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| Monument to Honore de Balzac by Auguste Rodin at the intersection of Boulevard Raspail and Boulevard de Montparnasse (6th arrondissement), Paris. |
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"Visiting the Poor", from the illustrated French
magazine Le Magasin pittoresque (1844)
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EXCERPT: “The Girl with the Golden Eyes” by Honore de Balzac
Editor’s note: These rich descriptive paragraphs of the dark
side of Paris in 1835 were excerpted from the public domain by Authorama.com but
first appeared in the novel “The Girl with the Golden Eyes” by Honore de
Balzac.
[First paragraphs of
Part I]
By taking interest in
everything, the Parisian ends by being interested in nothing. No emotion
dominating his face, which friction has rubbed away, it turns gray like the
faces of those houses upon which all kinds of dust and smoke have blown.
In
effect, the Parisian, with his indifference on the day for what the morrow will
bring forth, lives like a child, whatever may be his age. He grumbles at
everything, consoles himself for everything, jests at everything, forgets,
desires, and tastes everything, seizes all with passion, quits all with
indifference–his kings, his conquests, his glory, his idols of bronze or
glass–as he throws away his stockings, his hats, and his fortune.
Honore de Balzac (1799-1850)
was a French novelist and playwright and considered one of the founders of
realism in European literature.
In Paris no sentiment
can withstand the drift of things, and their current compels a struggle in
which the passions are relaxed: there love is a desire, and hatred a whim;
there’s no true kinsman but the thousand-franc note, no better friend than the
pawnbroker. This universal toleration bears its fruits, and in the salon, as in
the street, there is no one de trop, there is no one absolutely useful, or
absolutely harmful–knaves or fools, men of wit or integrity.
There
everything is tolerated: the government and the guillotine, religion and the
cholera. You are always acceptable to this world, you will never be missed by
it. What, then, is the dominating impulse in this country without morals,
without faith, without any sentiment, wherein, however, every sentiment,
belief, and moral has its origin and end?
It
is gold and pleasure. Take those two words for a lantern, and explore that
great stucco cage, that hive with its black gutters, and follow the windings of
that thought which agitates, sustains, and occupies it?
Consider!
And,
in the first place, examine the world which possesses nothing. How do we fix
it?
[from
here we skip to the ending paragraphs]
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 40,000 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 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.
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| Paris. Across the boulevard from the Monument to H. Balzac by Auguste Rodin is the Brasserie Charivari, which is just as good a place to read Balzac as any other. |
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 1789, 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, Necessity –the
necessity for money, glory, and amusement.
Thus,
any face which is fresh and graceful and reposeful, any really young face, is
in Paris the most extraordinary of exceptions; it is met with rarely. Should
you see one there, be sure it belongs either to a young and ardent ecclesiastic
or to some good abbe of forty with three chins; to a young girl of pure life
such as is brought up in certain middle-class families; to a mother of twenty,
still full of illusions, as she suckles her first-born; to a young man newly
embarked from the provinces, and entrusted to the care of some devout dowager
who keeps him without a sou; or, perhaps, to some shop assistant who goes to
bed at midnight wearied out with folding and unfolding calico, and rises at
seven o’clock to arrange the window; often again to some man of science or
poetry, who lives monastically in the embrace of a fine idea, who remains
sober, patient, and chaste; else to some self-contented fool, feeding himself
on folly, reeking of health, in a perpetual state of absorption with his own
smile; or to the soft and happy race of loungers, the only folk really happy in
Paris, which unfolds for them hour by hour its moving poetry.
Source:
Authorama.com and others from the public domain.
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