CHAPTER III. A DISCUSSION ON THE LITTLE CORPORAL
In the centre of the table flowers were disposed in a basket of gilded
bronze, decorated with eagles, stars, and bees, and handles formed like
horns of plenty. On its sides winged Victorys supported the branches
of candelabra. This centrepiece of the Empire style had been given
by Napoleon, in 1812, to Count Martin de l’Aisne, grandfather of
the present Count Martin-Belleme. Martin de l’Aisne, a deputy to the
Legislative Corps in 1809, was appointed the following year member of
the Committee on Finance, the assiduous and secret works of which suited
his laborious temperament. Although a Liberal, he pleased the Emperor by
his application and his exact honesty. For two years he was under a
rain of favors. In 1813 he formed part of the moderate majority which
approved the report in which Laine censured power and misfortune, by
giving to the Empire tardy advice. January 1, 1814, he went with his
colleagues to the Tuileries. The Emperor received them in a terrifying
manner. He charged on their ranks. Violent and sombre, in the horror of
his present strength and of his coming fall, he stunned them with his
anger and his contempt.
He came and went through their lines, and suddenly took Count Martin by
the shoulders, shook him and dragged him, exclaiming: “A throne is four
pieces of wood covered with velvet? No! A throne is a man, and that man
is I. You have tried to throw mud at me. Is this the time to remonstrate
with me when there are two hundred thousand Cossacks at the frontiers?
Your Laine is a wicked man. One should wash one’s dirty linen at home.”
And while in his anger he twisted in his hand the embroidered collar of
the deputy, he said: “The people know me. They do not know you. I am the
elect of the nation. You are the obscure delegates of a department.”
He predicted to them the fate of the Girondins. The noise of his spurs
accompanied the sound of his voice. Count Martin remained trembling the
rest of his life, and tremblingly recalled the Bourbons after the defeat
of the Emperor. The two restorations were in vain; the July government
and the Second Empire covered his oppressed breast with crosses and
cordons. Raised to the highest functions, loaded with honors by three
kings and one emperor, he felt forever on his shoulder the hand of the
Corsican. He died a senator of Napoleon III, and left a son agitated by
the same fear.
This son had married Mademoiselle Belleme, daughter of the first
president of the court of Bourges, and with her the political glories
of a family which gave three ministers to the moderate monarch. The
Bellemes, advocates in the time of Louis XV, elevated the Jacobin
origins of the Martins. The second Count Martin was a member of all the
Assemblies until his death in 1881. His son took without trouble his
seat in the Chamber of Deputies. Having married Mademoiselle Therese
Montessuy, whose dowry supported his political fortune, he appeared
discreetly among the four or five bourgeois, titled and wealthy, who
rallied to democracy, and were received without much bad grace by the
republicans, whom aristocracy flattered.
In the dining-room, Count Martin-Belleme was doing the honors of his
table with the good grace, the sad politeness, recently prescribed at
the Elysee to represent isolated France at a great northern court. From
time to time he addressed vapid phrases to Madame Garain at his right;
to the Princess Seniavine at his left, who, loaded with diamonds, felt
bored. Opposite him, on the other side of the table, Countess Martin,
having by her side General Lariviere and M. Schmoll, member of the
Academie des Inscriptions, caressed with her fan her smooth white
shoulders. At the two semicircles, whereby the dinner-table was
prolonged, were M. Montessuy, robust, with blue eyes and ruddy
complexion; a young cousin, Madame Belleme de Saint-Nom, embarrassed by
her long, thin arms; the painter Duviquet; M. Daniel Salomon; then Paul
Vence and Garain the deputy; Belleme de Saint-Nom; an unknown senator;
and Dechartre, who was dining at the house for the first time. The
conversation, at first trivial and insignificant, was prolonged into a
confused murmur, above which rose Garain’s voice:
“Every false idea is dangerous. People think that dreamers do no harm.
They are mistaken: dreamers do a great heal of harm. Even apparently
inoffensive utopian ideas really exercise a noxious influence. They tend
to inspire disgust at reality.”
“It is, perhaps, because reality is not beautiful,” said Paul Vence.
M. Garain said that he had always been in favor of all possible
improvements. He had asked for the suppression of permanent armies in
the time of the Empire, for the separation of church and state, and had
remained always faithful to democracy. His device, he said, was “Order
and Progress.” He thought he had discovered that device.
Montessuy said:
“Well, Monsieur Garain, be sincere. Confess that there are no reforms
to be made, and that it is as much as one can do to change the color of
postage-stamps. Good or bad, things are as they should be. Yes, things
are as they should be; but they change incessantly. Since 1870 the
industrial and financial situation of the country has gone through four
or five revolutions which political economists had not foreseen
and which they do not yet understand. In society, as in nature,
transformations are accomplished from within.”
As to matters of government his ideas were terse and decided. He was
strongly attached to the present, heedless of the future, and the
socialists troubled him little. Without caring whether the sun and
capital should be extinguished some day, he enjoyed them. According
to him, one should let himself be carried. None but fools resisted the
current or tried to go in front of it.
But Count Martin, naturally sad, had, dark presentiments. In veiled
words he announced catastrophes. His timorous phrases came through the
flowers, and irritated M. Schmoll, who began to grumble and to prophesy.
He explained that Christian nations were incapable, alone and by
themselves, of throwing off barbarism, and that without the Jews and the
Arabs Europe would be to-day, as in the time of the Crusades, sunk in
ignorance, misery, and cruelty.
“The Middle Ages,” he said, “are closed only in the historical manuals
that are given to pupils to spoil their minds. In reality, barbarians
are always barbarians. Israel’s mission is to instruct nations. It was
Israel which, in the Middle Ages, brought to Europe the wisdom of ages.
Socialism frightens you. It is a Christian evil, like priesthood. And
anarchy? Do you not recognize in it the plague of the Albigeois and of
the Vaudois? The Jews, who instructed and polished Europe, are the only
ones who can save it to-day from the evangelical evil by which it
is devoured. But they have not fulfilled their duty. They have made
Christians of themselves among the Christians. And God punishes them. He
permits them to be exiled and to be despoiled. Anti-Semitism is making
fearful progress everywhere. From Russia my co-religionists are expelled
like savage beasts. In France, civil and military employments are
closing against Jews. They have no longer access to aristocratic
circles. My nephew, young Isaac Coblentz, has had to renounce a
diplomatic career, after passing brilliantly his admission examination.
The wives of several of my colleagues, when Madame Schmoll calls on
them, display with intention, under her eyes, anti-Semitic newspapers.
And would you believe that the Minister of Public Instruction has
refused to give me the cross of the Legion of Honor for which I have
applied? There’s ingratitude! Anti-Semitism is death--it is death, do
you hear? to European civilization.”
The little man had a natural manner which surpassed all the art in the
world. Grotesque and terrible, he threw the table into consternation by
his sincerity. Madame Martin, whom he amused, complimented him on this:
“At least,” she said, “you defend your co-religionists. You are not,
Monsieur Schmoll, like a beautiful Jewish lady of my acquaintance who,
having read in a journal that she received the elite of Jewish society,
went everywhere shouting that she had been insulted.”
“I am sure, Madame, that you do not know how beautiful and superior to
all other moralities is Jewish morality. Do you know the parable of the
three rings?”
This question was lost in the murmur of the dialogues wherein were
mingled foreign politics, exhibitions of paintings, fashionable
scandals, and Academy speeches. They talked of the new novel and of the
coming play. This was a comedy. Napoleon was an incidental character in
it.
The conversation settled upon Napoleon I, often placed on the stage
and newly studied in books--an object of curiosity, a personage in the
fashion, no longer a popular hero, a demi-god, wearing boots for his
country, as in the days when Norvins and Beranger, Charlet and Raffet
were composing his legend; but a curious personage, an amusing type in
his living infinity, a figure whose style is pleasant to artists, whose
movements attract thoughtless idlers.
Garain, who had founded his political fortune on hatred of the Empire,
judged sincerely that this return of national taste was only an absurd
infatuation. He saw no danger in it and felt no fear about it. In him
fear was sudden and ferocious. For the moment he was very quiet; he
talked neither of prohibiting performances nor of seizing books, of
imprisoning authors, or of suppressing anything. Calm and severe, he saw
in Napoleon only Taine’s ‘condottiere’ who kicked Volney in the stomach.
Everybody wished to define the true Napoleon. Count Martin, in the face
of the imperial centrepiece and of the winged Victorys, talked suitably
of Napoleon as an organizer and administrator, and placed him in a high
position as president of the state council, where his words threw light
upon obscure questions. Garain affirmed that in his sessions, only too
famous, Napoleon, under pretext of taking snuff, asked the councillors
to pass to him their gold boxes ornamented with miniatures and decked
with diamonds, which they never saw again. The anecdote was told to him
by the son of Mounier himself.
Montessuy esteemed in Napoleon the genius of order. “He liked,” he said,
“work well done. That is a taste most persons have lost.”
The painter Duviquet, whose ideas were those of an artist, was
embarrassed. He did not find on the funeral mask brought from St. Helena
the characteristics of that face, beautiful and powerful, which medals
and busts have consecrated. One must be convinced of this now that the
bronze of that mask was hanging in all the old shops, among eagles and
sphinxes made of gilded wood. And, according to him, since the true face
of Napoleon was not that of the ideal Napoleon, his real soul may not
have been as idealists fancied it. Perhaps it was the soul of a good
bourgeois. Somebody had said this, and he was inclined to think that it
was true. Anyway, Duviquet, who flattered himself with having made the
best portraits of the century, knew that celebrated men seldom resemble
the ideas one forms of them.
M. Daniel Salomon observed that the fine mask about which Duviquet
talked, the plaster cast taken from the inanimate face of the Emperor,
and brought to Europe by Dr. Antommarchi, had been moulded in bronze and
sold by subscription for the first time in 1833, under Louis Philippe,
and had then inspired surprise and mistrust. People suspected the
Italian chemist, who was a sort of buffoon, always talkative and
famished, of having tried to make fun of people. Disciples of Dr. Gall,
whose system was then in favor, regarded the mask as suspicious. They
did not find in it the bumps of genius; and the forehead, examined in
accordance with the master’s theories, presented nothing remarkable in
its formation.
“Precisely,” said Princess Seniavine. “Napoleon was remarkable only for
having kicked Volney in the stomach and stealing a snuffbox ornamented
with diamonds. Monsieur Garain has just taught us.”
“And yet,” said Madame Martin, “nobody is sure that he kicked Volney.”
“Everything becomes known in the end,” replied the Princess, gayly.
“Napoleon did nothing at all. He did not even kick Volney, and his head
was that of an idiot.”
General Lariviere felt that he should say something. He hurled this
phrase:
“Napoleon--his campaign of 1813 is much discussed.”
The General wished to please Garain, and he had no other idea. However,
he succeeded, after an effort, in formulating a judgment:
“Napoleon committed faults; in his situation he should not have
committed any.” And he stopped abruptly, very red.
Madame Martin asked:
“And you, Monsieur Vence, what do you think of Napoleon?”
“Madame, I have not much love for sword-bearers, and conquerors seem to
me to be dangerous fools. But in spite of everything, that figure of the
Emperor interests me as it interests the public. I find character and
life in it. There is no poem or novel that is worth the Memoirs of Saint
Helena, although it is written in ridiculous fashion. What I think
of Napoleon, if you wish to know, is that, made for glory, he had the
brilliant simplicity of the hero of an epic poem. A hero must be human.
Napoleon was human.”
“Oh, oh!” every one exclaimed.
But Paul Vence continued:
“He was violent and frivolous; therefore profoundly human. I mean,
similar to everybody. He desired, with singular force, all that most men
esteem and desire. He had illusions, which he gave to the people. This
was his power and his weakness; it was his beauty. He believed in glory.
He had of life and of the world the same opinion as any one of his
grenadiers. He retained always the infantile gravity which finds
pleasure in playing with swords and drums, and the sort of innocence
which makes good military men. He esteemed force sincerely. He was a man
among men, the flesh of human flesh. He had not a thought that was not
in action, and all his actions were grand yet common. It is this vulgar
grandeur which makes heroes. And Napoleon is the perfect hero. His brain
never surpassed his hand--that hand, small and beautiful, which grasped
the world. He never had, for a moment, the least care for what he could
not reach.”
“Then,” said Garain, “according to you, he was not an intellectual
genius. I am of your opinion.”
“Surely,” continued Paul Vence, “he had enough genius to be brilliant
in the civil and military arena of the world. But he had not speculative
genius. That genius is another pair of sleeves, as Buffon says. We have
a collection of his writings and speeches. His style has movement and
imagination. And in this mass of thoughts one can not find a philosophic
curiosity, not one expression of anxiety about the unknowable, not an
expression of fear of the mystery which surrounds destiny. At Saint
Helena, when he talks of God and of the soul, he seems to be a little
fourteen-year-old school-boy. Thrown upon the world, his mind found
itself fit for the world, and embraced it all. Nothing of that mind was
lost in the infinite. Himself a poet, he knew only the poetry of action.
He limited to the earth his powerful dream of life. In his terrible and
touching naivete he believed that a man could be great, and neither time
nor misfortune made him lose that idea. His youth, or rather his sublime
adolescence, lasted as long as he lived, because life never brought him
a real maturity. Such is the abnormal state of men of action. They live
entirely in the present, and their genius concentrates on one point.
The hours of their existence are not connected by a chain of grave and
disinterested meditations. They succeed themselves in a series of
acts. They lack interior life. This defect is particularly visible
in Napoleon, who never lived within himself. From this is derived the
frivolity of temperament which made him support easily the enormous load
of his evils and of his faults. His mind was born anew every day. He
had, more than any other person, a capacity for diversion. The first day
that he saw the sun rise on his funereal rock at Saint Helena, he jumped
from his bed, whistling a romantic air. It was the peace of a
mind superior to fortune; it was the frivolity of a mind prompt in
resurrection. He lived from the outside.”
Garain, who did not like Paul Vence’s ingenious turn of wit and
language, tried to hasten the conclusion:
“In a word,” he said, “there was something of the monster in the man.”
“There are no monsters,” replied Paul Vence; “and men who pass for
monsters inspire horror. Napoleon was loved by an entire people. He had
the power to win the love of men. The joy of his soldiers was to die for
him.”
Countess Martin would have wished Dechartre to give his opinion. But he
excused himself with a sort of fright.
“Do you know,” said Schmoll again, “the parable of the three rings,
sublime inspiration of a Portuguese Jew.”
Garain, while complimenting Paul Vence on his brilliant paradox,
regretted that wit should be exercised at the expense of morality and
justice.
“One great principle,” he said, “is that men should be judged by their
acts.”
“And women?” asked Princess Seniavine, brusquely; “do you judge them by
their acts? And how do you know what they do?”
The sound of voices was mingled with the clear tintinabulation of
silverware. A warm air bathed the room. The roses shed their leaves on
the cloth. More ardent thoughts mounted to the brain.
General Lariviere fell into dreams.
“When public clamor has split my ears,” he said to his neighbor, “I
shall go to live at Tours. I shall cultivate flowers.”
He flattered himself on being a good gardener; his name had been given
to a rose. This pleased him highly.
Schmoll asked again if they knew the parable of the three rings.
The Princess rallied the Deputy.
“Then you do not know, Monsieur Garain, that one does the same things
for very different reasons?”
Montessuy said she was right.
“It is very true, as you say, Madame, that actions prove nothing. This
thought is striking in an episode in the life of Don Juan, which was
known neither to Moliere nor to Mozart, but which is revealed in an
English legend, a knowledge of which I owe to my friend James Russell
Lowell of London. One learns from it that the great seducer lost his
time with three women. One was a bourgeoise: she was in love with her
husband; the other was a nun: she would not consent to violate her vows;
the third, who had for a long time led a life of debauchery, had become
ugly, and was a servant in a den. After what she had done, after what
she had seen, love signified nothing to her. These three women behaved
alike for very different reasons. An action proves nothing. It is the
mass of actions, their weight, their sum total, which makes the value of
the human being.”
“Some of our actions,” said Madame Martin, “have our look, our face:
they are our daughters. Others do not resemble us at all.”
She rose and took the General’s arm.
On the way to the drawing-room the Princess said:
“Therese is right. Some actions do not express our real selves at all.
They are like the things we do in nightmares.”
The nymphs of the tapestries smiled vainly in their faded beauty at the
guests, who did not see them.
Madame Martin served the coffee with her young cousin, Madame Belleme de
Saint-Nom. She complimented Paul Vence on what he had said at the table.
“You talked of Napoleon with a freedom of mind that is rare in the
conversations I hear. I have noticed that children, when they are
handsome, look, when they pout, like Napoleon at Waterloo. You have made
me feel the profound reasons for this similarity.”
Then, turning toward Dechartre:
“Do you like Napoleon?”
“Madame, I do not like the Revolution. And Napoleon is the Revolution in
boots.”
“Monsieur Dechartre, why did you not say this at dinner? But I see you
prefer to be witty only in tete-a-tetes.”
Count Martin-Belleme escorted the men to the smoking-room. Paul Vence
alone remained with the women. Princess Seniavine asked him if he had
finished his novel, and what was the subject of it. It was a study
in which he tried to reach the truth through a series of plausible
conditions.
“Thus,” he said, “the novel acquires a moral force which history, in its
heavy frivolity, never had.”
She inquired whether the book was written for women. He said it was not.
“You are wrong, Monsieur Vence, not to write for women. A superior man
can do nothing else for them.”
He wished to know what gave her that idea.
“Because I see that all the intelligent women love fools.”
“Who bore them.”
“Certainly! But superior men would weary them more. They would have
more resources to employ in boring them. But tell me the subject of your
novel.”
“Do you insist?”
“Oh, I insist upon nothing.”
“Well, I will tell you. It is a study of popular manners; the history of
a young workman, sober and chaste, as handsome as a girl, with the mind
of a virgin, a sensitive soul. He is a carver, and works well. At night,
near his mother, whom he loves, he studies, he reads books. In his mind,
simple and receptive, ideas lodge themselves like bullets in a wall. He
has no desires. He has neither the passions nor the vices that attach
us to life. He is solitary and pure. Endowed with strong virtues, he
becomes conceited. He lives among miserable people. He sees suffering.
He has devotion without humanity. He has that sort of cold charity which
is called altruism. He is not human because he is not sensual.”
“Oh! One must be sensual to be human?”
“Certainly, Madame. True pity, like tenderness, comes from the heart. He
is not intelligent enough to doubt. He believes what he has read. And
he has read that to establish universal happiness society must be
destroyed. Thirst for martyrdom devours him. One morning, having kissed
his mother, he goes out; he watches for the socialist deputy of his
district, sees him, throws himself on him, and buries a poniard in
his breast. Long live anarchy! He is arrested, measured, photographed,
questioned, judged, condemned to death, and guillotined. That is my
novel.”
“It is not very amusing,” said the Princess; “but that is not your
fault. Your anarchists are as timid and moderate as other Frenchmen. The
Russians have more audacity and more imagination.”
Countess Martin asked Paul Vence whether he knew a silent, timid-looking
man among the guests. Her husband had invited him. She knew nothing of
him, not even his name. Paul Vence could only say that he was a senator.
He had seen him one day by chance in the Luxembourg, in the gallery that
served as a library.
“I went there to look at the cupola, where Delacroix has painted, in a
wood of bluish myrtles, heroes and sages of antiquity. That gentleman
was there, with the same wretched and pitiful air. His coat was damp and
he was warming himself. He was talking with old colleagues and saying,
while rubbing his hands: ‘The proof that the Republic is the best of
governments is that in 1871 it could kill in a week sixty thousand
insurgents without becoming unpopular. After such a repression any other
regime would have been impossible.’”
“He is a very wicked man,” said Madame Martin. “And to think that I was
pitying him!”
Madame Garain, her chin softly dropped on her chest, slept in the peace
of her housewifely mind, and dreamed of her vegetable garden on the
banks of the Loire, where singing-societies came to serenade her.
Joseph Schmoll and General Lariviere came out of the smoking-room. The
General took a seat between Princess Seniavine and Madame Martin.
“I met this morning, in the park, Baronne Warburg, mounted on a
magnificent horse. She said, ‘General, how do you manage to have such
fine horses?’ I replied: Madame, to have fine horses, you must be either
very wealthy or very clever.’”
He was so well satisfied with his reply that he repeated it twice.
Paul Vence came near Countess Martin:
“I know that senator’s name: it is Lyer. He is the vice-president of a
political society, and author of a book entitled, The Crime of December
Second.”
The General continued:
“The weather was horrible. I went into a hut and found Le Menil there.
I was in a bad humor. He was making fun of me, I saw, because I sought
shelter. He imagines that because I am a general I must like wind
and snow. He said that he liked bad weather, and that he was to go
foxhunting with friends next week.”
There was a pause; the General continued:
“I wish him much joy, but I don’t envy him. Foxhunting is not
agreeable.”
“But it is useful,” said Montessuy.
The General shrugged his shoulders.
“Foxes are dangerous for chicken-coops in the spring when the fowls have
to feed their families.”
“Foxes are sly poachers, who do less harm to farmers than to hunters. I
know something of this.”
Therese was not listening to the Princess, who was talking to her. She
was thinking:
“He did not tell me that he was going away!”
“Of what are you thinking, dear?” inquired the Princess.
“Of nothing interesting,” Therese replied.