The Girl With the Golden Eyes (2 page)

No physiognomy could keep itself pure in the service of such labors. Perhaps the worker who dies old at the age of thirty, his stomach tanned by progressive doses of his
eau-de-vie
, will be found, in the pronouncement of some prosperous philosophers, to be happier than the haberdasher is. One dies all at once and the other little by little. From his eight jobs, from his shoulders, from his throat, from his hands, from his wife and from his business, the haberdasher derives, as if from so many farms, some children, a few thousand francs, and the most laborious happiness that has ever refreshed the heart of a man. This wealth and these children, or the children who are everything to him, become prey to the superior world, to which he brings his money and his daughter, or his
lycée
-educated son, who, more learned than his father, aims his ambitions higher. Often the youngest son of a little retailer wants to be something in government.

This ambition raises our attentions to the second level of the Parisian spheres. Climb up one level and go to the mezzanine; or come down from the
attic and stay on the fifth floor; either way, you enter the world that has something. Wholesale dealers and their helpers, employees, people who use small-business banks and have great probity, rogues, damned souls, high and low clerks, assistants to the bailiff, the solicitor, the notary public, finally the active, thinking, speculating members of this lower middle class who handle the interests of Paris and watch over its grain, supervise its foodstuffs, store the products made by the proletariat, pack the fruits of the Midi, the fish of the ocean, the wines of every hillside kissed by the sun; who stretch out their hands to the Orient and take shawls scorned by the Turks and Russians from it; who go all the way to the Indies to harvest crops, go to bed early to await sale, long for profit, discount their wares, circulate and collect all currencies; wrap up all Paris and sell it retail, wheel it in, are alert to any childish whim, spy out the caprices and vices of maturity, squeeze profit from disease. Even so, without drinking
eau-de-vie
like the workman, and without going to wallow in the mud of the city gates, they all thus overtax their strength; overstretch their bodies and morale, the former by means of the latter; desire dries them up, and they become lost in precipitate hurry. In them, physical torsion is accomplished under the whip of self-interest, under the scourge of ambitions that torment the
elevated worlds of this monstrous city, just as the fortune of the proletariat is carried out under the cruel pendulum of material production ceaselessly demanded by the despotism of the aristocrat’s
I want it
. Here too, to obey this universal master, pleasure or gold, you have to devour time, squeeze time, find more than twenty-four hours in the day and night, overwork, overdo everything, kill yourself, sell thirty years of old age for two years of unhealthy rest. But the worker dies in the hospital, when his last period of withering away has expired, whereas the man of the lower middle class persists in living and continues to live, but enfeebled: You will find him with a worn-out, flat, old face, dull eyes, weak legs, dragging himself along the boulevard—the girdle of his Venus, his beloved city—with a vacant look. What did this member of the bourgeoisie want? The saber of the National Guard, his dependable stew, a decent plot in the Père-Lachaise cemetery, and for his old age a little gold legitimately earned. His Monday is Sunday; his relaxation is a spin in the delivery van, a picnic in the country, during which his wife and children joyously swallow dust or roast themselves in the sun; his excursion is to some restaurant renowned for its poisonous dinners, or some family ball where you suffocate till midnight. Some simpletons are surprised at the St. Vitus’s dance that seems to
afflict the molecules seen through a microscope in a drop of water, but what would Rabelais’ Gargantua say, figure of a sublime misunderstood audacity, what would this giant say, fallen from the celestial spheres, if he were to amuse himself contemplating the movement of this second level of Parisian life, one of whose formulae is presented here? Have you seen those little shacks, cold in summer, with no other hearth than a foot-warmer in winter, beneath the vast copper dome that tops the wheat market? Madame has been there since morning, she is manageress at the market and earns twelve thousand francs per year at this profession, they say. When Madame gets up in the morning, Monsieur goes into an ill-lit back room, where he makes short-term loans to merchants in his neighborhood. By nine o’clock he is at the passport office, where he is one of the chief clerks. At night he’s at the ticket-office of the Théâtre Italien, or any other theater you like to name. The children are left in the care of the nanny, and later on they are sent to high school or boarding school. Monsieur and Madame live on the fourth floor, have only one stove, host dances in a twelve-by-eight-foot room illumined by oil lamps; but they give 150,000 francs to their daughter’s dowry and retire at the age of fifty, when they begin to appear in the third-tier boxes at the Opéra, in a fiacre at
Longchamp, or in faded raiment, every sunny day, on the boulevards, the carefully tended fruit of all these labors. Respected in the neighborhood, well-regarded by the government, allied to the upper middle class, Monsieur obtains the Cross of the Legion of Honor at sixty-five years of age, and his son-in-law’s father, the mayor of an arrondissement, invites him to his soirées. These labors of an entire lifetime thus benefit the children whom this lower middle class inevitably tries to lift to the upper middle class. Thus each sphere throws its entire spawn into the sphere above it. The son of the rich grocer is made a notary, the son of the lumber merchant becomes a magistrate. No cog misses its appointed groove, and everything stimulates the upward mobility of money.

Now we have reached the third circle of this hell, which might someday find its Dante. This third social circle is a kind of Parisian stomach, where the interests of the city are digested and where the crowd of attorneys, doctors, notaries, lawyers, businessmen, bankers, wholesale merchants, speculators, and magistrates are condensed in the form called
business affairs
, and where the mass is moved and stirred up by an acrid and venomous intestinal agitation. Here more than anywhere else are encountered causes for physical and moral destruction. Almost all these people live in squalid dens, in reeking courtrooms,
in little barred offices, spending all day bent over beneath the weight of affairs; they get up at dawn to be prepared, to keep from being rooked, to win everything or to lose nothing, to seize hold of a man or of his money, to get a deal going or wrap one up, to take advantage of a fleeting circumstance, to have a man hanged or acquitted. They have an effect on their horses, work them to death, overtax them, aging their horses’ legs long before their time. Time is their tyrant, they never have enough of it, it slips away from them; they can neither stretch it out nor contract it. What soul can remain great, pure, moral, generous, what face can remain handsome in the depraving exercise of a profession that forces you to bear the weight of public miseries, to analyze them, weigh them, gauge them, bleed them systematically? Where do these people keep their hearts? I don’t know; but they leave them somewhere else, if they have any, before they descend every morning to the depths of the suffering that afflicts families. For them, there are no mysteries, they see the other side of the society for which they are confessors, and they despise it. Yet whatever they do, by dint of pitting themselves against corruption, they come to loathe it and are aggrieved by it; or else, out of weariness, by a secret transaction, they wed it. Ultimately, necessarily, they grow bored with all emotions, these people
whom laws, people, institutions make fly down like crows onto corpses still warm. At any time of day, the money-man weighs the living, the contract-man weighs the dead, the law-man weighs our conscience. Obliged to talk continually, they replace ideas with words, emotions with phrases, and their soul turns into a larynx. They wear themselves down and grow demoralized. Neither the great negotiator, nor the judge, nor the lawyer keeps his heart in the right place: They stop feeling, they apply rules that bribes distort. Carried away by their torrential existence, they can be neither husbands nor fathers nor lovers; they glide on a sledge over the things of life, and live every minute compelled by the affairs of the great city. When they return home, they are called upon to attend a ball, or the Opéra, or parties where they go to develop clients for themselves, or acquaintances, or protectors. They all eat to excess, play, stay up late, till their faces grow round, smooth, red. To such terrible expenditures of intellectual strength, to such an increase in moral contradictions, they oppose not pleasure—too pale, flat, without contrast—but debauchery, a secret, terrifying debauchery, since they have everything at their disposal, and they are the ones that create society’s morals. Their actual stupidity is hidden beneath an expert science. They know their profession, but they ignore anything
unconnected with their profession. So, to protect their self-esteem, they call everything into question, criticize right and left; seem skeptical but are actually gullible, and drown their minds in interminable discussions. Almost all of them adopt convenient social, literary, or political prejudices so as to dispense with having to form an opinion of their own, just as they place their conscience in the shelter of common law, or of the commercial court. Having left home early in order to become remarkable men, they become mediocre, and crawl along on the heights of society. Accordingly, their faces present us with this sour pallor, these false complexions, these dull, lined eyes, these talkative and sensual mouths where the observer recognizes the symptoms of the degeneration of thought and its turning round and round in the dull circle of specialization that kills the generative faculties of the brain, the gift of seeing the big picture, of generalizing and deducing. They almost all shrivel up in the furnace of business affairs. Never can a man who has let himself be caught up in the crushing gears of these immense machines become great. If he is a doctor, either he has practiced little medicine, or he is an exception, a Bichat who dies young. If, as a great merchant, there’s still something left, he is almost a financier like Jacques Coeur. Did Robespierre practice law? Danton was a lazy man who bided his
time. But who in any case has ever envied the figures of Danton or Robespierre, superb as they may be? These busy men par excellence draw money to themselves and amass it in order to ally themselves with aristocratic families. If the worker’s ambition is the same as a man of the lower middle class, here too passions are the same. In Paris, vanity epitomizes all the passions. The classic example of this level of society is either the ambitious bourgeois, who, after a life full of constant anxiety and maneuvering, gets onto the Council of State the way an ant crawls through a crack; or some newspaper editor, riddled with intrigues, whom the King makes a peer of France, perhaps to get back at the nobility; or some notary who gets to become mayor of his arrondissement: All of them have been exhausted by business affairs and, if they reach their goal, are
killed
doing so. In France, it is customary to honor grey hair. But Napoleon, Louis XIV, the truly great monarchs always wanted young people to carry out their plans.

Above this sphere lives the artistic world. But here again the faces, marked by the seal of originality, are sublimely broken, but broken they are, weary, haggard. Overwhelmed by the need to keep producing, overwhelmed by their costly imaginations, wearied by a devouring genius, starved for pleasure, the artists of Paris all want to recover through excessive labor the depletions left
by laziness, and seek vainly to reconcile the world and glory, money and art. From the start, the artist is ceaselessly panting beneath the creditor; his needs engender debts, and his debts take his nights away from him. After work, pleasure. The actor plays till midnight, studies in the morning, rehearses at noon; the sculptor bends beneath his statue; the journalist is a thought on the march, like the soldier at war; the fashionable painter is overwhelmed with work, the painter without commissions is eaten away if he feels he is a man of genius. Competition, rivalries, calumnies murder talent. Some, desperate, roll into the abysses of vice, others die young and unknown because of having counted too soon on their future. Few of these faces, sublime to begin with, remain handsome. Moreover, the flamboyant beauty of their heads remains misunderstood. An artist’s face is always extravagant, it is always above or below the conventional lines of what imbeciles call
ideal beauty
. What power destroys them? Passion. All passion in Paris is focused on two goals: gold and pleasure.

Now, can’t you breathe more easily? Can’t you feel that the spacious atmosphere has been purified? Here, no labor or suffering. The spiral of gold has reached the summit. From the bottom of basement windows where its rivulets begin, from the depths of shops where meager dykes constrain its flow,
from the heart of neighborhood branch offices and big headquarters where it lets itself be made into bars, gold, in the form of dowries or inheritances, brought by the hands of young women or by the big-knuckled hands of old men, gushes towards the race of aristocrats where it gleams, spreads out, flows. But before we leave the four regions on which upper-class Paris relies, shouldn’t we, after the aforementioned moral causes, deduce the physical causes, and call attention to a plague, which we could term as underlying, that is constantly acting on the faces of the porter, the shopkeeper, the laborer; shouldn’t we point out a noxious influence whose corruptive power equals that of the Parisian administrators who complacently allow it to subsist! If the air of houses where most of the middle-class live is foul, if the atmosphere of the streets spits out cruel fumes in back-alley-shops where air is scarce, be aware that besides this pestilence, the 40,000 houses of this great city bathe their feet in ordure that the authorities have not yet seriously considered encircling with concrete walls that might prevent the most fetid mud from seeping through the ground, poisoning the wells, and continuing underground its famous name, Lutetia, place of the swamps. Half of Paris lies in the putrid exhalations of backyards, streets, and outhouses.