Paris in the Twentieth Century (13 page)

"I
have two. "

"That's
a good many, if they deceive you, " the old fellow remarked sententiously,
"and enough, if they love you. "

"Oh,
Uncle, " Michel exclaimed with animation. "They're artists!"

"Yes,
" Uncle Huguenin replied, tossing his head, "that's a guarantee of a
sort: the statistics of prisons and reformatories include priests, lawyers,
brokers, and bankers, and not a single artist! But—"

"You'll
meet them, Uncle, and you'll see what splendid fellows they are!"

"I
look forward to it, " Uncle Huguenin answered. "I love youth,
provided it's young! These premature old men of ours have always struck me as
hypocrites. "

"Oh,
I can answer for these two. "

"Then
judging from your associations, Michel, I should guess your ideas haven't
changed?"

"Quite
the contrary, Uncle. "

"You've
become a hardened sinner!"

"Yes,
Uncle, I have. "

"All
right then, wretch, confess your latest trespasses. "

"Gladly,
Uncle!" And in an enthusiastic tone the young man recited some fine verses
of his own composition, carefully thought out, nicely spoken, and filled with a
true spirit of poetry.

"Bravo!"
exclaimed Uncle Huguenin, transported. "Bravo, my boy! So such things are
still being written. You speak the language of the good old days! O my boy,

how
much pleasure you give me, along with how much pain!" The old man and the
young one remained silent for a few moments. "Enough of that!" said
Uncle Huguenin. "Let's clear this table, which is getting in our
way!" Michel helped the old man, and the dining room swiftly became a
library once more.

"Now,
Uncle?" inquired Michel.

Chapter
X       
Grand
Review of French Authors Conducted by Uncle Huguenin, Sunday, April 15, 1961

"This
will be our dessert, " said Uncle Huguenin, gesturing toward the crowded
shelves.

"It
gives me an appetite all over again, " Michel replied. "Let's dig in.
"

Uncle
and nephew, each as young as the other, began rummaging among the shelves, in
twenty places at once, though Monsieur Huguenin lost no time in restoring some
order to this pillage.

"Come
over here, " he said to Michel, "and let's begin at the beginning;
we're not going to read today, we'll just look and talk. This is a review,
rather than a battle. Think of yourself as Napoleon in the Tuileries courtyard,
and not on the field of Austerlitz. Put your hands behind your back. We're
going to pass through the ranks. "

"I'm
following you, Uncle. "

"My
boy, remember that the finest army in the world is about to parade before your
eyes; there is no other nation which can offer such a sight, and which has won
such brilliant victories over barbarism. "

"The
Grand Army of Letters. "

"There
on that first shelf, uniformed in their fine morocco bindings, stand our old
sixteenth-century veterans, Amyot
[30]
,
Ronsard, Rabelais, Montaigne, Mathurin R
é
gnier
[31]
;
they're staunch at their positions, and you can still detect their original
influence in the fine French language they established. But it must be admitted
that they fought harder for ideas than for form. Here's a general close by who
fought with great valor, though he mainly perfected the weapons of his day.
"

"Malherbe!"

"Himself.
As he says somewhere, the picklocks of Port-au-Foin were his masters; he
gleaned their metaphors, their eminently Gallic expressions, he cleaned them,
polished them, and out of them made that splendid language spoken so handsomely
in the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries. "

"Ah!"
said Michel, pointing to a single volume proudly and simply bound, "now
there's a great captain. "

"Yes,
my boy, like Alexander, Caesar, or Napoleon: indeed Bonaparte would have made
Corneille a prince!

The
old warrior has astonishingly multiplied, for his classical editions are
countless; this is the fifty-first and last of his complete works, dating from
1873; since then, Corneille has never been reprinted. "

"You
must have gone to a great deal of trouble, Uncle, to have obtained all these
works!"

"On
the contrary—everyone was getting rid of them! Look, here's the forty-ninth
edition of the complete works of Racine, the hundred fiftieth of Moli
é
re,
the fortieth of Pascal, the two hundred third of La Fontaine, the last
actually, and they date from over a hundred years ago and already constitute
the delight of bibliophiles! These geniuses have served their time, and now
they're relegated to the rank of archaeological specimens. "

"And
in fact, " replied the young man, "they speak a language no longer
understood in this day and age. "

"That's
quite true, my boy! The fine French tongue has been lost; the language
illustrious foreigners like Leibniz, Frederick the Great, Ancillon
[32]
,
Humboldt, and Heine chose as the interpreter of their ideas—that wonderful
language Goethe regretted never having written, that elegant idiom which
nearly became Greek or Latin in the fifteenth century, Italian with Catherine
de M
é
dicis,
and Gascon under Henri IV—is now a horrible argot. Each specialist, forgetting
that a language is finer in its action than in its accumulation, has created
his own word to name his own thing. Botanists, natural historians, physicists,
chemists, mathematicians have coined dreadful hybrids, inventors have ransacked
the English vocabulary for their most disagreeable appellations; horse traders
for their horses, jockeys for their races, carriage dealers for their vehicles,
philosophers for their philosophy—all of them have found the French language
too poor and have resorted to foreigners! Well, let them! Let them forget all
about it! French is even lovelier in its poverty and hasn't tried to grow rich
by prostituting herself! Our own language, my boy, the language of Malherbe,
and Moli
é
re, of
Bossuet and Voltaire, of Nodier
[33]
and Victor Hugo, is a well-brought-up young lady, and you need have no fear
when you fall in love with her, for the barbarians of the twentieth century
have failed to turn her into a courtesan!"

"How
eloquent you are, Uncle—now I understand the delightful mania of old Professor
Richelot, whose scorn for modern slang made him speak nothing but a sort of
Frenchified Latin! People make fun of him, but he's quite right.... All the
same, Uncle, hasn't French become the language of diplomacy?"

"Yes!
as a punishment! At the Congress of Nijmegen in 1678! Its virtues of directness
and clarity caused it to be chosen by diplomacy, which is the science of
duplicity, of equivocation and of mendacity, so that our honest language has
gradually been diluted and lost! You'll see—people will have to change it
someday. "

"Poor
French!" Michel sighed. "I see Bossuet over there, and F
é
nelon,
and Saint-Simon, who wouldn't recognize it now!"

"Yes,
their child has turned out poorly! That's what comes of frequenting scientists,
industrialists, diplomats, and other bad company. Dissipation! Debauchery! A
1960 dictionary that wants to include all terms in use is twice the size of an
1800 dictionary! As for what is to be found there, I leave that to your imagination.
But let's return to our review—soldiers shouldn't be kept under arms too long.
"

"I
see a long row of fine volumes over there. "

"Fine
and sometimes good, " Uncle Huguenin answered. "That's the four
hundred twenty-eighth edition of the individual works of Voltaire: a universal
mind, second in every genre, according to Monsieur Joseph Prudhomme. In 1978,
according to Stendhal, Voltaire will be Voiture
[34]
,
and the dimwits will be making him their god. Fortunately Stendhal put too
much faith in the future. Dimwits? There are no wits at all nowadays, and
Voltaire is worshiped no more than any other... god. To continue our metaphor,
Voltaire, as

I
see him, was only an armchair general! He gave battle orders in his study, and
didn't really see how the land lay. His wit, actually not so dangerous a
weapon, occasionally misfired, and the people he killed often outlived him."

"But,
Uncle, wasn't he a great writer?"

"Certainly,
Nephew—he was the French language incarnate, and wielded it with elegance and
spirit—the way those regimental instructors used to aim at the wall during
fencing instruction: when it came to actual duels, the first clumsy conscript
who lunged past his guard managed to kill the fencing master. In short— and
this is really surprising for a man who wrote French so well—Voltaire was not
really a brave man. "

"I
guess not, " said Michel.

"Let's
move on to others, " said Uncle Huguenin, heading for a dark and severe
line of soldiers.

"There
are your authors of the late eighteenth century, " the young man
observed.

"Yes,
Rousseau, who said the finest things about the Gospels, just as Robespierre
wrote the most remarkable things about the immortality of the soul! A
veritable General of the Republic, Jean-Jacques
[35]
,
in sabots, without epaulets or gold-embroidered uniforms! Which didn't keep
him from winning some proud victories! Look, there's Beaumarchais next to him,
an avant-garde sniper judiciously engaged in that great battle of '89, which
civilization won over barbarism! Unfortunately, that victory has been somewhat
abused subsequently, and the devil of Progress has brought us where we are
today. "

"Perhaps
a revolution will be made against Progress..."

"Possible,
possible, and that would have its amusing aspects. But let's not lose
ourselves in such philosophical divagations, Nephew—let's keep on our way
through the ranks. Here's a sumptuous commander who spent forty years of his
life talking about his modesty: Chateaubriand, and even his
M
é
moires d'Outre-Tombe
haven't
been able to save him from oblivion. "

"Isn't
that Bernardin de Saint-Pierre beside him? I suspect that sweet novel of his,
Paul et Virginie,
wouldn't
move anyone today. "

"Alas
no: Paul would be a banker today, and Virginie would marry the son of a
manufacturer of railway tracks. Now here are the famous memoirs of Monsieur de
Talleyrand, published, on his orders, thirty years after his death. I'm sure
that fellow is still doing diplomacy where he is now, though even Talleyrand
won't be able to fool the Devil—for long! Now here's an officer who wielded
sword and pen alike, a great Hellenist who wrote in French like a contempo rary
of Tacitus: Paul-Louis Courier! When our language is lost, Michel, it can be
created all over again out of the works of this proud scribe. Here's kindly
Nodier, and with him B
é
ranger
[36]
,
a great statesman who wrote his songs in his spare time. And here we have reached
that brilliant generation that escaped the Restoration as if it were a
seminary, making a great riot in the streets. "

"Lamartine,
" said the young man, "a great poet!"

"One
of the leaders of our literature of images, a statue of Memnon that sang so beautifully
when touched by sunbeams! Poor Lamartine, after lavishing his fortune on the
noblest causes and plucking the harp of the poor in the streets of an
ungrateful city, wasted his talent on his creditors, delivered his estate of
Saint-Point
[37]
from the cancer of mortgages, and died of grief at seeing that sacred earth
where all his family lay expropriated by a railroad company!"