not Paris a sublime vessel laden with
intelligence? Yes, her arms are one of those oracles which fatality
sometimes allows. The /City of Paris/ has her great mast, all of bronze,
carved with victories, and for watchman-- Napoleon. The barque may
roll and pitch, but she cleaves the world, illuminates it through the
hundred mouths of her tribunes, ploughs the seas of science, rides with
full sail, cries from the height of her tops, with the voice of her
scientists and artists: "Onward, advance! Follow me!" She carries a
huge crew, which delights in adorning her with fresh streamers. Boys
and urchins laughing in the rigging; ballast of heavy /bourgeoisie/;
working-men and sailor-men touched with tar; in her cabins the lucky
passengers; elegant midshipmen smoke their cigars leaning over the
bulwarks; then, on the deck, her soldiers, innovators or ambitious,
would accost every fresh shore, and shooting out their bright lights
upon it, ask for glory which is pleasure, or for love which needs gold.
Thus the exorbitant movement of the proletariat, the corrupting
influence of the interests which consume the two middle classes, the
cruelties of the artist's thought, and the excessive pleasure which is
sought for incessantly by the great, explain the normal ugliness of the
Parisian physiognomy. It is only in the Orient that the human race

presents a magnificent figure, but that is an effect of the constant calm
affected by those profound philosophers with their long pipes, their
short legs, their square contour, who despise and hold activity in horror,
whilst in Paris the little and the great and the mediocre run and leap and
drive, whipped on by an inexorable goddess,