2.M.3.3. REQUIESCANT
MADAME DE T.'s salon was all that Marius Pontmercy knew
of the world. It was the only opening through which he could
get a glimpse of life. This opening was sombre, and more
cold than warmth, more night than day, came to him through
this skylight. This child, who had been all joy and light on
entering this strange world, soon became melancholy, and,
what is still more contrary to his age, grave. Surrounded by
all those singular and imposing personages, he gazed about
him with serious amazement. Everything conspired to increase
this astonishment in him. There were in Madame de
T.'s salon some very noble ladies named Mathan, Noe, Levis,
— which was pronounced Levi, — Cambis, pronounced Cambyse.
These antique visages and these Biblical names mingled
in the child's mind with the Old Testament which he was
learning by heart, and when they were all there, seated in
a circle around a dying fire, sparely lighted by a lamp shaded
with green, with their severe profiles, their gray or white hair,
their long gowns of another age, whose lugubrious colors could
not be distinguished, dropping, at rare intervals, words which
were both majestic and severe, little Marius stared at them
with frightened eyes, in the conviction that he beheld not
women, but patriarchs and magi, not real beings, but
phantoms.
With these phantoms, priests were sometimes mingled,
frequenters
of this ancient salon, and some gentlemen; the
Marquis de Sass****, private secretary to Madame de Berry,
the Vicomte de Val***, who published, under the pseudonyme
of Charles-Antoine, monorhymed odes, the Prince de
Beauff*******, who, though very young, had a gray head and
a pretty and witty wife, whose very low-necked toilettes of
scarlet velvet with gold torsades alarmed these shadows, the
Marquis de C*****d'E******, the man in all France who best
understood "proportioned politeness," the Comte d'Am*****,
the kindly man with the amiable chin, and the Chevalier de
Port-de-Guy, a pillar of the library of the Louvre, called the
King's cabinet, M. de Port-de-Guy, bald, and rather aged than
old, was wont to relate that in 1793, at the age of sixteen, he
had been put in the galleys as refractory and chained with an
octogenarian, the Bishop of Mirepoix, also refractory, but as
a priest, while he was so in the capacity of a soldier. This was
at Toulon. Their business was to go at night and gather up
on the scaffold the heads and bodies of the persons who had
been guillotined during the day; they bore away on their backs
these dripping corpses, and their red galley-slave blouses had a
clot of blood at the back of the neck, which was dry in the
morning and wet at night. These tragic tales abounded in
Madame de T.'s salon, and by dint of cursing Marat, they
applauded
Trestaillon. Some deputies of the undiscoverable
variety played their whist there; M. Thibord du Chalard, M.
Lemarchant de Gomicourt, and the celebrated scoffer of the
right, M. Cornet-Dincourt. The bailiff de Ferrette, with his
short breeches and his thin legs, sometimes traversed this
salon on his way to M. de Talleyrand. He had been M. le
Comte d'Artois' companion in pleasures and unlike Aristotle
crouching under Campaspe, he had made the Guimard crawl
on all fours, and in that way he had exhibited to the ages a
philosopher avenged by a bailiff. As for the priests, there
was the Abbe Halma, the same to whom M. Larose, his collaborator
on la Foudre, said: "Bah! Who is there who is not
fifty years old? a few greenhorns perhaps?" The Abbe
Letourneur, preacher to the King, the Abbe Frayssinous, who
was not, as yet, either count, or bishop, or minister, or peer,
and
who wore an old cassock whose buttons were missing, and the
Abbe Keravenant, Cure of Saint-Germain-des-Pres; also the
Pope's Nuncio, then Monsignor Macchi, Archbishop of Nisibi,
later on Cardinal, remarkable for his long, pensive nose, and
another Monsignor, entitled thus: Abbate Palmieri, domestic
prelate, one of the seven participant prothonotaries of the
Holy See, Canon of the illustrious Liberian basilica, Advocate
of the saints,
Postulatore dei Santi, which refers to
matters of
canonization, and signifies very nearly: Master of Requests of
the section of Paradise. Lastly, two cardinals, M. de la
Luzerne,
and M. de Cl****** T*******. The Cardinal of
Luzerne was a writer and was destined to have, a few years
later, the honor of signing in the
Conservateur articles
side by
side with Chateaubriand; M. de Cl****** T******* was
Archbishop of Toul****, and often made trips to Paris, to his
nephew, the Marquis de T*******, who was Minister of
Marine and War. The Cardinal of Cl****** T******* was a
merry little man, who displayed his red stockings beneath his
tucked-up cassock; his specialty was a hatred of the
Encyclopaedia,
and his desperate play at billiards, and persons who,
at that epoch, passed through the Rue M***** on summer
evenings, where the hotel de Cl****** T******* then stood,
halted to listen to the shock of the balls and the piercing voice
of the Cardinal shouting to his conclavist, Monseigneur Cotiret,
Bishop
in partibus of Caryste: "Mark, Abbe, I make a
cannon." The Cardinal de Cl****** T******* had been
brought to Madame de T.'s by his most intimate friend, M. de
Roquelaure, former Bishop of Senlis, and one of the Forty.
M. de Roquelaure was notable for his lofty figure and his
assiduity at the Academy; through the glass door of the
neighboring hall of the library where the French Academy
then held its meetings, the curious could, on every Tuesday,
contemplate the Ex-Bishop of Senlis, usually standing erect,
freshly powdered, in violet hose, with his back turned to the
door, apparently for the purpose of allowing a better view of
his little collar. All these ecclesiastics, though for the most
part as much courtiers as churchmen, added to the gravity of
the T. salon, whose seigniorial aspect was accentuated by five
peers of France, the Marquis de Vib****, the Marquis de
Tal***, the Marquis de Herb*******, the Vicomte Damb***,
and the Duc de Val********. This Duc de Val********,
although Prince de Mon***, that is to say a reigning prince
abroad, had so high an idea of France and its peerage, that he
viewed everything through their medium. It was he who said:
"The Cardinals are the peers of France of Rome; the lords
are the peers of France of England." Moreover, as it is
indispensable
that the Revolution should be everywhere in this
century, this feudal salon was, as we have said, dominated by
a bourgeois. M. Gillenormand reigned there.
There lay the essence and quintessence of the Parisian
white
society. There reputations, even Royalist reputations, were
held in quarantine. There is always a trace of anarchy in
renown. Chateaubriand, had he entered there, would have
produced the effect of Pere Duchene. Some of the scoffed-at
did, nevertheless, penetrate thither on sufferance. Comte
Beug*** was received there, subject to correction.
The "noble" salons of the present day no longer resemble
those salons. The Faubourg Saint-Germain reeks of the fagot
even now. The Royalists of to-day are demagogues, let us
record it to their credit.
At Madame de T.'s the society was superior, taste was
exquisite
and haughty, under the cover of a great show of politeness.
Manners there admitted of all sorts of involuntary refinements
which were the old regime itself, buried but still alive. Some
of these habits, especially in the matter of language, seem
eccentric. Persons but superficially acquainted with them
would have taken for provincial that which was only antique.
A woman was called Madame la Generale. Madame la
Colonelle
was not entirely disused. The charming Madame de Leon,
in memory, no doubt, of the Duchesses de Longueville and de
Chevreuse, preferred this appellation to her title of Princesse.
The Marquise de Crequy was also called Madame la
Colonelle.
It was this little high society which invented at the
Tuileries
the refinement of speaking to the King in private as the
King,
in the third person, and never as Your Majesty, the
designation
of Your Majesty having been "soiled by the usurper."
Men and deeds were brought to judgment there. They
jeered at the age, which released them from the necessity of
understanding it. They abetted each other in amazement.
They communicated to each other that modicum of light which
they possessed. Methuselah bestowed information on Epimenides.
The deaf man made the blind man acquainted with
the course of things. They declared that the time which had
elasped since Coblentz had not existed. In the same manner
that Louis XVIII. was by the grace of God, in the five and
twentieth year of his reign, the emigrants were, by rights, in
the five and twentieth year of their adolescence.
All was harmonious; nothing was too much alive; speech
hardly amounted to a breath; the newspapers, agreeing with
the salons, seemed a papyrus. There were some young people,
but they were rather dead. The liveries in the antechamber
were antiquated. These utterly obsolete personages were
served by domestics of the same stamp.
They all had the air of having lived a long time ago, and
of
obstinately resisting the sepulchre. Nearly the whole dictionary
consisted of Conserver, Conservation, Conservateur; to be
in good odor, — that was the point. There are, in fact,
aromatics
in the opinions of these venerable groups, and their
ideas smelled of it. It was a mummified society. The masters
were embalmed, the servants were stuffed with straw.
A worthy old marquise, an emigree and ruined, who
had but
a solitary maid, continued to say: "My people."
What did they do in Madame de T.'s salon? They were
ultra.
To be ultra; this word, although what it represents may
not
have disappeared, has no longer any meaning at the present
day. Let us explain it.
To be ultra is to go beyond. It is to attack the sceptre
in
the name of the throne, and the mitre in the name of the attar;
it is to ill-treat the thing which one is dragging, it is to kick
over the traces; it is to cavil at the fagot on the score of the
amount of cooking received by heretics; it is to reproach the
idol with its small amount of idolatry; it is to insult through
excess of respect; it is to discover that the Pope is not
sufficiently
papish, that the King is not sufficiently royal, and that
the night has too much light; it is to be discontented with
alabaster,
with snow, with the swan and the lily in the name of
whiteness; it is to be a partisan of things to the point of
becoming their enemy; it is to be so strongly for, as to be
against.
The ultra spirit especially characterizes the first phase
of
the Restoration.
Nothing in history resembles that quarter of an hour which
begins in 1814 and terminates about 1820, with the advent of
M. de Villele, the practical man of the Right. These six years
were an extraordinary moment; at one and the same time
brilliant and gloomy, smiling and sombre, illuminated as by
the radiance of dawn and entirely covered, at the same time,
with the shadows of the great catastrophes which still filled the
horizon and were slowly sinking into the past. There existed
in that light and that shadow, a complete little new and old
world, comic and sad, juvenile and senile, which was rubbing
its eyes; nothing resembles an awakening like a return; a
group which regarded France with ill-temper, and which
France regarded with irony; good old owls of marquises by the
streetful, who had returned, and of ghosts, the "former" subjects
of amazement at everything, brave and noble gentlemen
who smiled at being in France but wept also, delighted to behold
their country once more, in despair at not finding their
monarchy; the nobility of the Crusades treating the nobility of
the Empire, that is to say, the nobility of the sword, with
scorn; historic races who had lost the sense of history; the sons
of the companions of Charlemagne disdaining the companions
of Napoleon. The swords, as we have just remarked, returned
the insult; the sword of Fontenoy was laughable and nothing
but a scrap of rusty iron; the sword of Marengo was odious
and was only a sabre. Former days did not recognize Yesterday.
People no longer had the feeling for what was grand.
There was some one who called Bonaparte Scapin. This Society
no longer exists. Nothing of it, we repeat, exists to-day.
When we select from it some one figure at random, and
attempt to make it live again in thought, it seems as strange
to us as the world before the Deluge. It is because it, too,
as a matter of fact, has been engulfed in a deluge. It has
disappeared beneath two Revolutions. What billows are ideas!
How quickly they cover all that it is their mission to destroy
and to bury, and how promptly they create frightful gulfs!
Such was the physiognomy of the salons of those distant
and candid times when M. Martainville had more wit than
Voltaire.
These salons had a literature and politics of their own.
They believed in Fievee. M. Agier laid down the law in them.
They commentated M. Colnet, the old bookseller and publicist
of the Quay Malaquais. Napoleon was to them thoroughly the
Corsican Ogre. Later on the introduction into history of M. le
Marquis de Bonaparte, Lieutenant-General of the King's
armies, was a concession to the spirit of the age.
These salons did not long preserve their purity.
Beginning
with 1818, doctrinarians began to spring up in them, a disturbing
shade. Their way was to be Royalists and to excuse
themselves for being so. Where the ultras were very proud,
the doctrinarians were rather ashamed. They had wit; they
had silence; their political dogma was suitably impregnated
with arrogance; they should have succeeded. They indulged,
and usefully too, in excesses in the matter of white neckties
and tightly buttoned coats. The mistake or the misfortune of
the doctrinarian party was to create aged youth. They assumed
the poses of wise men. They dreamed of engrafting a
temperate power on the absolute and excessive principle. They
opposed, and sometimes with rare intelligence, conservative
liberalism to the liberalism which demolishes. They were
heard to say: "Thanks for Royalism! It has rendered more
than one service. It has brought back tradition, worship,
religion,
respect. It is faithful, brave, chivalric, loving, devoted.
It has mingled, though with regret, the secular grandeurs of
the monarchy with the new grandeurs of the nation. Its mistake
is not to understand the Revolution, the Empire, glory,
liberty, young ideas, young generations, the age. But this
mistake which it makes with regard to us, — have we not
sometimes
been guilty of it towards them? The Revolution, whose
heirs we are, ought to be intelligent on all points. To attack
Royalism is a misconstruction of liberalism. What an error!
And what blindness! Revolutionary France is wanting in
respect towards historic France, that is to say, towards its
mother, that is to say, towards itself. After the 5th of
September,
the nobility of the monarchy is treated as the nobility
of the Empire was treated after the 5th of July. They were
unjust to the eagle, we are unjust to the fleur-de-lys. It seems
that we must always have something to proscribe! Does it
serve any purpose to ungild the crown of Louis XIV., to scrape
the coat of arms of Henry IV.? We scoff at M. de Vaublanc
for erasing the N's from the bridge of Jena! What was it that
he did? What are we doing? Bouvines belongs to us as well
as Marengo. The fleurs-de-lys are ours as well as the N's.
That is our patrimony. To what purpose shall we diminish
it? We must not deny our country in the past any more than
in the present. Why not accept the whole of history? Why
not love the whole of France?
It is thus that doctrinarians criticised and protected
Royalism, which was displeased at criticism and furious at
protection.
The ultras marked the first epoch of Royalism,
congregation
characterized the second. Skill follows ardor. Let us confine
ourselves here to this sketch.
In the course of this narrative, the author of this book
has
encountered in his path this curious moment of contemporary
history; he has been forced to cast a passing glance upon it,
and to trace once more some of the singular features of this
society which is unknown to-day. But he does it rapidly and
without any bitter or derisive idea. Souvenirs both respectful
and affectionate, for they touch his mother, attach him to this
past. Moreover, let us remark, this same petty world had a
grandeur of its own. One may smile at it, but one can neither
despise nor hate it. It was the France of former days.
Marius Pontmercy pursued some studies, as all children do.
When he emerged from the hands of Aunt Gillenormand, his
grandfather confided him to a worthy professor of the most
purely classic innocence. This young soul which was expanding
passed from a prude to a vulgar pedant.
Marius went through his years of college, then he entered
the law school. He was a Royalist, fanatical and severe. He
did not love his grandfather much, as the latter's gayety and
cynicism repelled him, and his feelings towards his father
were gloomy.
He was, on the whole, a cold and ardent, noble, generous,
proud, religious, enthusiastic lad; dignified to harshness, pure
to shyness.