Chapter XI: Appendix (3)

But is she alive? It is hard to say what has survived except the grand shell, and whether there is another future for Venice.... And, indeed, what future can there be for Italy at all? For Venice, perhaps, it lies in Constantinople, in the free federation of the rising Slav-Hellenic nationalities, which begins to stand out in vague outlines from the mists of the East.

And Italy?... Of that later. Just now there is the carnival in Venice, the first carnival in freedom after seventy years’ captivity. The Square has been transformed into the hall of the Parisian Opera. Old Saint Mark gladly takes his part in the fête with his pictures of saints and his gilt, with his patriotic flags and his pagan horses. Only the doves who come at two o’clock every day to the Square to be fed are shy and flutter from cornice to cornice to convince themselves that this really is their dining-room in such disorder.

The crowd keeps growing, _le peuple s’amuse_, plays the fool heartily with all its might, with great comic talent in declamation and language, in action and gesticulation, without the spiciness of the Parisian pierrots, without the vulgar jokes of the German, without our native filth. The absence of everything indecent surprises one, though the significance of it is clear. This is the recreation, the diversion, the playfulness of a whole people, and not the dress-parade of the brothels, of their _succursales_, whose inmates, while they strip off so much else, put on a mask, like Bismarck’s needle on a gun, to intensify and make sure their aim. Here they would be out of place; here the people are amusing themselves; here their sister, wife and daughter are diverting themselves, and woe to him who insults a mask. For the time of carnival the mask is for the woman what the Stanislav ribbon in his buttonhole used to be for a stationmaster.[55]

At first the carnival left me in peace, but it kept growing, and with its elemental force was bound to draw every one in.

Nothing is too nonsensical to happen when Saint Vitus’ Dance takes hold of a whole population in fancy dress. Hundreds, perhaps more, of mauve dominoes were sitting in the big hall of a restaurant; they had sailed across the Square in a gilt ship drawn by bulls (everything that walks on dry land and with four legs is a luxury and rarity in Venice), now they were eating and drinking. One of the guests suggested a curiosity to entertain them, and undertook to obtain it; that curiosity was myself.

The gentleman, who scarcely knew me, ran to me at the Albergo Danieli, and begged and besought me to go with him for a minute to the masqueraders. It was silly to go, it was silly to make a fuss. I went, I was greeted with ‘_Evviva!_’ and full glasses. I bowed in all directions and talked nonsense, the ‘_Evvivas_’ were more hearty than ever; some shouted: ‘_Evviva el amico de Garibaldi_,’ others drank to the _poeta Russo_! Afraid that the mauve masks would drink to me as the _pittore Slavo scultore i maestro_, I beat a retreat to the Piazza San Marco.

In the Square there was a thick wall of people. I leaned against a pilaster, proud of the title of poet; beside me stood my conductor who had carried out the dominoes’ _mandat d’amener_. ‘My God, how lovely she is!’ broke from my lips as a very young lady made her way through the crowd. My guide without a word seized me and at once set me before her. ‘This is that Russian,’ my Polish count began. ‘Will you give me your hand after that word?’ I interrupted. Smiling, she held out her hand and said in Russian that she had long wanted to see me, and glanced at me so sympathetically that I pressed her hand once more and followed her with my eyes so long as she was in sight.

‘A blossom, torn by the hurricane, carried by the tide of blood from her Lithuanian fields!’ I thought, looking after her. ‘Your beauty shines for strangers now.’

I left the Square and went to meet Garibaldi. On the water everything was still ... the noise of the carnival came in discordant snatches. The stern, frowning blocks of the houses pressed closer and closer upon the boat, peeped at it with their lanterns; at an entry the rudder splashes, the steel hook gleams, the gondolier shouts: ‘_Apri—sia stati_’ ... and again the water flows quietly in a side-street, and all at once the houses move apart, we are in the Grand Canal.... ‘_Ferrovia Signore_,’ says the gondolier, lisping, as all the town does. Garibaldi had not arrived, he was still at Bologna. The engine that was going to Florence moaned, awaiting the whistle. ‘I had better go too,’ I thought; ‘to-morrow I shall be tired of the masks. To-morrow I shall not see my Slav beauty.’

The city gave Garibaldi a brilliant reception. The Grand Canal was almost transformed into a single bridge; to get into our boat we had to step across dozens of others. The Government and its retainers did everything possible to show that they were sulky with Garibaldi. If Prince Amadeus had been commanded by his father to show all those petty indelicacies, all that vulgar resentment, how was it the Italian boy’s heart did not speak, how was it that he did not for the moment reconcile the city with the king and the king’s son with his conscience? Why, Garibaldi had bestowed the crowns of the two Sicilies upon them.

I found Garibaldi neither ill nor any older since our meeting in London in 1864. But he was depressed, worried, and not ready to talk with the Venetians who were presented to him next day. The masses of the common people were his real followers; he grew more lively in Chioggia, where boatmen and fishermen were waiting for him. Mingling with the crowd, he said to those poor and simple people: ‘How happy and at home I am with you, how deeply I feel that I was born a working man and have been a working man; the misfortunes of our country tore me away from peaceful work. I too grew up on the sea-coast and know all about your work....’ A murmur of delight drowned the former boatman’s words, the people surged about him. ‘Give a name to my new-born child,’ cried a woman. ‘Bless mine.’ ‘And mine,’ shouted the others. You valiant general, La Marmora,[56] and you inconsolable widower, Ricasoli,[57] with all your Cialdinis[58] and Depretises,[59] you may as well give up your efforts to destroy that bond; it is tied by peasant working hands, and with a cord which you can never break with the help of all the Tuscan and Sardinian hirelings, of all your halfpenny Machiavellis.

Let us return to the question: what then lies before Italy, what future awaits her now that she is renewed, united, independent? Is it the future preached by Mazzini, or that to which Garibaldi is leading her, or perhaps that which Cavour has created?

This question at once leads us far away, into all the difficulties of the most painful and most disputed subjects. It touches directly upon those inner convictions which lie at the foundations of our life, and upon that conflict which so often divides us from our friends and sometimes sets us on the same side as our opponents.

I doubt of the _future of the Latin peoples_. I doubt their fertility in the future; they like the process of revolutions, but are bored by progress when they have attained it. They love to move headlong towards it without reaching it.

The ideal of Italian emancipation is poor. On the one hand, it lacks the essential element that makes for life, and unhappily, on the other hand, retains the old dying and dead element that makes for decay. The Italian revolution has been hitherto the struggle for independence.

Of course, if the terrestrial globe does not crack, if a comet does not come too close and overheat our atmosphere, Italy in the future too will be Italy, the land of the blue sky and the blue sea, of graceful outlines, of a lovely, attractive race of people, musical and artistic by nature. Of course, the changes in military and civilian government, and victory and defeat, and fallen frontiers, and rising assemblies will all be reflected in her life; she will change (and is changing) from clerical despotism to bourgeois parliamentarianism, from a cheap mode of living to an expensive one, from discomfort to comfort, and so on, and so on. But that is not much, and it does not take one far. There is another fine country whose shores are washed by the same blue sea, a fine race, valiant and stern, living beyond the Pyrenees; it has no internal enemy, it has an assembly, it has external unity ... but with all that, what is Spain?

Nations are of strong vitality; they can lie fallow for ages, and again under favourable circumstances show themselves full of sap and vigour. But do they rise up the same as they were?

How many centuries, I had almost said thousands of years, was the Greek people wiped off the face of the earth as a nation, and still it remained alive, and at the moment when the whole of Europe was stifling in the fumes of Reaction, Greece awoke and stirred the whole world. But were the Greeks of Capo d’Istrias[60] like the Greeks of Pericles or the Greeks of Byzantium? All that was left of them was the name and a remote memory. Italy too may be renewed, but then she will have to begin a new history. Her emancipation is no more than her right to existence.

The example of Greece is very apt; it is so far away from us that it awakens less passion. The Greece of Athens, of Macedon, deprived of independence by Rome, appears again politically independent in the Byzantine period. What does she create in it? Nothing, or worse than nothing: theological controversy, seraglio revolutions _par anticipation_. The Turks come to the help of backward nature and give the glow of conflagration to her death by violence. Ancient Greece _had lived out her life_ when the Roman empire covered and preserved her as the lava and ashes of the volcano preserved Pompeii and Herculaneum. The Byzantine period only lifted the coffin-lid, and the dead remained dead, controlled by popes and monks as every tomb is, ordered about by eunuchs who were quite in place as types of barrenness. Who does not know the tales of crusaders in Byzantium? Incomparably inferior in culture, in refinement of manners, these savage warriors, these rude swashbucklers, were yet full of strength, daring, force; they were advancing, the _god of history_ was with them. To him, men are precious, not for their good qualities but for their sturdy vigour and for their coming upon the stage _à propos_. That is why as we read the tedious chronicles we rejoice when the Varangians sweep down from their northern snows, or the Slavs float down in cockle-shells and brand with their shields the proud walls of Byzantium. As a schoolboy, I was overjoyed at the savage in his shirt[61] paddling his canoe and going with a gold earring in his ear to an interview with the effeminate, luxurious, scholastic Emperor,[62] John Zimisces.

Think a little about Byzantium. Until our Slavophils have brought out another new chronicle adorned with old ikon paintings, and until it has received the sanction of Government, Byzantium will explain a great deal of what it is hard to put into words.

Byzantium could _live_, but there was nothing for her to _do_; and nations in general only take a place in history while they are on the stage, that is while they are doing something.

I remember I have mentioned already the answer Thomas Carlyle gave to me when I spoke to him of the severities of the Parisian censorship. ‘But why are you so angry with it?’ he said. ‘In compelling the French to keep quiet, Napoleon has done them the greatest service. They have nothing to say, but they want to talk.... Napoleon has given them a justification in their own eyes....’ I do not say how far I agree with Carlyle, but I do ask myself: Will the Italians have anything to say and do on the day after the taking of Rome?

And sometimes, without finding an answer, I begin to hope that Rome may remain a long time their living desideratum.

Till Rome is taken, everything will go fairly well; there will be energy and strength enough, if only there is money enough.... Till then, Italy will put up with a great deal: taxes and the yoke of Piedmont and the pillaging administration and the quarrelsome and vexatious bureaucracy; while waiting for Rome, everything seems unimportant. To gain it, her people may be cramped, they must stand together. Rome is the boundary-line, the flag; it is always before their eyes, it prevents their sleeping, it prevents their attending to business, it keeps up the fever. In Rome all will be changed, everything will snap.... There, they fancy, is the end, the crown; not at all ... there is the beginning.

Nations that are redeeming their independence never know (and it is a very good thing too) that independence of itself gives them nothing except the rights of mature age, except a place among their peers, except the recognition of their rights as citizens to act for themselves, and that is all.

What acts will be announced to us from the heights of the Capitol and the Quirinal? What will be proclaimed to the world from the forum or from the balcony, where for ages the Pope has blessed the ‘Universe and the City’?

To proclaim ‘independence’ _sans phrase_ is not enough. But there is nothing else.... And at times it seems to me that on the day when Garibaldi flings aside his sword, no longer needed, and puts the _toga virilis_ on the shoulders of Italy, there will be nothing left for him to do but publicly to embrace his _maestro_ Mazzini on the banks of the Tiber and to repeat with him: ‘Lord, now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace!’

I say this for them and not against them.

Their future is secured, their two names will stand high and radiant throughout all Italy, from Fiume to Messina, and will be more and more exalted throughout all gloomy Europe as her people grow pettier and the general level sinks.

But I doubt whether Italy will follow the programme of the great _carbonaro_ and the great warrior. Their religion has worked miracles; it has awakened thought, it has lifted the sword, it has been the trumpet awakening the sleepers, the standard under which Italy has conquered herself.... Half of Mazzini’s ideal has been accomplished, precisely because the other half lay far beyond the possible. That Mazzini now has grown weaker shows his success and greatness; he is the poorer for that part of his ideal which has passed into reality, it is the weakness after giving birth. In sight of the shore Columbus had but to float, and had no need to use all the might of his invincible spirit. We have had experiences something like it in our circle.... Where now is the force given to our words in the past by our struggle against serfdom, against the lack of all justice, of all freedom of speech?

Rome is Mazzini’s America ... there are no more elements strong enough to survive in his programme, it has been based on the struggle for unity and for Rome.

‘And the democratic republic?’

That is the great reward beyond the grave, with the hope of which men have advanced into action and achievement, and in which the prophets and martyrs have fervently and earnestly believed.

Even now it is the goal of a handful of resolute old men, the veteran followers of Mazzini, the undaunted, unyielding, incorruptible, untiring masons who have laid the foundations of the new Italy and when they had not cement enough gave their blood for it. But are there many of them? And who will follow them?

While the threefold yoke of the German, the Bourbon and the Pope weighed on the neck of Italy, these vigorous soldier-monks of the Order of Saint Mazzini found sympathy everywhere. _Principessi_ and students, jewellers and doctors, actors and priests, artists and lawyers, the more educated of the petty bourgeois, the more awakened of the workmen, officers and soldiers—all, secretly or openly, were with them and working for them. A republic was the aim of few, independence and unity the aim of all; independence they have gained, unity after the French fashion is detestable to them, they do not want a republic. The present _régime_ is in many ways just what fits the Italians; they have a longing to present ‘a strong and majestic figure’ in the councils of European states, and finding this _bella e grande figura_ in Victor Emmanuel they cling to him.[63]

The representative system in its continental development really answers best of all when there is nothing clear in the mind and nothing possible in action. It is a great stop-gap, which rubs corners and extremes off both sides and gains time. Part of Europe has passed through this mill, the other parts will pass through it, and we sinners among them. What about Egypt? Why, that too has ridden on camels into the representative mill, urged on by the whip.

I do not blame the majority, ill-prepared, weary and cowardly, still less the masses, so long left to the teaching of priests; I do not blame the Government even—and indeed, how can it be blamed for its stupidity, its ignorance, its lack of impulse, of poetry, of tact? It was born in the Carignano Palace[64] among rusty Gothic swords, old-fashioned powdered wigs, and the starched etiquette of little courts with vast pretensions.

It has not inspired love—quite the contrary; but it is none the weaker for that. I was surprised in 1863 to see the general dislike of the Government in Naples. In 1867, in Venice, I saw without the slightest surprise that three months after their deliverance the people could not endure the Government, but at the same time I saw even more clearly that it had nothing to be afraid of unless it committed a series of colossal blunders, though it gets over these, too, with extraordinary ease. There is an example before my eyes. I will describe it in a few lines.

To the various jests with which Governments sometimes deign to throw dust in their people’s eyes, such as the ‘_Prisonniers de la paix_’ of Louis-Philippe, and ‘Empire is Peace’ of Louis Napoleon, Ricasoli added one of his own, calling the law which secured the greater part of the property of the clergy the law of ‘the freedom of the Church in a Free State.’ All the immature followers of liberalism, all the people who read no further than a title, rejoiced. The Ministry, concealing a smile, triumphed in their victory; the trick was obviously profitable to the clergy. The Belgian publican and sinner[65] behind whom the Jesuit fathers hid themselves turned up. He brought with him piles of gold, the colour of which had not been seen for a long time in Italy, and offered the Government a large sum to secure for the clergy the lawful possession of the estates wrung out in the confessional, gained from dying sinners and from the poor in spirit generally.

The Government saw only one thing—the money; the fools saw something else—_American_ freedom of the Church in a Free state. It is the fashion nowadays to measure European institutions by the American standard. The Duc de Persigny finds a striking similarity between the Second Empire and the First Republic of our day.

However artful Ricasoli and Cialdini were, the Chamber of Deputies, though very mixed and mediocre in its composition, began to grasp that the dice were loaded, and loaded without their assistance. The banker played the _impresario_ and tried to buy Italian voices, but it was February and the Chamber was hoarse. In Naples there were murmurs, in Venice a meeting was called in the Malibran Theatre to protest. Ricasoli ordered the theatre to be closed and put sentries to guard it. There is no doubt that of all possible blunders nothing more foolish could have been thought of. Venice, which had only just been set free, wanted to enjoy its right of opposition and was handicapped by the police. To assemble in order to fête the King and offer bouquets _al gran comandatore La Marmora_ means nothing. If the Venetians had wanted to assemble in honour of the Austrian archdukes, they would, of course, have been permitted. There was absolutely no danger in a meeting in the Malibran Theatre.

The Chamber woke up and asked for an explanation. Ricasoli gave a haughty and arrogant answer, as was befitting to the last representative of Raoul Barbe-Bleue, a mediaeval Count and feudal Lord. The Chamber, convinced that the Ministry did not desire to limit the ‘right of public meeting,’ would have passed on to the order of the day. Barbe-Bleue, already enraged that his law of the freedom of the Church, of which he had been certain, was beginning to be curtailed in committees, announced that he could not accept the _ordre du jour motivé_. The offended Chamber voted against him. For such insolence he suspended the Chamber on the next day, on the third dissolved it, and on the fourth was thinking of still harsher measures, but, I was told, Cialdini informed the King that he could not rely upon the troops.

There have been instances of blundering Governments seeking a sensible pretext for doing something nasty or for covering it, but these worthies sought the most absurd pretext to prove their own defeat. If the Government goes further and more conspicuously along this road, it may break its neck. One can foresee and reckon upon only what is to some extent subject to reason. There is no limit to what senselessness may do, though there is almost always some Cialdini at hand to pour cold water on the heated head.

And if Italy puts up with this _régime_ and grows inured to it, she will not endure it with impunity. It is hard for a people _less experienced_ than the French to digest such a fantastic world of lies and empty words, of phrases without meaning. In France nothing exists in reality, but everything is for appearance and show; like an old man sunk into second childhood, she is taken up with playthings; at times she guesses that her horses are only wooden ones, but she wants to deceive herself.

Italy will not be able to deal with these shadows of a Chinese lantern: with this moonlight independence that is illuminated on three of its four sides by the sun of the Tuileries; with a despised and hated Church, waited upon like an aged grandmother in expectation of her speedy demise. The potato-yeast of parliamentarianism and the rhetoric of the Chambers will not provide wholesome food for an Italian. He will be stunned and driven out of his mind by this pretence of nourishment and unreal struggle. And there is nothing else being prepared for him. What is to be done? Where is the solution? I do not know. Perhaps, after proclaiming the unity of Italy in Rome, her dissolution into independent self-governing parts, loosely connected together, may be proclaimed, and that may be the solution. More development might be possible (if there is anything to develop) in a dozen living units, and the solution would be quite in the spirit of Italy.

In the midst of these reflections I happened to come across Quinet’s pamphlet, _France and Germany_. I was immensely pleased with it—not that I specially rely upon the judgments of the celebrated historical thinker, though I have a great respect for him personally, but I rejoiced not on my own account.

In old days in Petersburg a friend noted for his humour, finding on my table a book of the Berlin Michelet, _On the Immortality of the Soul_, left me a note as follows: ‘Dear friend, when you have read the book, do be so good as to tell me briefly whether the soul is immortal or not. It does not matter for me, but I should like to know for the comfort of relations.’

Well, it is for the sake of relations that I am glad I have come upon Quinet. In spite of the conceited attitude many of them have taken up in regard to European authorities, our friends still pay more attention to them than to any of their own kin. That is why I try when I can to put my own thought in the charge of a European nurse. Clinging to Proudhon, I said that not Catiline but death was at the doors of France; hanging on to the skirts of Stuart Mill, I repeated what he said about the Chinese character of the English; and I am very glad that I can take Quinet by the hand and say: ‘Here my honoured friend Quinet says in 1867 about Latin Europe what I said about it in 1847 and all the following years.’

Quinet sees with horror and sadness the degradation of France, the softening of her brain, her growing pettiness. He does not understand the cause; he seeks it in her estrangement from the principles of 1789 and in the loss of political liberty, and so through his grief there is a gleam in his words of the hidden hope of recovery by a return to a genuine parliamentary _régime_, to the great principles of the Revolution.

Quinet does not observe that the great principles of which he speaks, and the political ideas of the Latin world generally, have lost their virtue, their spring has been overstrained and has almost snapped. _Les principes du 1789_ were not mere words, but now they have become mere words, like the liturgy and the prayers. Their service has been immense: by them, through them, France has accomplished her revolution, she has drawn up the curtain of the future and has sprung back in horror.

A dilemma has arisen.

Either free institutions will again touch the sacred curtain, or there will be government control, external order and internal slavery.

If in the life of the peoples of Europe there had been a single aim, a single tendency, one solution or the other would have gained the upper hand long ago. But as the history of Western Europe is constituted, it leads to everlasting struggle. The underlying fundamental fact that its culture is of twofold nature forms the organic obstacle to consistent development. To live in two civilisations, on two levels, in two worlds, at two stages of development, to live not with a whole organism but with one part of it, while employing the other for the hewing of wood and the drawing of water, and to keep talking about liberty and equality, is becoming more and more difficult.

Attempts to reach a more harmonious, better-balanced system have not been successful. But if they have failed in any given place, that rather proves the unsuitability of the place than the faultiness of the principle.

The whole gist of the matter lies in that.

The States of North America with their unity of civilisation will easily outstrip Europe; their position is simpler. The standard of their civilisation is lower than that of Western Europe, but they have _one_ standard and all reach it: that is their tremendous strength.

Twenty years ago France burst like a Titan into another life, struggling in the dark without plan or understanding and with no knowledge except of her insufferable agony. She has been beaten ‘by order and civilisation,’ but it was the victor who retreated. The bourgeoisie have had to pay for their melancholy victory with all they had gained by ages of effort, of sacrifice, of wars and revolutions, with the best fruits of their culture.

The centres of force, the paths of development—all have changed; the hidden activity and suppressed work of social reconstruction have passed to other lands beyond the borders of France.

As soon as the Germans were convinced that the French tide had ebbed, that its terrible revolutionary ideas were old and feeble, that there was no need to fear her, the Prussian helmet appeared behind the walls of the fortresses on the Rhine.

France still drew back, the helmets became more and more conspicuous. Bismarck has never thought much of his own people, he has kept his ears cocked towards France, he has sniffed the air coming that way, and, convinced of the permanent degradation of that country, he saw that Prussia’s day was at hand. He ordered Moltke to make a plan, he ordered the munition factories to make needles for the guns, and systematically, with German unceremonious coarseness, gathered the ripe German pears and threw them into the apron of the ridiculous Friedrich Wilhelm, assuring him that he was a hero by the especial grace of the Lutheran god.

I do not believe that the destinies of the world will remain for long in the hands of the Germans and the Hohenzollerns. It is impossible, it is contrary to the good sense of humanity, contrary to the aesthetics of history. I say, as Kent to Lear, only the other way about: ‘In you, oh Prussia, there is nothing of that I could call a king.’ But all the same, Prussia has thrust France into the background and herself taken the front seat. But all the same, painting the parti-coloured rags of the German fatherland all one colour, she will lay down the law to Europe so long as her laws are laid down by the bayonet and carried out by grapeshot, for the very simple reason that she has more bayonets and more grapeshot.

Behind the Prussian wave there will arise another that will not trouble itself much whether the old men with their classical principles like it or not. England craftily preserves the appearance of strength, standing on one side, as though proud of her apparent aloofness.... She has felt deep within her the same social sore that she healed so easily in 1848 with policemen’s staves, but the pains of birth are growing stronger ... and she is drawing in her far-reaching tentacles to meet the conflict at home.

France, amazed, embarrassed by the change of her position, threatens to fight not Prussia but Italy, if the latter touches the temporal possessions of the eternal father, and she collects money for a monument to Voltaire.

Will the ear-splitting Prussian trumpet of the _last_ judgment by battle rouse Latin Europe? Will the approach of the learned barbarians awaken her?

_Chi lo sa._

I reached Genoa with some Americans who had only just crossed the ocean. They were impressed by Genoa. Everything they had read about the Old World in books they saw now face to face, and they were never tired of gazing at the precipitous, narrow, black, mediaeval streets, the extraordinary height of the houses, the half-broken arches, the fortresses, and so on.

We went into the hall of a palace. A cry of delight broke from one of the Americans: ‘How these people did live! How they did live! What proportions, what elegance! No, you will find nothing like it among us.’ And he was ready to blush for his America. We glanced inside an immense drawing-room. The portraits of former owners, the pictures, the faded walls, the old furniture, the old heraldic crests, the stagnant atmosphere, the emptiness, and the old custodian in a black knitted cap and a threadbare black coat carrying a bunch of keys ... all said as plainly as words that this was not a house but a curiosity, a sarcophagus, a sumptuous relic of past life.

‘Yes,’ I said to the Americans as we went out, ‘you are perfectly right, these people _did_ live well.’

_March 1867._

LA BELLE FRANCE

‘_Ah! que j’ai douce souvenance_
_De ce beau pays de France!_’

1

ANTE PORTAS

France was closed to me. A year after my arrival in Nice, in the summer of 1851, I wrote a letter to Léon Faucher, then Minister of the Interior, and asked his permission to visit Paris for a few days. ‘I have a house in Paris and I must look after it,’ I said. A genuine economist could not but yield to this argument, and I received permission to stay in Paris ‘for a very brief time.’

In 1852 I asked for the privilege of travelling through France to England: it was refused. In 1856 I wanted to return from England to Switzerland, and again asked for a _visa_; it was refused. I wrote to the Freiburg _Conseil d’État_ that I was cut off from Switzerland, and should have to travel by stealth, or come through the Straits of Gibraltar, or across Germany, which would most likely land me in the Peter-Paul Fortress and not in Freiburg. On which grounds I begged the _Conseil d’État_ to apply to the French Minister of Foreign Affairs and ask for leave for me to pass through France. The Consul answered me on the 19th of October 1856 with the following letter:—

‘DEAR SIR,—In accordance with your desire, we charged the Swiss
Minister in Paris to take the necessary steps to obtain for
you an authorisation to pass through France on your way back
to Switzerland. We forward you a copy of the answer received
by the Swiss Minister: “M. Walewski has been obliged upon this
subject to consult his colleague, the Minister of the Interior;
considerations of _special importance_, so the Minister of the
Interior has informed him, compelled the latter to refuse M.
Herzen the right of passing through France last August, and he
cannot revise his decision, etc., etc.”’

I had nothing in common with the French exiles except simple acquaintanceship; I had not taken part in any conspiracy or any society, and was at the time exclusively engaged in Russian propaganda. All this the French police—the one omniscient, the one national, and therefore the one infinitely powerful police—knew perfectly. They were angry with me for my articles and my connections.

Of this anger it cannot but be said that it went beyond all bounds. In 1859 I went for a few days to Brussels with my son. Neither at Ostend nor at Brussels was my passport asked for on arrival. Six days later, when I came back in the evening to the hotel, the waiter as he handed me a candle said to me that they had sent from the police for my passport. ‘They have thought of it in time,’ I observed. The man went with me to my room and took the passport. I had no sooner got into bed, between twelve and one, when there was a knock at the door; the same waiter appeared again with a big envelope. ‘The Minister of Justice begs that M. Herzen will present himself at eleven o’clock to-morrow morning at the _Département de la Sûreté Publique_.’

‘And you come and wake people up at night for that?’

‘They are waiting for an answer.’

‘Who?’

‘Some one from the police.’

‘Well, say that I will come, but say, too, that it is stupid to bring invitations after midnight.’

Then like Nulin[66] I put out my candle.

At eight o’clock next morning a knock at the door again. It was not difficult to guess that this was all the foolery of Belgian justice. ‘_Entrez!_’

In walked a gentleman, excessively spick and span, in a very new hat and a fresh-looking black coat, with a long watch-chain, thick and apparently gold, and so on.

Not fully dressed—indeed, only partially clad—I presented the strangest contrast to a man who was obliged to be dressed so scrupulously from seven o’clock in the morning that he might be mistaken for an honest man. The advantage was certainly on his side.

‘I have the honour to be speaking _avec M. Herzen père_?’

‘_C’est selon_; as you look at it. On the one hand I am a father, on the other I am a son.’

That greatly diverted the spy.

‘I have come to you....’

‘Excuse me—to tell me that the Minister of Justice summons me at eleven o’clock to his department?’

‘Just so.’

‘Why does the Minister trouble you, and so early in the morning too? Is not it enough for him to disturb me so late at night, sending that envelope?’

‘So you will be there?’

‘Without fail.’

‘You know the way?’

‘Why? Have you been told to accompany me?’

‘Upon my word, _quelle idée_!’

‘And so....’

‘I wish you good day.’

‘Good morning.’

At eleven o’clock I was sitting with the head of the Belgian Public Security Department.

He was holding some sort of a manuscript book and my passport.

‘You must excuse me for our having troubled you, but you see there are two little circumstances here: in the first place, your passport is Swiss, while ...’ with police penetration, to test me, he fixed his eyes upon me.

‘While I am a Russian,’ I added.

‘Yes. I must confess that has struck us as strange.’

‘Why? Have you no law of naturalisation in Belgium?’

‘And you...?’

‘I was naturalised ten years ago at Morat of the Canton of Freiburg in the village of Châtel.’

‘Of course, _if that is so_, in that case I do not venture to doubt ... we will pass to the second difficulty. Three years ago you asked for permission to visit Brussels and received a refusal....’

‘_Mille pardons_, that did not happen and could not have happened. What should I have thought of _free_ Belgium, if, though never banished from her, I could doubt my right to visit Brussels?’

The head of the Department of Public Security was a little embarrassed.

‘However, here it is ...’ and he opened the manuscript book.

‘It seems that not everything in it is correct. Here you did not know, for instance, that I was naturalised in Switzerland.’

‘To be sure. The Consul, M. Delpierre....’

‘Don’t disturb yourself, I will tell you the rest. I asked your Consul in London whether I could move the Russian printing-press to Brussels—that is, whether the press would be left alone if I did not interfere in Belgian affairs, which I had no inclination whatever to do, _as you will readily believe_. M. Delpierre asked the Minister. The Minister asked him to dissuade me from my plan of moving the printing-press. Your Consul was ashamed to communicate the Minister’s answer by letter, and he asked Louis Blanc, as an acquaintance of both of us, to give me this message. Thanking Louis Blanc, I asked him to reassure M. Delpierre and to tell him that I had with great fortitude received the news that my printing-press would not be allowed to enter Brussels, but “if,” I added, “the Consul had had to inform me of the opposite—that is, that my printing-press and I would never to all eternity be allowed to leave Brussels—I might not have had the courage to bear it.” You see, I remember all the circumstances very well.’

The guardian of public security cleared his throat a little, and reading the manuscript book observed: ‘It really is so; I had not noticed the mention of the printing-press. However, I imagine that you must in any case obtain permission from the Minister; otherwise, much as we shall regret it, we shall be forced to ask you....’

‘I am going to-morrow.’

‘Oh dear no, no one insists on such haste; you may remain a week, a fortnight. We are speaking of permanent residence.... I am almost certain that the Minister will sanction it.’

‘I may ask his sanction for some future occasion, but now I have not the slightest desire to remain longer in Brussels.’

There the affair ended. ‘I forgot one thing in the confusion of our explanation,’ the apprehensive guardian of public security said to me, ‘we are a small people, we are a small people, that’s our trouble, _il y a des égards_....’ He was ashamed.

Two years later my younger daughter, who was living in Paris, was taken ill. Again I asked for a _visa_, and again Persigny refused it. Just at that time Count Branicki was in London. Dining with him, I told him of the refusal. ‘Write a letter to Prince Napoleon,’ said Branicki, ‘I’ll see that he gets it.’

‘I have no grounds for writing to the Prince.’

‘That is true. Write to the Emperor. To-morrow I am going, and the day after to-morrow your letter shall be in his hands.’

‘That is very soon, let me consider it.’

On reaching home I wrote the following letter:—

‘SIRE,—More than ten years ago I was compelled to leave
France by ministerial order. Since then I have twice received
permission to visit Paris.[67]

‘Of late I have been steadily refused the privilege of visiting
France, though one of my daughters is being educated in Paris
and I own a house there. I venture to apply directly to your
Imperial Majesty with a request for permission to visit France
and to remain in Paris for the time necessary for my business,
and I shall await your decision with confidence and respect.

‘In any case, Sire, I give you my word that my desire to
visit France has no political motive.—I remain, with profound
respect, Your Majesty’s obedient servant,

‘ALEXANDER HERZEN.

‘ORSETT HOUSE, WESTBOURNE TERRACE, LONDON.’

Branicki thought the letter was curt and would therefore probably not attain its object. I told him that I should not write another letter, and that if he cared to do me a service he might deliver it, but that if on reflection he had changed his mind he could throw it in the fire. This conversation took place at the railway station; he went off.

Four days later I received the following letter from the French Embassy:—

‘PARIS, _June 3, 1861_, OFFICE OF
PREFECT OF POLICE, BUREAU ONE.

‘DEAR SIR,—By command of the Emperor I have the honour to
inform you that His Imperial Majesty sanctions your visit to
France and your sojourn in Paris on every occasion when your
business requires it, as you have requested in your letter of
May 31st.

‘You can consequently travel freely throughout the Empire,
observing the accepted formalities.—Receive sir, etc., Prefect
of Police.’

Then a signature written eccentrically slanting, impossible to decipher, and like anything rather than the name Boitelle.

The same day came a letter from Branicki. Prince Napoleon sent him the following letter from the Emperor:—

‘DEAR NAPOLEON,—This is to inform you that I have just
sanctioned the entrance of Monsieur[68] Herzen into France and
have ordered him to be given a passport.’

After this ‘Lift up!’ the _Schlagbaum_, which had been down for eleven years, was raised, and a month later I set off for Paris.

2

INTRA MUROS

‘Ma-ame Erstin!’ a gloomy gendarme with enormous moustaches shouted at Calais at the barrier through which travellers who have only just landed from the Dover steamer and been driven by the Customs House and other overseers into the stone-built barn have to pass one by one into France. The travellers went up, the gendarme served out the passports, the police commissioner questioned with his eyes and, where necessary, with his tongue, and the traveller, approved and found innocuous to the Empire, vanished behind the barrier.

This time no traveller moved forward at the gendarme’s shout.

‘Ma-ame Ogly Erstin!’ the gendarme shouted, raising his voice and waving a passport.

No one answered.

‘Why, is there no one of the name?’ shouted the gendarme, and looking at the passport, added: ‘Mam’zelle Ogly Erstin.’

Only then a little girl of ten, namely my daughter Olga, conjectured that the guardian of order was calling her with this ferocity. ‘_Avancez donc, prenez vos papiers!_’ the gendarme commanded savagely. Olga took her passport, and huddling up to Malwide von Meysenbug, asked her in a whisper: ‘_Est-ce que c’est l’Empereur?_’

That happened to her in 1860, but something worse happened to me a year later, and not at the barrier at Calais, which no longer exists, but everywhere: in a railway carriage, in the street, in Paris, in the provinces, in my home, in my dreams, in waking life, everywhere I saw before me the Emperor, with long moustaches waxed to a thread, with eyes that did not see and a mouth that did not speak. Not only the gendarmes, who are to a certain extent emperors from their position, but the soldiers, the shop-boys, the waiters, and especially the conductors on trains and omnibuses, looked to me like Napoleons. It was only here in Paris in 1861, before the Hôtel de Ville, before which I had stood in respect in 1847, before Notre Dame, the Champs-Élysées and the Boulevards, that I grasped the meaning of the psalm in which King David with flattering despair complains to Jehovah that he cannot get away from Him, cannot escape Him: ‘I go into the water,’ he says, ‘thou art there; into the earth, thou art there; into the sky, and of course thou art there also.’ If I went to dine at the Maison d’Or, Napoleon in one of his incarnations was dining the other side of the table and asking for truffles _à la serviette_; if I went to the theatre, one would be sitting in the same row and one would walk on to the stage. If I ran away from him out of town, he followed on my heels beyond the Bois de Boulogne in a closely buttoned coat and moustaches with stiffly waxed points. Where was he not? At the ball in Mabille? At mass in the Madeleine? He was sure to be at both.

_La révolution s’est faite homme._ ‘The revolution is embodied in a man,’ was one of the favourite phrases of the doctrinaire jargon of the days of Thiers and the liberal historians of the Louis-Philippe period; but this is rather more cunning: the revolution and the reaction, order and disorder, the van and the rear, are incarnate in one man, and that man in his turn is reincarnated in the whole administration, from the ministers to the rural constables, from the senators to the village mayors, is scattered in the infantry and afloat in the navy.

This man is not a prophet, not a poet, not a conqueror, not an eccentricity, not a genius, not a man of talent; but a cold, silent, surly, plain, prudent, persistent, prosaic ‘middle-aged gentleman, neither fat nor thin’[69]—_le bourgeois_ of bourgeois France, _l’homme du destin, le neveu du grand homme_, the plebeian. He obliterates, he concentrates in himself, all the prominent aspects of the national character, all the tendencies of the people, as the topmost peak of a mountain or a pyramid ends in nothing.

In 1849 and in 1850 I had not grasped the significance of Napoleon III. Carried away by democratic rhetoric, I did not appreciate him. The year 1861 was one of the very best for the Empire, everything was going well. Everything had reached equilibrium, was reconciled with and submissive to the new _régime_. There was precisely enough opposition and daring thought to give shadow and some spiciness to the mixture. Laboulaye[70] very cleverly praised New York to the disadvantage of Paris, Prévost-Paradol[71] Austria to the disadvantage of France. Anonymous hints were made with regard to the Mirès case.[72] People were quietly allowed to abuse the Pope and show some slight sympathy for the Polish movement. There were circles who met together to display their _frondeur_ spirit, as we used to meet in the ’forties in Moscow at the house of some old friend. They even had their dissatisfied celebrities, rather after the fashion of our Yermolov, but turned civilian, such as Guizot. All the rest had been beaten flat by the storm. And no one complained, they even liked the repose of it, as people like the first week of Lent with its horse-radish and cabbage after the seven days of feasting and drinking in Carnival. Those who did not like lenten fare were hard to find; they had vanished for shorter or longer periods, and would come back with taste corrected from Lambessa or from the Mazas prison. The police, _la grande police_ which had replaced _la grande armée_, was everywhere at all times. Literary style was all at a dead level—wretched boatmen floating calmly in wretched boats over the once stormy sea. The inanity of the plays produced on every stage induced heavy sleep at night, which was maintained in the morning by the futility of the newspapers. Journalism in the former sense of the word did not exist. The leading papers stood not for views but for commercial firms. After the leading articles of London papers, written in condensed, sensible language, with ‘nerve,’ as the French say, and ‘muscles,’ one simply cannot read the Paris _premiers_. Rhetorical flourishes, faded and frayed, and the same old, high-flown phrases, made more than absurd, disgusting, through their obvious contrast with facts, took the place of subject-matter. Oppressed nationalities were continually being invited as before to rely upon France; she still remained ‘at the head of the great movement,’ and was still bringing the world-revolution freedom and the great principles of 1789. Opposition took its stand under the banner of Buonapartism. These are nuances of precisely the same colour, and they might all be indicated as sailors indicate the intermediate winds, N.N.W., N.W.N., N.W.W., W.N.W.... Buonapartism desperate, furious, moderate; Buonapartism monarchical; Buonapartism republican, democratic, socialistic; Buonapartism peaceful, military, revolutionary, conservative; and finally, Buonapartism of the Palais Royal and the Tuileries.... Late in the evening certain gentlemen run to the newspaper offices to set the weather-cock of the paper straight, if it should have turned a little too far to the east or west of the north. They check the time by the chronometer of the Prefecture, erase and add, and hasten to bring out the next edition.

Reading in a café an evening paper which stated that Mirès’ lawyer had refused to disclose how certain sums had been employed, saying that ‘very highly placed persons’ were involved, I said to a man I knew: ‘But how is it the prosecutor does not compel him to tell, and how is it the newspapers do not insist upon it?’ My acquaintance gave a tug to my coat, cast a glance round, and signalled with his eyes, his hands and his cane. I had not lived in Petersburg for nothing. I understood him, and began discussing absinthe and seltzer-water.

As I came out of the café, I saw a minute man running towards me with minute arms outspread to embrace me. As he approached I recognised Darimon. ‘How happy you must be,’ said the deputy of the Left, ‘to be back in Paris! _Ah, je m’imagine._’

‘Not particularly so!’

Darimon was petrified.

‘Well, how are Madame Darimon and your little son, who must be by now your big son, especially if he does not take after his father?’

‘_Toujours le même, ha-ha-ha, très bien_’—and we parted.

I felt oppressed in Paris, and I only breathed freely when a month later, through the rain and fog, I saw again the dirty white chalky cliffs of England. Everything that pinched like narrow shoes under Louis-Philippe pinched now like fetters on the legs. I had not seen the intermediate processes by which the new _régime_ had been built up and made secure, but found it after ten years absolutely complete and established.... Moreover, I did not recognise Paris; its rebuilt streets, unfinished palaces, and, worst of all, the people I met were strange to me. This was not the Paris I had loved and hated, not the city I had longed to reach from childhood, not the city I had left with a curse on my lips. This was a Paris that had lost its individuality, had grown indifferent, and was no longer boiling. A strong hand oppressed it everywhere and was at every minute ready to tug at the reins—but that was not necessary; Paris had accepted the Second Empire _tout de bon_, it barely retained the external habits of older days. The ‘discontented’ had nothing serious and strong to set up against the Empire. The memories of the republicans of Tacitus and the vague ideas of the Socialists could not shake the throne of the Caesars. The _police de surveillance_ did not combat these ‘fantasies’ seriously, they resented them not as a danger, but as disorderly and improper. They were more annoyed at the ‘memories’ than at the ‘hopes,’ they kept a stricter hand over the Orleanists. From time to time the autocratic police unexpectedly dealt some unjust and brutal blow as a menacing reminder of its power; it purposely aroused terror over two quarters of the city for two months, and then retreated again into the crevices of the Prefecture and the corridors of the Government Offices.