Chapter II: Part 2

In these delirious passages are contained the most marked symptoms of the time, the satanic gloom that drew its inspiration from Byron, the nervous sensibility imitated from the heroes of Madame de Staël, Châteaubriand, and Sénancour, and the longing for a life of Oriental colour which found a later expression in Victor Hugo's poems. However, it would be unfair to put down this spiritual _bouleversement_ to the influence of "René," "Obermann," "Werther's Leiden," or "Manfred." They became, indeed, the breviaries of the afflicted, but the cause of the affliction lay deeper in the reaction of the French nation after the Napoleonic wars. Napoleon's victorious campaigns drained France of its best blood and its best energies, leaving an inheritance of anæmia and neurasthenia to the next generation, without diminishing that feverish desire for glory, that determination to work one's will upon a passive world, which was the spirit of Napoleon's armies. Older and more settled people were content to reap the rewards of peace, but the young men, exalted by the exploits of their fathers, looked in vain for some channel in which to discharge their superfluous electricity. Under the restored Bourbons there was none. The fathers had had free play upon historic battlefields, the sons were cribbed and confined in the narrow bounds of everyday life. Moreover, the revolutionary wars had revealed vast, unexplored pastures to the French mind. New countries, languages, and literatures were brought into its view. The gorgeous East, in particular, seized upon the French imagination. The desert was vast and untrodden, the Arab was dignified and free, and under unclouded skies the primitive nobility of mankind revealed itself in splendour and space.

Here, then, is the root of _le mal du siècle_ from which the divers symptoms sprang. Of these, perhaps, the most marked and most general was an exaggerated sensibility, a kind of melancholy madness. Young Henri Dubois, who at any other epoch would have been content to learn his trade behind the counter of Dubois and Dupont, cloth merchants, and to settle down into a peaceful home with Mademoiselle Dupont, now plied the yard measure with disgust and yearned for an existence more worthy of his "complicated state of mind." He was a perfect magazine of pent-up emotions, ready to expire in a delirium of joy or an ecstasy of despair after the manner of René and Werther. He was quite willing to love Mademoiselle Dupont on the condition that she would lend herself to a tempestuous passion, allow her hands to be bathed in tears for hours together by her prostrate cavalier, receive folios of hysterical ravings by the post, and dread the fatal dagger if she had smiled from her desk at a customer. She was urged daily to fly to a brighter destiny upon distant shores, and nightly trembled that the coming morning would find Henri transfixed by his own poniard. It was impossible to be reasonable; only a clod, dead to all beauty, could be so brutal. M. Louis Maigron, who in his book, "Le Romantisme et les Mœurs," gives some very remarkable instances of these aberrations in actual correspondence, says very truly: "Une foule de 'cratères' ont alors superbement fumé au nez des bourgeois." The Romantic ideal supposed a sensibility always stretched to its utmost, _des âmes excessives_, as M. Bourget says,[3] capable of constant renewal, and a consumption of emotional energy which is irreconcilable with the laws of any organism. If a young man failed for a moment to find food for melancholy broodings in the shortcomings of society, he could always fall back for a good groan upon his own insufficiencies of sensibility. Now, of course, the "feelings of malediction" which afflicted the Henri Dubois are of small moment in themselves. Time comfortably settled them down. It was the young men of real sensibility and imagination, the coming poets and artists, in whom the ravages of _le mal du siècle_ were more than a passing phase. The boundless yearnings that found expression in such lines as these:

_Amour, enthousiasme, étude, poésie!_
_C'est là qu'en votre extase, océan d'ambroisie_
_Se noîraient nos âmes de feu!_
_C'est là que je saurais, fort d'un génie étrange,_
_Dans la création d'un bonheur sans mélange_
_Être plus artiste que Dieu_[4]--

could not but lead to a profound dissatisfaction with existence, which Maxime du Camp in his reminiscences very happily describes:

"It was not only a fashion [he says], as might be believed; it was
a kind of general prostration which made our hearts sad, darkened
our thoughts, and caused us to see a deliverance in the glimpse of
death. You would have thought that life held in chains souls that
had caught sight of something superior to terrestrial existence. We
did not aspire to the felicities of paradise: we dreamed of taking
possession of the infinite, and we were tortured by a vague
pantheism of which the formula was never found.... The artistic and
literary generation which preceded me and that to which I belonged
had a youth of lamentable sadness, sadness without cause and
without object, abstract sadness, inherent in the individual or in
the period....

"Nobody was allowed to be without an _âme incomprise_; it was the
custom and we conformed to it. We were 'fatal' and 'accursed';
without even having tasted life, we tumbled to the bottom of the
abyss of disillusionment. Children of eighteen years, repeating
phrases gathered from some novel or other, would say: 'J'ai le
cœur usé comme l'escalier d'une fille de joie,' and one of
Pétrus Borel's heroes went to the executioner to say to him: 'I
should like you to guillotine me!' This did not prevent us from
laughing, singing, or committing the honest follies of youth; that
was also a way of being desperate; we imagined that we had a
satanic laugh, while we really possessed the fair joy of spring."

These exquisite sensibilities, when they were not turned back upon themselves in black despair, roamed far and wide in search of new sensations upon which to exercise themselves. This _exotisme_, as the French have called it, is another of the most marked symptoms of Romanticism. The time was ripe for its satisfaction. The French mind, shut for so long in the formalism of the eighteenth century, now found that there were innumerable new ways to _rêver la rêve de la vie_. The men of learning who followed in Napoleon's wake renewed the interest in archæology by their discoveries; the historical novels of Scott and the history of Michelet revealed the full and generous life of earlier ages; the forged poems of Ossian caused a perfect rage for Celtic mysticism; and the bold lawless life of the East, with its tyrannous Ali Pashas and its Greek patriots, shone out with a new splendour. An unsatisfied longing for another age and another clime animated every young breast. Societies even were formed in provincial towns in which subscriptions were pooled, and the winner of the lucky number drew the money to take a voyage in Italy. The glories of Greece and the grandeurs of Rome, as savouring of the classical, appealed only to a few; other eclectics fed upon German mysticism and the fantastic weirdness of Hoffmann's supernatural tales. A far greater number became Celts in imagination; dressed in the dignity of outlawry and the garb of an Irish bard or a Scotch chieftain, they defied the haughty English. Maxime du Camp, for instance, wrote a poem in his school-days called "Wistibrock l'Irlandais." "When I am depressed," he says in his reminiscences, "I read it again, and there is no vexation that resists it." Anybody who wishes to gain some idea of the _genre frénétique_, as Nodier called it, in its Celtic dress will derive considerable entertainment from Pétrus Borel's "Madame Putiphar." It is full of murders and intrigues and tirades which foam at the mouth. The hero, Patrick FitzWhyte, falls in love with Deborah Cockermouth, daughter of Lord and Lady Cockermouth, the opening dialogue of whom upon the battlements is magnificent. My lord, who is described as "one of those gigantic fungous and spongy zoophytes indigenous to Great Britain," permits himself to address my lady as "Saint-hearted milk soup!" After a good deal of clandestine philandering and interminable translations of imaginary Irish ballads the young couple elope to Paris, where Madame Putiphar (Madame de Pompadour) seduces the heroine, and the hero after a series of dreadful adventures is imprisoned in a loathsome dungeon in the Bastille, the taking of which by the people of Paris is described with quite astonishing force.

Wild adventures, horrors and tragedies in any age were fondly dwelt upon in comparison with the insupportable monotony of contemporary life; but the Middle Ages made a stronger appeal than any. There was a perfect mania for medievalism. Nothing pleased overwrought imaginations more than to picture existence amid all the riot and magnificence of those more spacious days. How they would have rattled a sword and clanked a spur, how defiantly tilted their plume, how breathlessly loved and how destructively fought! Why did they not live in the joyous time when every minute brought an adventure instead of spilling one more drop from the cup of _ennui_, and when a man shaped his own ends according to his passions, throwing a curse to the poor and a madrigal to the fair? Then, all their life was not grey. Splendour of colour with ample grace of form decked out existence like a picture by Veronese. Costly satin vied with magnificent brocade; all was a riot of velvet and purple dyes, fur and old lace; drinking cups, worthy of giants, chiselled by a Cellini, offered wine worthy of the gods; swords were masterpieces of the finest Toledo; jewelled harness caparisoned fleet Arab horses; feasts were Gargantuan, jests more than Rabelaisian; and all this wonderful wealth of glittering colour was thrown into magnificent relief against the solemnity of antique battlements and the sombre shadows of Gothic architecture. This, apart from all innovations of dramatic form, was the secret of the delirious popularity of "Hernani," "Lucrèce Borgia," "Le Roi s'amuse," and the "Tour de Nesle," and of the craze for historical novels, verses in baroque metres, slouch hats _à la Buridan_, velvet pourpoints, daggers, mysterious draperies and massive chests, drinking cups made out of skulls, and illuminated breviaries of which Gautier makes such fun in "Les Jeunes France." To it we owe Balzac's splendid "Contes Drolatiques," Lassailly's "Roueries de Trialph," and Roger de Beauvoir's "L'Écolier de Cluny." Gautier in his early poems was as romanesque as any of his "Jeune France," as those who know his early poems must admit. "Débauche" is a frank orgy, and "Albertus" is a gem of the Gothic, with its supernatural setting, the "fatality" of its hero, the horror of its _dénouement_, the wild fantasy of its witches' chamber, and its amorous wealth of descriptive detail in which old fabrics, old furniture, swords, daggers, and hangings abound. Victor Hugo, above all, was the chosen bard of the Gothic and the romanesque. Besides his dramas, his "Odes et Ballades" were in the mouth of every child who could pay four halfpence for an hour's luxury in the _cabinet de lecture_; and schoolboys would declaim for hours in antiphon such passages as the invocation of "La Bande Noire":

_O murs! ô créneaux! ô tourelles!_
_Remparts! fossés aux ponts mouvants!_
_Lourds faisceaux de colonnes frêles!_
_Fiers châteaux! modestes couvents!_
_Cloîtres poudreux, salles antiques,_
_Où gémissaient les saints cantiques,_
_Où riaient les rires joyeux!_
_Églises où priaient nos mères,_
_Tours où combattaient nos aïeux!_

or the frenzied descriptions of the witches' dance in "La Ronde du Sabbat," or lines from "La Chasse du Burgrave"--which even Hugo called "un peu trop Gothique de forme"--or with a

_Çà, qu'on selle,_
_Ecuyer,_
_Mon fidèle_
_Destrier._
_Mon cœur ploie_
_Sous la joie_
_Quand je broie_
_L'étrier_

proclaimed their attendance at the "Pas d'Armes du Roi Jean."

The star of the Gothic and the medieval was indeed high in the heavens, but it paled before the full sun of Araby and the East. Napoleon had dreamed of a Mohammedan empire, and before his dream could fade Navarino and Missolonghi fired men's minds again. Victor Hugo was also the champion of Oriental rhapsody. Even in 1824 he had seen the possibilities of Oriental colour in French verse, when he wrote "La Fée et la Péri," a poem in which the Peri, who stands for romanticism, says:

_J'ai de vastes cités qu'en tous lieux on admire,_
_Lahore aux champs fleuris, Golconde, Cachemire,_
_La guerrière Damas, la royale Ispahan,_
_Bagdad que ses remparts couvrent comme une armure,_
_Alep dont l'immense murmure_
_Semble au pâtre lointain le bruit d'un océan._

His collection of poems entitled "Les Orientales" was published in 1829 and took Paris by storm, provoking passionate enthusiasm and equally passionate protest. In the preface he asserts that Orientalism is a general preoccupation. "The colours of the East have come, as if spontaneously, to impress themselves upon all his [the poet's] thoughts and all his musings; his musings and his thoughts have become, in turn, and almost without his willing it, Hebrew, Turkish, Greek, Persian, Arabic, even Spanish, for Spain, too, is the East." There are fine poems in "Les Orientales"--"Les Djinns," for instance, will always be famous--but it is impossible to read the volume through to-day without considerable amusement, so very full-blooded are they. There are lofty apostrophes to Byron and the Greeks, followed by dreadful tales of Turkish cruelty, gruesome ballads like "La Voile," in which four brothers kill their sister, epigraphs like "O horror! horror! horror!" valiant Klephtes, houris, scimitars, and all the catalogue which the poet himself gives in "Novembre":

_Sultans et sultanes,_
_Pyramides, palmiers, galères capitanes,_
_Et le tigre vorace et le chameau frugal;_
_Djinns au vol furieux, danses des bayadères,_
_L'Arabe qui se penche au cou des dromadaires,_
_Et la fauve girafe au galop inégale._
_Alors éléphants blancs chargés de femmes brunes,_
_Cités aux dômes d'or où les mois sont des lunes,_
_Imams de Mahomet, mages, prêtres de Bel ..._

Then, as if Victor Hugo did not whip the passions enough, Alfred de Musset lent a hand in the hurly-burly with his "Contes d'Espagne et d'Italie," which made the young maniacs frantically demand:

_Avez-vous vu dans Barcelone_
_Une Andalouse au sein bruni?_
_Pâle comme un beau soir d'automne!_
_C'est ma maîtresse, ma lionne!_
_La marquesa d'Amaëgui._

Delacroix, too, was sending the critics into ecstasies of rage with his vivid Eastern scenes and the horrors of his "Massacre of Scio." The ideas of the young men with inflamed sensibilities seethed in turbulent disorder. To be in the movement they had to have at least a poniard and a narghile, a medieval cloak and an Oriental divan. Those with money to spare decorated their rooms like sombre Gothic manors, those with no money enriched their conversations with a wealth of medieval diction. No make-believe was too ridiculous to shut out the actual place and time in which they lived. Balzac's novel "La Peau de Chagrin," which has won a celebrity far beyond its merits, is most unmistakably marked with the frenzies of 1830. His revelling in the supernatural, the massed effects of careful detail in the description of the curiosity shop where the wild-ass skin hangs, the wild riot of the orgy, the terrific excesses in which Valentin ruins his life, the duel and the horrible end, are just as much the _genre frénétique_ as anything by Pétrus Borel. The hero, Valentin, is simply a type of his time, and his tirade on taking the supernatural skin is hardly an exaggeration:

"Je veux que la débauche en délire et rugissante nous emporte, dans
son char à quatre chevaux, par delà les bornes du monde, pour nous
verser sur des plages inconnues! Que les âmes montent dans les
cieux ou se plongent dans la boue, je ne sais si alors elles
s'élèvent ou s'abaissent, peu m'importe! Donc, je commande à ce
pouvoir sinistre de me fondre toutes les joies dans une joie. Oui,
j'ai besoin d'embrasser les plaisirs du ciel et de la terre dans
une dernière étreinte, pour en mourir. Aussi souhaité-je et des
priapées antiques après boire, et des chants à réveiller les morts,
et de triples baisers, des baisers sans fin dont la clameur passe
sur Paris comme un craquement d'incendie, y réveille les époux et
les inspire une ardeur cuisante qui les rajeunissent tous, même les
septuagénaires!"

As for the "orgy," it was so much a fashion that Gautier in his "Les Jeune France" scores a delightful hit with the story of a society of young men who combine for a colossal feast, in which various sections follow out in exact detail the descriptions of orgies given by their favourite novelists and the end is a farcical confusion.

Building castles in Spain is a fascinating pastime, but the ingenuities of imagination cannot entirely shut out the individual from his surroundings. From 1820 to 1830 the young man of France was continually running against the sharp corners of the world and receiving the elbow prods of his fellow-men. Exalted by his excited sensibility, he conceived at once a contempt and a hatred for the insensibility of society, which produced in him a feeling of moral superiority and solitude. This abnormal vanity, shown in the deification of "l'homme supérieur" and a proud contemplation of his social outlawry, is a third marked symptom of _le mal du siècle_.[5] It broke out in several different forms. One was a romantic worship of energy and strong will, as typified by the career of Napoleon. Given these qualities, a man could rise from the lowest depths to impose his wishes on the world. However, self-styled supermen have invariably found their theories rebellious to practical application, and Henri Dubois, if he started upon a Napoleonic path, soon discovered that society selects its "homme supérieur" when it wants him, and that uncalled-for aspirants receive the point of its toe. He reserved his superiority, therefore, more usually, for less material manifestations and conflicts. His rare spirit, susceptible to all "the finer shades," stood mournfully but prudently on high, scorning the base, unfeeling throng below it, and calling out through space for kindred spirits to cherish. "My friend, take care of yourself," writes young Ampère to his friend. "Obermann cries to us, 'Keep close together, ye simple men who feel the beauty of natural things.' Let us help one another, all of us who suffer." So Henri Dubois and his friends suffered and helped one another, shedding pints of tears and being just as ridiculous as they could be.

Solitary suffering makes men philosophers or poets. Philosophy requiring some intellectual capacity and mental preparation, Henri Dubois often took the further step from crying in the wilderness to enshrining his laments in metre, being encouraged in this by the certain fact that young men and true poets were indeed striking the Romantic harp to a new and surprising tune. The poet was the real "homme supérieur" of the time, not only in fancy but in fact. Henri accordingly proceeded another stage towards sublimity by way of the faulty syllogism: "The poet has an exquisite soul; I have an exquisite soul; therefore I am a poet." The Romantics conceived the poet as a God-sent prophet. This was the attitude, above all, of de Vigny; Lamartine and Sainte-Beuve adopted it in their early days, and certain passages of Victor Hugo--for instance:

_O poètes sacrés, échevelés, sublimes,_
_Allez, et répandez vos âmes sur les cimes,_
_Sur les sommets de neige en butte aux aquilons,_
_Sur les déserts pieux où l'esprit se recueille,_
_Sur les bois que l'automne emporte feuille à feuille,_
_Sur les lacs endormis dans l'ombre des vallons!_

--show that he was not averse to it. So every youth who could rhyme "âme" with "flamme" put on the aureole of a "poète échevelé," revelled in the ecstasies of solitary contemplation, and sneered magnificently at all who attended to business as soulless _épiciers_. This was a harmless enough delusion, but it became less harmless when combined with the idea that for the sake of experience the poet should abandon himself entirely to his passions. The great artist, indeed, has his own morality, but Victor Hugo's "Mazeppa" or Lamartine's stanza

_Mais nous, pour embraser les âmes,_
_Il faut brûler, il faut ravir_
_Au ciel jaloux ses triples flammes:_
_Pour tout peindre, il faut tout sentir._
_Foyers brûlants de la lumière,_
_Nos cœurs de la nature entière_
_Doivent concentrer les rayons,_
_Et l'on accuse notre vie!_
_Mais ce flambeau qu'on nous envie_
_S'allume au feu des passions_

were dangerous matchboxes in the hands of children. It was a fatality, too, that several poets of some merit died during these years of want or neglect. Gilbert, the satirist, expired in hospital, breathing piteous plaints, and Hégésippe Moreau, the poet of "La Voulzie," was equally unfortunate. Society can hardly be blamed for not supporting all its lyrically inclined members, but it was natural that the "poète échevelé" should smoulder with indignation at such disasters, and cheer the sentiments of de Vigny's drama "Chatterton" till his lungs gave out. It was still more of a fatality that certain other poets attained a momentary celebrity by committing suicide, leaving rhymed farewells to a stony-hearted society and a tedious life. To win fame by a pathetic death in a pauper's hospital, or to bid defiance to the world with a superb gesture of self-destruction, was a far too common ambition. Sainte-Beuve himself observed that "la manie et la gageure de tous les René, de tous les Chatterton de notre temps, c'était d'être grand poète et de mourir." A perfect epidemic of suicide was due to _le mal du siècle_, as M. Louis Maigron shows in his work that I have already cited. Among other strange stories he gives at length the confession of an old man who in his youth was president of a suicide club, formed in a provincial town by a set of romantic schoolboys as late as 1846. Happily the club was short-lived, but it resulted in the self-destruction of one of its most gifted members. In the letter with which he announced his coming death from Lucerne he wrote:

" ...I have no precise reason to have done with life except the
insurmountable disgust with which it inspires me. Chance of birth
gave me a certain fortune; I am not denied an intelligence perhaps
slightly above the common level; it would have been in my power to
marry an adorable child: so many conditions of happiness, in the
eyes of the vulgar. But my poor soul, alas, cannot content itself
with them. Nothing can charm my heart any longer, 'mon cœur
lassé de tout, même de l'espérance'; it will be closed, without
ever having been opened."

He left his little library to the club, specially reserving for the president "Werther," "René," "Obermann," "Jacques," and the works of Rabbe. They were his breviaries, he said, covered as they were with notes that revealed all his soul.

The pose of pathetic despair was not, however, the only one in which the feeling of moral solitude showed itself. Another very common attitude was that of revolt against society, an aping of Mephistopheles, the fallen angel doomed to everlasting unhappiness, strong only in his disillusionment and his clear vision of the canker in the heart of every bud. The word "satanism" summed up this attitude: its breviaries were "Manfred" and Dumas' violent tragedy, "Antony." It rejoiced in the cult of the horrible, in Hoffmannesque dabblings in the supernatural, in pessimistic poetry like Gautier's "Tête de Mort," and such lines in his early sonnets as:

_Mais toute cette joie est comme le lierre_
_Qui d'une vieille tour, guirlande irregulière,_
_Embrasse en les cachant les pans démantelés,_
_Au dehors on ne voit que riante verdure,_
_Au dedans, que poussière infecte et noire ordure,_
_Et qu'ossements jaunis aux décombres mêlés._

Its effects, in society, were chiefly obtained by the satanic laugh. Gautier soon grew out of his satanic mood, Dumas was never anything more than a fine romancer, while Victor Hugo, Lamartine, and de Vigny were too lofty poets to indulge in such artificialities; but satanism deserves mention because it was a traditional business with one party in the romantic Bohemia--the party of the _Bousingots_.

The origin of the term _Bousingot_ has been a matter of dispute among French writers. Philibert Audebrand in his memoir of Léon Gozlan says it was invented by that brilliant journalist to satirize the young republican enthusiasts of 1832 in the _Figaro_. Charles Asselineau in his "Bibliographie Romantique" says that after some hilarious souls had been arrested for singing too loudly in the streets "Nous avons fait du bousingo"--_bousingo_ being the slang for "noise"--it became a popular designation for the more furious Romantics. The matter seems to be settled more or less in Asselineau's manner by a passage in the letter written by Philothée O'Neddy to Asselineau after the publication of the "Bibliographie Romantique" to give a more correct account of the second _cénacle_. He asserts that there never were any self-styled _Bousingots_, but that after the arrest of the hilarious revellers the affair got into the newspapers and the term remained as a _bourgeois_ hit at the Romantics. The proper spelling of the word was _bouzingo_, and Gautier exclaimed one day: "These asses of _bourgeois_ don't even know how _bouzingo_ is spelt! To teach them a little orthography several of us ought to publish a volume of stories which we will bravely call 'Contes du Bouzingo.'" The suggestion was thought a happy one, and the book was even advertised as imminent, but it was never written. Gautier's promise of a contribution was afterwards redeemed in "Le Capitaine Fracasse," but Jules Vabre's famous treatise "Sur l'incommodité des commodes" did not progress beyond the title. In common parlance, however, the name remained _Bousingots_, and its general meaning was quite clear. Just as the Gothic frenzy made the party of _Jeune-France_, who were the Christian-Royalist section of the Romantics, so the political agitation, combined with the feeling of antagonism to society, made the _Bousingots_. The meaning became subsequently enlarged to express all the extravagances of the Romantics, their idealization of the artist and their disorderly ways; but this extension was illegitimate. Literature and poetry were, it is true, the preoccupation of the more prominent _Bousingots_, but their distinctive mark was a profession of ultra-democratic views and manners. The leader of them all was the mysterious Pétrus Borel,[6] whom I have already mentioned as the author of "Madame Putiphar." His other chief work was a volume of poems entitled "Rhapsodies." The young men of 1830 worshipped him as the coming champion before whom the star of Victor Hugo was ingloriously to wane. They were grievously disappointed. After the first crisis of _le mal du siècle_ his inspiration faded away, and he died an obscure officiai in Algeria. Baudelaire, in "L'Art Romantique," says of him:

"Without Pétrus Borel, there would have been a lacuna in
Romanticism. In the first phase of our literary revolution the
poet's imagination turned especially to the past.... Later on its
melancholy took a more decided, more savage, and more earthy tone.
A misanthropical republicanism allied itself with the new school,
and Pétrus Borel was the most extravagant and paradoxical
expression of the spirit of the _Bousingots_.... This spirit, both
literary and republican, as opposed to the democratic and bourgeois
passion which subsequently oppressed us so cruelly, was moved both
by an aristocratic hate, without limit, without restriction,
without pity, for kings and the bourgeoisie, and by a general
sympathy for all that in art represented excess in colour and form,
for all that was at once intense, pessimistic, and Byronic; it was
dilettantism of a singular nature, only to be explained by the
hateful circumstances in which our bored and turbulent youth was
enclosed. If the Restoration had regularly developed in glory,
Romanticism would have never separated from the throne; and this
new sect, which professed an equal disdain for the moderate party
of the political opposition, for the painting of Delaroche or the
poetry of Delavigne, and for the king who presided over the
development of le _juste-milieu_, would have had no reason for
existing."

Charles Asselineau fills up the picture. The _Bousingot_, he says, was as rough and cynical as the _Jeune-France_ was dandified and exquisite, and showed genius in discovering at once the _plastique_ of his idea. In contrast to the extravagant luxury affected by the medievalists, he adopted the manners of the people in habits and dress, smoking clay pipes and drinking the "petit bleu" of low pot-houses. Instead of raving about cathedrals, he spent his ingenuity in devising bitter satires against the king and his officers or fresh settings in caricature for Louis' famous _tête de poire_. "The fusillade of St.-Merry and the laws of September were the _Bousingot's_ Waterloo. From the moment he was forbidden to protest in a visible manner, and was deprived of his insignia, his waistcoat, his stick, and his pipe with a pear-shaped bowl, the _Bousingot_ had to retire. He became serious, an economist or a humanitarian philosopher, and showed his revolt against society and power by writing novels 'in which the idea predominated over the form.' The novel with a tendency, that literary monstrosity, is the only legacy left by the _Bousingot_ to the literature of the nineteenth century."[7]

In Balzac's wonderful gallery of portraits there is a picture of a _Bousingot_. Raoul Nathan, the author, appears frequently in his Parisian scenes, but his outlines are only elaborated in the little-read "Une Fille d'Eve." There was something great and fantastic in his appearance, as if he had fought with angels or demons. He was strongly built, with a pocked face and a tanned complexion. His long hair was always untidy, but his eyes were Napoleonic and his mouth charming. His clothes always looked old and worn, his cravat was askew, his long, pointed beard untended. The grease from his hair stained his coat-collar, and he never used a nail-brush. His movements were grotesque, his conversation caustic and full of surprises. His talent, great but disorderly, had shown itself in three novels and a book of poetry: he was critic, dramatist, vaudevillist. Jealous ambition led him to embrace politics. Beginning at the extreme of opposition, he went from Saint Simonism to republicanism and through all the stages to ministerialism, being rewarded by a government appointment.

"Nathan offre un image de la jeunesse littéraire d'aujourd'hui, de
ses fausses grandeurs et de ses misères réelles; il la représente
avec ses beautés incorrectes et ses chutes profondes, sa vie à
cascades bouillonnantes, à revers soudains, à triomphes inespérés.
C'est bien l'enfant de ce siècle dévoré de jalousie ... qui veut la
fortune sans le travail, la gloire sans le talent et le succès sans
peine, mais qu'après bien des rébellions, bien des escarmouches,
ses vices amènent à émarger le budget sous le bon plaisir du
Pouvoir."

Balzac, we all know, was a little too ready to believe in the depravity of human nature, particularly when men of letters were in question. Moreover, he was profoundly antagonistic to the creed of the _Bousingots_. His portrait of Nathan is distinctly ill-natured, but it bears out the profound remark of Baudelaire, that if the Restoration had developed in glory Romanticism would never have separated from it. In another extravagant tirade (in "Béatrix") Balzac complains that the Revolution of 1830 opened the flood-gates of petty ambition, and the result of modern "equality" was that everybody did his utmost to become conspicuous. This complaint was very largely true, but as far as the _Bousingots_ are concerned Baudelaire puts the facts in a truer light. The policy of _juste-milieu_ inevitably caused revolt among the over-excited young men of the day. The _Bousingots_ were part of this revolt, but the best of them had no thought of self-advancement. On the contrary, the testimony of contemporaries goes to show that the saving virtue of the Romantic Bohemia, _Bousingot_ and _Jeune-France_ alike, was disinterestedness. Baudelaire says in extenuation of Pétrus Borel himself: "He loved letters ferociously, and to-day we are encumbered with pretty, supple writers ready to sell the muse for the potter's field." Asselineau avers that if there was much of the ridiculous in their excesses, there was nothing sordid. "They never talked of money, or business, or position." The artist Jean Gigoux,[8] in regretting the past, says that the _rapin_ of his later years, if better dressed, knew less than those of his young days, and was greedy of honours and money, things which the _rapins_ of old sincerely despised. Indeed, it is impossible to read much about the Romantics of 1830, high or low, aristocratic or Bohemian, without coming to the conclusion that they were neither jealous nor mercenary. So the _Bousingots_--though some rolled their eyes and knitted their brows "as if they would bully the whole universe," others "fixed their dark glances on the ground in fearful meditation," others, "gloomily leaning against a statue or tree," threw "such terrific meaning into their looks as might be naturally interpreted into the language of the witches in 'Macbeth'"[9]--did these things in all sincerity, with an ambition, not to "get on," but to "do something."

We cannot, then, judge the classic _vie de Bohème_ in a true light without taking into account this _mal du siècle_ which with its various symptoms infected the greater part, certainly the more intelligent part, of the younger generation. Many outlived the fever and smiled at its remembrance; but at its height it was powerful. It was a healthy fever in so far as it implied devotion to an ideal, _the_ ideal of true art, which was then born again. Moreover, the ideal consumed in its fire many pettinesses of the artistic soul, the commercialism of some, the haughty vanity of others. Balzac's Lucien de Rubempré was not a true son of 1830 when he sold his independence to corrupt journalism, and Victor Hugo was not only intriguing when he intoxicated young poets by flattering letters. There was a true fellowship of art such as has not existed since. The poet or artist whose name was in everyone's mouth did not for that reason deny his friendship to one who had never published a line or exhibited a picture. If a man had talent he was greeted as brother by all his fellow-craftsmen, high or low. This common brotherhood inspired by one ideal of art suffused and welded together Bohemia with a radiant heat. Only when the radiance became dim did the mass grow cold and crumble in pieces which retained but the semblance of a spark. Bohemia, to change the metaphor, was not then a block of model dwellings, with nothing in common but steel girders and a stone staircase, but it was a corporation fed by common hopes and warmed at a common hearth. Its more ridiculous defects--its vanities and morbid excitability, its violent defiance of social convention, its passion for the exotic and the vivid, its fits of melancholy and its uproarious rejoicings--were not individual vices, but marks of a generation. Its grandeur and its follies are traceable to a common source. Its greatest fault was not extravagance, for that is a venial folly, but ignorance, which even youth cannot wholly excuse. The seed of dissolution really lurking in Bohemia was what Philibert Audebrand has truly called its _enfantillage de l'esprit_.[10] In the flush of Romanticism the zealots neglected those studies which give firmness to the mind. They rejected history and philosophy; being young, they were not well read and they did not care to become so. Foreign literature was a closed book to them, in spite of their professed admiration for Dante, Goethe, Shakespeare, and Byron; even of their own literature their knowledge was sadly defective. "Tout bien vu," says M. Audebrand with a shake of the head, "ils n'avaient pas d'autre docteur que la Blague." This cap will not fit all the heads, but it has an undeniable texture of truth. When the first ebullition was over, and the Bohemians of 1830 had departed from their joyful college to spread its doctrines in a workaday world, they left nothing but a tradition behind them. Their house had been built upon a light soil, and the time had come to make new and solid foundations. But the tradition did not include such wholesome industry, and Murger's generation, denied the excitement and warmth of building, were content to sit down in the hasty edifice to enjoy only the pastimes of their predecessors, stopping up the ever-widening crevices, that let in a cold blast of public opinion, with the unsatisfactory makeshift of _la blague_.

IV

PARISIAN SOCIETY--LE TOUT PARIS

The events of the time, the spiritual exaltation of young France, and the _éclat_ of the Romantic struggle gave to Bohemia a definite position. This position was accentuated by the smallness of Parisian society. The diversity and complexity of life in a great modern city are such that, even if all other obstacles were swept away, this alone would still make it impossible for Bohemia to rise again. Bohemians must live where rents are low--on the outer circumference, that is, of a city. In the larger capitals of Europe the inner circle, which contains the commerce and luxury, the hurry and bustle, has extended enormously in the last fifty years or so. The increase of middle-class prosperity has thrown far back the alleys and mean houses, to give place to "residential" districts; the easiness of modern travel has brought vast hotels and a constant foreign population; shops and theatres fill immeasurably more space. Bohemia is driven to the extremities of the spider's web, so that, in Plato's phrase, it is no longer one, but many. It would be absurd to imagine a solid cohort formed from Hampstead, Chelsea, and Camden Town, to say nothing of Wimbledon or Hampton Court, for the purpose of forcing some "Hernani" upon the London public (or its newspaper critics). Public opinion can hardly be corrected when the agents of correction are forced to disperse in the last motor omnibus. Moreover, this extension of the inner circle has made its inhabitants less susceptible to sudden assaults. Unconventional demonstrations have upon it no more effect than the poke of a finger upon an india-rubber ball. The interests of Bohemia, even if this circle be not entirely indifferent to them, are only a fraction of its multitudinous preoccupations, which include the fluctuations of the money market, the results of athletic contests in all parts of the globe, the progress of foreign wars, the crimes and railway accidents of the week, the development of aviation, and the safest method of crossing the street. Bohemia can no longer be pointed to and felt by society as part of itself, and when this is the case the name is nothing but a metaphor.

Speaking of the year 1841, Baudelaire in "L'Art Romantique" says:

"Paris was not then what it is to-day, a hurly-burly, a Babel
inhabited by fools and futilities, with little delicacy as to how
they kill time. At that time _tout Paris_ was composed of that
choice body of people who were responsible for forming the opinion
of the others."

The glory of Bohemia rests partly on this fact. During Louis Philippe's reign this state of society, comparable in some respects with the ideal polity of the Attic philosophers, was, it is true, being disrupted from within. The balance of power between wealth of gold and fecundity of ideas was gradually changing--a change of which Balzac is the immortal epic poet. Yet, though the power of a Nucingen was increasing, and Paris was about to start on its new prosperity as the pleasure-ground of Europe, this precious _tout Paris_ lasted till the reign was over. Paris was small, in extent, in population, in the number of those who formed its opinion. Of its actual compactness as a city I shall speak in a later chapter; suffice it now to say that the boulevards of Montmartre and Montparnasse bounded it on the north and south, that the Champs Elysées was still a wilderness, and that outside the fortifications lay open country. The population about 1835 was only 714,000; railways were hardly beginning, factories only tentatively being erected. The working classes were chiefly engaged in commerce or _petits métiers_, and the heights of Ménilmontant smiled as green and as free from slums as the Champs Elysées were free from luxurious hotels. The passing foreign population, though there was a certain number of English attracted by cheap living, was almost negligible. Brazilians and Argentines, Germans and Americans were hardly to be seen; even French provincials walked delicately instead of forming, as they do now, the chief _clientèle_ of the Parisian theatres. _Le tout Paris_ was, therefore, a nucleus within a circle of three segments--the middle class, the aristocratic families, and Bohemia.

The middle class, though the most numerous, was only potentially important at the time. Politics and money-making were its only preoccupations. It was divided, of course, into an infinity of grades, all of which may be illustrated from characters in Balzac's "Comédie Humaine." There were the bankers and usurers from the Du Tillets down to the Samanons, the successful merchants like Birotteau, the world of officials so accurately described in "Les Employés," the judges like old Popinot, and all the men of law from a Desroches down to his youngest clerk. Some were as sordid and bourgeois as the Thuilliers, others luxurious debauchees like the Camusots and Matifats, others, like the Rabourdins, fringed upon the _beau monde_. The sons of men enriched and decorated by Napoleon formed perhaps the cream of the middle class, and of these Balzac has given his opinion in describing Baron Hulot's son, who plays so large a part in "Cousine Bette":

"M. Hulot junior was just the type of young man fashioned by the
Revolution of 1830, with a mind engrossed by politics, respectful
towards his hopes, suppressing them beneath a false gravity, very
envious of reputations, uttering phrases instead of incisive
_mots_--those diamonds of French conversation--but with plenty of
attitude and mistaking haughtiness for dignity. These people are
the walking coffins which contain the Frenchman of former times;
the Frenchman gets agitated at moments and knocks against his
English envelope; but ambition holds him back, and he consents to
suffocate inside it. This coffin is always dressed in black cloth."

This sombre portion of the background need, therefore, trouble us no further. It dominated politics and was ignored by _tout Paris_.

The aristocracy of the Faubourg St.-Germain is almost equally negligible. Being legitimists, they sulked after 1830, either living on their country estates or shutting themselves gloomily within the gaunt walls of their _hôtels_ in the Faubourg. This retirement, too, was not wholly due to _bouderie_, for many of them, like Balzac's Princesse de Cadignan, suffered heavy financial losses by the Revolution. Their self-denying ordinance caused a great diminution in the general gaiety of Paris for some years. Legitimist drawing-rooms, where a brilliant host of guests had been wont to gather, were hushed and dark while the dowagers gravely discussed the latest news of the Duchesse de Berry. The few official _fêtes_ were severely boycotted, and even the entertainments of foreign ambassadors suffered. It was an irksome business for the younger members, particularly the ladies of the aristocracy, who eventually gathered courage to break out into small entertainments, and in 1835 there was the first of a series of legitimist balls, the subscriptions for which went to recompense those whose civil list pensions had been suppressed in 1830. After this the Faubourg St.-Germain became more lively, and certain houses were opened to a wider circle of guests. Eugène Sue, for instance, till he became impossible, was to be found in many legitimist drawing-rooms. Nevertheless, the Faubourg St.-Germain avoided attracting the public eye by any conspicuous festivities, and this had two effects. In the first place, it brought the more joyous festivities of _tout Paris_ and the riotous celebrations of Bohemia into greater relief; and, in the second, the men of the aristocracy, like the Duc d'Aulnis, were driven to find distraction and amusement in a gayer world into which their own womankind was debarred from penetrating. It was they who formed a certain section of _tout Paris_; they were the _viveurs_, the _dandies_, the young bloods of the newly founded Jockey Club, the members of the _petit cercle_ in the Café de Paris, who joined hands with what may be called _la haute Bohème_.

There was, however, a certain amount of neutral ground between the aristocracy of birth and that of wit to be found in the literary _salons_ of the day, which, if not quite so illustrious as they had once been, shone with a considerable amount of brilliance. Among the legitimists these were, of course, not to be found, but the aristocracy of Napoleon was represented by the _salons_ of the Duchesse de Duras and the Duchesse d'Abrantès. The latter, widow of Napoleon's marshal Junot, was a particular friend of Balzac, who was the most notable figure to be found at her house. She was always dreadfully in debt, and after being sold up she died in a hospital in 1838. The _salon_ of the Princess Belgiojoso in the Rue Montparnasse attracted particular attention because, with an aristocratic hostess, it had all the _entrain_ of more purely artistic gatherings. Till troubles in Italy called them back to their estates the Prince and Princess Belgiojoso were among the gayest of the gay. The Prince with his boon companion, Alfred de Musset, ruffled it merrily on the boulevard, while the Princess, who had many of the most brilliant men of the day for her lovers, filled her apartments with poets, artists, writers, and, above all, musicians. One who frequented her drawing-room hung with black velvet, spangled with silver stars, says she had a "fierté glaciale, mais curiosité suraiguë." The splendour of her entertainments was royal, and her concerts were magnificent. To this the _salons_ of Madame Ancelot and Madame Récamier were a striking contrast. The former was composed chiefly of serious men of letters and politicians, while at L'Abbaye-aux-Bois Madame Récamier acted as priestess to the adoration of the aging Châteaubriand. The _salons_ of the pure Romantics made no pretence of splendour and were entirely free from the atmosphere of officialdom. The chief of them were those of Madame Hugo, of Madame Gay (who was succeeded by her daughter, Delphine de Girardin), and of Charles Nodier, the genial librarian of the Arsenal. In all of these, as in the _salon_ of the Princess Belgiojoso, _tout Paris_ was to be found in force. The gatherings round Victor Hugo were a little too much flavoured by the fumes of the censer, but those of the Girardins and of Nodier were of the most charming gaiety. Balzac, in a humorous article, drew a malicious sketch of the exaggerated enthusiasms of Nodier's guests when a poem was read before them. "Cathédrale!" "Ogive!" "Pyramide d'Egypte!" were the approved exclamations of ecstatic approbation. Madame Ancelot[11] confesses that she found the conversation very amusing, but very strange. "There was never a serious word," she says, "never anything profound, sensible, or simple; every word was meant to cause laughter, to make an effect. The more a thing was unexpected--that is, the less it was natural--the more prodigious was its success." She, no doubt, was prejudiced, and the fact remains that every guest who wrote in after years of Nodier's _salon_, its merry conversation followed inevitably by dancing, did so with most grateful praise, for Nodier died in 1846, leaving his Romantic friends to write regretful reminiscences. The _salon_ of Sophie Gay and her daughter was equally infected by high spirits, but it was less purely literary. Liszt, Thalberg, and Berlioz made music here; Roger de Beauvoir met Lamartine, and the Marquis de Custine sat by Balzac or Alphonse Karr. The de Vignys also had a _salon_, and Théodore de Banville speaks most warmly of their kindly hospitality; but there was a certain aloofness about the creator of "Eloa," and another of his guests found that in his house colouring seemed absent, so that "the regular guests seemed to come and go in the moonlight."[12]

To speak at greater length about the _salons_ of the Romantic period would here be beside the mark. Bohemians, no doubt, were often to be found at Victor Hugo's or Nodier's, but on those occasions they were consciously straying outside their own boundaries. Neither the stately house in the Place Royale nor the librarian's dwelling at the Arsenal was within the domains of Bohemia, and no Bohemian of the time would have dreamed of claiming them, as the later "Parnassiens" might have claimed the _salons_ of Nina de Kallias and Madame Ricard, for parts of their ordinary existence. The case, however, is different with the relations between _le tout Paris_ and Bohemia. _Le tout Paris_ was, as I have said, a nucleus, but a nucleus of disparate and constantly shifting particles. This perfectly undefined body had, of course, no definite place of assembly, but so far as it could be identified with any particular locality it may be said to have congregated on the boulevard. The Boulevard des Italiens--_the_ boulevard--was the chosen spot for the saunterings of the chosen few, a fact which by itself is a proof of the smallness and privacy of Paris compared with the present day, when this same boulevard is flooded from morning till night by a hurrying stream of indistinguishable humanity. In the days of Louis Philippe nobody, except an ignorant foreigner, ventured to appear on this sacred preserve in the afternoon without some semblance of a title. The title may have been so small as a peculiarly elegant waistcoat, a capacity for drinking, or a happy invention for practical jokes, or it may have been the reputation for a ready wit and a trenchant pen; but whosoever dared to show himself in this select society was sure to have some particular justification for making himself conspicuous, otherwise he was certain to be quizzed out of existence. The newcomer, if he survived a short but swift scrutiny, entered an informal though exclusive club of which every member was known to the others--he was known, that is, to "all Paris." All Paris, in a sense, it truly was, not because the greatest poets and statesmen belonged to it--for they had better things to do than to waste so much time--but because it served as the central intelligence department or, I might almost say, as the brain of Paris. A word uttered there was round the town in two hours; there a poet was made or a play damned--in the twinkling of an eye. One day of its activity furnished all the wit of the next day's newspapers, which is hardly surprising when so many of its members were journalists. _Le tout Paris_ was not hide-bound in its requirements; it admitted high birth as one qualification for membership, wealth if accompanied by good manners as another, but a certain way to its heart was by a brilliant handling of the pen. In spite of the exaggeration of the Parisian scenes in "Illusions Perdues," there is no unreality in Balzac's picture of Lucien's sudden rise from impoverished obscurity to fame and money. Lucien, the provincial poet, after his disappointing elopement with Madame de Bargeton, retires discomfited to a garret in the Quartier Latin. The door of rich protectors is shut in his face, no publisher will read his poems or accept his novels. The serpent arrives in the shape of Lousteau, who shows him the devilish power of journalism. By a lucky chance Lucien is asked to write a dramatic criticism for a new paper. He succeeds brilliantly, and he has Paris at his feet. The publisher cringes before his power and publishes all that he had formerly rejected; with money, fine clothes, and a reputation, he can answer stare for stare and return the impertinences of Rastignac and de Marsay; even Madame de Bargeton in the Faubourg St.-Germain cowers from his revengeful epigrams. So long as he remains a power in the Press he is flattered and caressed and plumes himself, a butterfly only just emerged, in the glittering _tout Paris_ of his day.