Chapter 1: 2.viii

Printed Paper.

In such a practical France, let the theory of Perfectibility say
what it will, discontents cannot be wanting: your promised
Reformation is so indispensable; yet it comes not; who will begin
it—with himself? Discontent with what is around us, still more
with what is above us, goes on increasing; seeking ever new
vents.

Of Street Ballads, of Epigrams that from of old tempered
Despotism, we need not speak. Nor of Manuscript Newspapers
(_Nouvelles à la main_) do we speak. Bachaumont and his
journeymen and followers may close those “thirty volumes of
scurrilous eaves-dropping,” and quit that trade; for at length if
not liberty of the Press, there is license. Pamphlets can be
surreptititiously vended and read in Paris, did they even bear to
be “Printed at Pekin.” We have a _Courrier de l’Europe_ in those
years, regularly published at London; by a De Morande, whom the
guillotine has not yet devoured. There too an unruly Linguet,
still unguillotined, when his own country has become too hot for
him, and his brother Advocates have cast him out, can emit his
hoarse wailings, and _Bastille Dévoilée_ (Bastille unveiled).
Loquacious Abbé Raynal, at length, has his wish; sees the
_Histoire Philosophique,_ with its “lubricity,” unveracity, loose
loud eleutheromaniac rant (contributed, they say, by
Philosophedom at large, though in the Abbé’s name, and to his
glory), burnt by the common hangman;—and sets out on his travels
as a martyr. It was the edition of 1781; perhaps the last notable
book that had such fire-beatitude,—the hangman discovering now
that it did not serve.

Again, in Courts of Law, with their money-quarrels,
divorce-cases, wheresoever a glimpse into the household existence
can be had, what indications! The Parlements of Besancon and Aix
ring, audible to all France, with the amours and destinies of a
young Mirabeau. He, under the nurture of a “Friend of Men,” has,
in State Prisons, in marching Regiments, Dutch Authors” garrets,
and quite other scenes, “been for twenty years learning to resist
despotism:” despotism of men, and alas also of gods. How, beneath
this rose-coloured veil of Universal Benevolence and _Astræa
Redux_, is the sanctuary of Home so often a dreary void, or a
dark contentious Hell-on-Earth! The old Friend of Men has his own
divorce case too; and at times, “his whole family but one” under
lock and key: he writes much about reforming and enfranchising
the world; and for his own private behoof he has needed sixty
_Lettres-de-Cachet_. A man of insight too, with resolution, even
with manful principle: but in such an element, inward and
outward; which he could not rule, but only madden. Edacity,
rapacity;—quite contrary to the finer sensibilities of the heart!
Fools, that expect your verdant Millennium, and nothing but Love
and Abundance, brooks running wine, winds whispering music,—with
the whole ground and basis of your existence champed into a mud
of Sensuality; which, daily growing deeper, will soon have no
bottom but the Abyss!

Or consider that unutterable business of the Diamond Necklace.
Red-hatted Cardinal Louis de Rohan; Sicilian jail-bird Balsamo
Cagliostro; milliner Dame de Lamotte, “with a face of some
piquancy:” the highest Church Dignitaries waltzing, in Walpurgis
Dance, with quack-prophets, pickpurses and public women;—a whole
Satan’s Invisible World displayed; working there continually
under the daylight visible one; the smoke of its torment going up
for ever! The Throne has been brought into scandalous collision
with the Treadmill. Astonished Europe rings with the mystery for
ten months; sees only lie unfold itself from lie; corruption
among the lofty and the low, gulosity, credulity, imbecility,
strength nowhere but in the hunger. Weep, fair Queen, thy first
tears of unmixed wretchedness! Thy fair name has been tarnished
by foul breath; irremediably while life lasts. No more shalt thou
be loved and pitied by living hearts, till a new generation has
been born, and thy own heart lies cold, cured of all its
sorrows.—The Epigrams henceforth become, not sharp and bitter;
but cruel, atrocious, unmentionable. On that 31st of May, 1786, a
miserable Cardinal Grand-Almoner Rohan, on issuing from his
Bastille, is escorted by hurrahing crowds: unloved he, and worthy
of no love; but important since the Court and Queen are his
enemies.[49]

How is our bright Era of Hope dimmed: and the whole sky growing
bleak with signs of hurricane and earthquake! It is a doomed
world: gone all “obedience that made men free;” fast going the
obedience that made men slaves,—at least to one another. Slaves
only of their own lusts they now are, and will be. Slaves of sin;
inevitably also of sorrow. Behold the mouldering mass of
Sensuality and Falsehood; round which plays foolishly, itself a
corrupt phosphorescence, some glimmer of Sentimentalism;—and over
all, rising, as Ark of _their_ Covenant, the grim Patibulary Fork
“forty feet high;” which also is now nigh rotted. Add only that
the French Nation distinguishes itself among Nations by the
characteristic of Excitability; with the good, but also with the
perilous evil, which belongs to that. Rebellion, explosion, of
unknown extent is to be calculated on. There are, as Chesterfield
wrote, “all the symptoms I have ever met with in History!”

Shall we say, then: Wo to Philosophism, that it destroyed
Religion, what it called “extinguishing the abomination (_écraser
l’infâme_)”? Wo rather to those that made the Holy an
abomination, and extinguishable; wo at all men that live in such
a time of world-abomination and world-destruction! Nay, answer
the Courtiers, it was Turgot, it was Necker, with their mad
innovating; it was the Queen’s want of etiquette; it was he, it
was she, it was that. Friends! it was every scoundrel that had
lived, and quack-like pretended to be doing, and been only eating
and _mis_doing, in all provinces of life, as Shoeblack or as
Sovereign Lord, each in his degree, from the time of Charlemagne
and earlier. All this (for be sure no falsehood perishes, but is
as seed sown out to grow) has been storing itself for thousands
of years; and now the account-day has come. And rude will the
settlement be: of wrath laid up against the day of wrath. O my
Brother, be not thou a Quack! Die rather, if thou wilt take
counsel; ’tis but dying once, and thou art quit of it for ever.
Cursed is that trade; and bears curses, thou knowest not how,
long ages after thou art departed, and the wages thou hadst are
all consumed; nay, as the ancient wise have written,—through
Eternity itself, and is verily marked in the Doom-Book of a God!

Hope deferred maketh the heart sick. And yet, as we said, Hope is
but deferred; not abolished, not abolishable. It is very notable,
and touching, how this same Hope does still light onwards the
French Nation through all its wild destinies. For we shall still
find Hope shining, be it for fond invitation, be it for anger and
menace; as a mild heavenly light it shone; as a red conflagration
it shines: burning sulphurous blue, through darkest regions of
Terror, it still shines; and goes sent out at all, since
Desperation itself is a kind of Hope. Thus is our Era still to be
named of Hope, though in the saddest sense,—when there is nothing
left but Hope.

But if any one would know summarily what a Pandora’s Box lies
there for the opening, he may see it in what by its nature is the
symptom of all symptoms, the surviving Literature of the Period.
Abbé Raynal, with his lubricity and loud loose rant, has spoken
_his_ word; and already the fast-hastening generation responds to
another. Glance at Beaumarchais’ _Mariage de Figaro;_ which now
(in 1784), after difficulty enough, has issued on the stage; and
“runs its hundred nights,” to the admiration of all men. By what
virtue or internal vigour it so ran, the reader of our day will
rather wonder:—and indeed will know so much the better that it
flattered some pruriency of the time; that it spoke what all were
feeling, and longing to speak. Small substance in that _Figaro:_
thin wiredrawn intrigues, thin wiredrawn sentiments and sarcasms;
a thing lean, barren; yet which winds and whisks itself, as
through a wholly mad universe, adroitly, with a high-sniffing
air: wherein each, as was hinted, which is the grand secret, may
see some image of himself, and of his own state and ways. So it
runs its hundred nights, and all France runs with it; laughing
applause. If the soliloquising Barber ask: ‘What has your
Lordship done to earn all this?’ and can only answer: ‘You took
the trouble to be born (_Vous vous êtes donné la peine de
naître_),’ all men must laugh: and a gay horse-racing Anglomaniac
Noblesse loudest of all. For how can small books have a great
danger in them? asks the Sieur Caron; and fancies his thin
epigram may be a kind of reason. Conqueror of a golden fleece, by
giant smuggling; tamer of hell-dogs, in the Parlement Maupeou;
and finally crowned Orpheus in the _Théâtre Français_,
Beaumarchais has now culminated, and unites the attributes of
several demigods. We shall meet him once again, in the course of
his decline.

Still more significant are two Books produced on the eve of the
ever-memorable Explosion itself, and read eagerly by all the
world: Saint-Pierre’s _Paul et Virginie_, and Louvet’s _Chevalier
de Faublas_. Noteworthy Books; which may be considered as the
last speech of old Feudal France. In the first there rises
melodiously, as it were, the wail of a moribund world: everywhere
wholesome Nature in unequal conflict with diseased perfidious
Art; cannot escape from it in the lowest hut, in the remotest
island of the sea. Ruin and death must strike down the loved one;
and, what is most significant of all, death even here not by
necessity, but by etiquette. What a world of prurient corruption
lies visible in that super-sublime of modesty! Yet, on the whole,
our good Saint-Pierre is musical, poetical though most morbid: we
will call his Book the swan-song of old dying France.

Louvet’s again, let no man account musical. Truly, if this
wretched _Faublas_ is a death-speech, it is one under the
gallows, and by a felon that does not repent. Wretched _cloaca_
of a Book; without depth even as a cloaca! What “picture of
French society” is here? Picture properly of nothing, if not of
the mind that gave it out as some sort of picture. Yet symptom of
much; above all, of the world that could nourish itself thereon.

BOOK 1.III.
THE PARLEMENT OF PARIS