2.M.1.11. TO SCOFF, TO REIGN
THERE is no limit to Paris. No city has had that domination
which sometimes derides those whom it subjugates. To
please you, O Athenians! exclaimed Alexander. Paris makes
more than the law, it makes the fashion; Paris sets more than
the fashion, it sets the routine. Paris may be stupid, if it
sees
fit; it sometimes allows itself this luxury; then the universe is
stupid in company with it; then Paris awakes, rubs its eyes,
says: "How stupid I am!" and bursts out laughing in the
face of the human race. What a marvel is such a city! it is
a strange thing that this grandioseness and this burlesque
should be amicable neighbors, that all this majesty should not
be thrown into disorder by all this parody, and that the same
mouth can to-day blow into the trump of the Judgment Day,
and to-morrow into the reed-flute! Paris has a sovereign
joviality. Its gayety is of the thunder and its farce holds a
sceptre.
Its tempest sometimes proceeds from a grimace. Its
explosions,
its days, its masterpieces, its prodigies, its epics, go
forth to the bounds of the universe, and so also do its cock-and-bull
stories. Its laugh is the mouth of a volcano which spatters
the whole earth. Its jests are sparks. It imposes its
caricatures
as well as its ideal on people; the highest monuments of
human civilization accept its ironies and lend their eternity to
its mischievous pranks. It is superb; it has a prodigious 14th
of July, which delivers the globe; it forces all nations to take
the oath of tennis; its night of the 4th of August dissolves in
three hours a thousand years of feudalism; it makes of its logic
the muscle of unanimous will; it multiplies itself under all
sorts of forms of the sublime; it fills with its light
Washington,
Kosciusko, Bolivar, Bozzaris, Riego, Bem, Manin, Lopez, John
Brown, Garibaldi; it is everywhere where the future is being
lighted up, at Boston in 1779, at the Isle de Leon in 1820, at
Pesth in 1848, at Palermo in 1860, it whispers the mighty
countersign: Liberty, in the ear of the American abolitionists
grouped about the boat at Harper's Ferry, and in the ear of
the patriots of Ancona assembled in the shadow, to the Archi
before the Gozzi inn on the seashore; it creates Canaris; it
creates Quiroga; it creates Pisacane; it irradiates the great
on earth; it was while proceeding whither its breath urge them,
that Byron perished at Missolonghi, and that Mazet died at
Barcelona; it is the tribune under the feet of Mirabeau, and a
crater under the feet of Robespierre; its books, its theatre, its
art, its science, its literature, its philosophy, are the manuals
of the human race; it has Pascal, Regnier, Corneille, Descartes,
Jean-Jacques: Voltaire for all moments, Moliere for all
centuries;
it makes its language to be talked by the universal
mouth, and that language becomes the word; it constructs in
all minds the idea of progress, the liberating dogmas which it
forges are for the generations trusty friends, and it is with
the soul of its thinkers and its poets that all heroes of all
nations have been made since 1789; this does not prevent
vagabondism,
and that enormous genius which is called Paris,
while transfiguring the world by its light, sketches in charcoal
Bouginier's nose on the wall of the temple of Theseus and
writes
Credeville the thief on the Pyramids.
Paris is always showing its teeth; when it is not scolding
it
is laughing.
Such is Paris. The smoke of its roofs forms the ideas of
tho
universe. A heap of mud and stone, if you will, but, above all,
a moral being. It is more than great, it is immense. Why?
Because it is daring.
To dare; that is the price of progress.
All sublime conquests are, more or less, the prizes of
daring.
In order that the Revolution should take place, it does not
suffice
that Montesquieu should foresee it, that Diderot should
preach it, that Beaumarchais should announce it, that Condorcet
should calculate it, that Arouet should prepare it, that
Rousseau should premeditate it; it is necessary that Danton
should dare it.
The cry: Audacity! is a Fiat lux. It is
necessary, for the
sake of the forward march of the human race, that there
should be proud lessons of courage permanently on the heights.
Daring deeds dazzle history and are one of man's great sources
of light. The dawn dares when it rises. To attempt, to brave,
to persist, to persevere, to be faithful to one's self, to grasp
fate bodily, to astound catastrophe by the small amount of fear
that it occasions us, now to affront unjust power, again to
insult drunken victory, to hold one's position, to stand one's
ground; that is the example which nations need, that is the
light which electrifies them. The same formidable lightning
proceeds from the torch of Prometheus to Cambronne's short
pipe.