Théophile Gautier
Mademoiselle de Maupin
Part I: Introduction, Preface, and Chapter 1
Translated by A. S. Kline © Copyright 2025 All Rights Reserved
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Contents
Translator’s Introduction
Théophile Gautier (1811-1872) was born in Tarbes, in the Hautes-Pyrénées region of south-west France, his family moving to Paris in 1814. He was a friend, at school, of the poet Gérard de Nerval, who introduced him to Victor Hugo. Gautier contributed to various journals, including La Presse, throughout his life, which offered opportunities for travel to various countries, among others Spain, Italy, Russia, Turkey and Egypt. He was a devotee of the ballet, writing a number of scenarios including that of Giselle. At the time of the 1848 Revolution, he expressed strong support for the ideals of the Second Republic, a support which he maintained for the rest of his life.
A successor to the first wave of Romantic writers, including Chateaubriand and Lamartine, he directed the Revue de Paris from 1851 to 1856, worked as a journalist for La Presse and Le Moniteur universel, and in 1856 became editor of L’Artiste, in which he published numerous editorials asserting his anti-utilitarian credo of ‘Art for art’s sake’. Saint-Beuve secured his critical acclaim; he became chairman of the Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts in 1862, and in 1868 was granted the sinecure of librarian to Princess Mathilde Bonaparte, a cousin of Napoleon III, having previously been introduced to her salon.
Gautier remained in Paris during the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-71, and the aftermath of the 1871 Commune, dying of heart disease at the age of sixty-one in 1872.
Though ostensibly a Romantic poet, Gautier may be seen as a forerunner to, or point of reference for, a number of divergent poetic movements including Symbolism and Modernism.
His mainly epistolatory novel Mademoiselle de Maupin, published in 1835, is a part-parody of both the erotic novels and novels of sentiment of the eighteenth century, though its focus is the search for the ideal beloved. Gautier named one of his three main characters, ‘Madeleine’ de Maupin, after the notorious and likely bi-sexual adventuress ‘La Maupin’, born Julie d’Aubigny (1673–1707), who enjoyed a wild cross-dressing youth, a career as an opera singer, and ultimately retired to a convent. In Gautier’s somewhat calmer novel, set in his own nineteenth century, her namesake, disguised as a man, with the pseudonym Théodore de Sérannes, sets out to understand the male sex. Both D’Albert, initially an example of the ‘superfluous’ and misogynistic man but one still in search of the ideal woman of his dreams, and his amorous mistress, Rosette, fall in love with Madeleine, her disguise, and androgynous nature (she deems herself a member of an as yet unnamed third sex), causing a high degree of gender confusion. The characters’ involvement in a performance of Shakespeare’s ‘As You Like It’, in which Madeleine/Théodore, takes the part of Rosalind/Ganymede, sets the scene for the latter half of the story.
In the preface, Gautier famously articulates his anti-utilitarian credo of ‘Art for Art’s sake’ (the phrase ‘l’art pour l’art’, had been coined by the philosopher Victor Cousin, in 1818), while evident throughout is his Romanticism, including his desire for the Ideal, his love of the fanciful, and of the imaginatively-constructed worlds of artistic endeavour, particularly those of Classical and Renaissance art, and his delight in the natural world, and all its creatures. Here he exceeds the boundaries of what was acceptable in the bourgeois literature of his day, so as to assert the ideal, without praising immorality but rather asserting the permanent values of love, truth, beauty and liberty of action.
This enhanced translation has been designed to offer maximum compatibility with current search engines. Among other modifications, and in particular in the preface, the proper names of people referenced, and the titles given to works of literature, etc., have been fully researched, modernised, and expanded; comments in parentheses have been added here and there to provide a reference, or clarify meaning; and minor typographic or factual errors, in the original text, have been eliminated from this new translation.
Mademoiselle de Maupin
Preface
One of the most grotesque aspects of the glorious era in which we are so fortunate as to live is undoubtedly the championing of virtue undertaken by all the newspapers, whatever their hue, red, green or tricoloured.
Virtue is doubtless a very respectable person, and I have no wish to decry her, God forbid! That good and worthy woman! I find her eyes bright enough behind her spectacles, and her stockings not too badly laddered, while she partakes of snuff from her gilded snuff-box with all imaginable grace, and her little dog curtsies like a dancing master. I acknowledge it all. I even concede that she is not bad-looking for her age, and wears her years as well as one might. She is a most charming grandmother, though a grandmother she is still… To me, it seems more natural, especially at twenty years old, to prefer a fine, smart, coquettish, little girl, hair a little wanton, skirt shorter rather than longer, foot and eye quivering, cheeks slightly-flushed, laughter on her lips, and her heart worn on her sleeve, even if she be a little lacking in morality. The most monstrously virtuous of journalists could scarcely own to a different opinion; and, if they say the opposite, it is likely they do not think it. To think one thing and write another? It happens every day, especially where virtuous people are concerned.
I recall, prior to the Revolution (I speak of that of July 1830), all those jeers aimed at the unfortunate and virginal Viscount Sosthène de La Rochefoucauld who lengthened the dancers’ dresses at the Opéra, and applied with patrician hands, on the grounds of modesty, a little plaster to the groins of all the statues. Viscount Sosthène de La Rochefoucauld has been far surpassed. Modesty has greatly increased since that time; we have entered into refinements he could scarcely have imagined.
I, who am not in the habit of gazing at statues’ private parts, found, as did others, those fig leaves, cut with scissors by the fellow in charge of the fine arts, the most ridiculous thing in the world. It seems I was wrong, and the fig leaf is a most meritorious institution.
I was also told, though I refused to believe it, so singular did it seem, that there were people who, standing before Michelangelo’s fresco of the Last Judgment, saw nothing in it other than the punishment of libertine prelates, and hid their faces, crying out about ‘the abomination of desolation’! (See Charles X’s Anti-Sacrilege Act of 1825-1830, and the Biblical ‘Book of Daniel’: 7-12,)
Such people know nothing of the tale concerning King Rodrigo other than the lines about the snake (See Pedro de Corral’s ‘Crónica del Rey Don Rodrigo’, in which the snake bites him ‘where most he sinned’)
If there is any nudity in a painting or in a book, they seek it at once, as a pig does mud, caring nothing for the splendid flowers, or the lovely golden fruit that hangs everywhere.
I confess I am not as virtuous as they. Dorine, that impudent maid, may indeed display her plump bosom before me, but I will most certainly not remove my handkerchief from my pocket and cover her breast which must not be seen. I will look upon her breast as I do her face, and, if it is pale and well-formed, I will take pleasure in it. But I will not finger the softness of Elmire’s dress, or press her in a saintly manner against the table, like that rascal Tartuffe.
The widespread affectation of morality which reigns now would be wholly laughable, if it were not so tedious. Every newspaper article is a pulpit; every journalist, a preacher; all they lack is a tonsure and a little collar. The current climate is all rain and homilies; one defends oneself from both by going about only in a carriage, and by rereading ‘Gargantua and Pantagruel’ between one’s wine-bottle and one’s pipe. Sweet Jesus! What a lashing! What fury!
Who bit you? What stung you? What the devil is wrong with you, to shout so loudly, and what malice has this poor sinner shown you, he who is such a good man, so easy to live with, who only asks to amuse himself and not annoy others, if possible? Deal with the sinner as Jean-Joseph Serres did with the gendarme (on the former’s arrest in 1815): embrace him, and be done with it. Believe me, you will find it does you good. Lord, gentlemen preachers, what would you do without vice? Become virtuous today, and you will be reduced to begging tomorrow
The theatres would be instantly closed. What would you write your articles about? No more Opéra balls to fill your columns, no more novels to dissect; for balls, novels, and comedies, are the true spawn of Satan, if we are to believe our Holy Mother the Church. The actress would dismiss her admirers, and no longer be allowed to reward you for praising her. People would no longer subscribe to your paper; they would read Saint Augustine, they would go to church, they would tell their rosaries. That might be all very well; but certainly, you would gain nothing from it. If everyone were virtuous, what would inspire your articles on the immorality of the age? Surely you see that vice must be good for something.
But it is the fashion now to be virtuous and a Christian, it is an epithet one awards oneself; one poses as Saint Jerome, as one formerly did as Don Juan; one is pale and emaciated, one wears one’s hair like an apostle, one walks with clasped hands, eyes fixed on the ground; one adopts to perfection a candid air; one has a Bible open on one’s mantelpiece, a crucifix and blessed boxwood leaves by one’s bed; one no longer swears, one smokes little, and one rarely chews tobacco. Behold the Christian! One speaks of the sanctity of art, of the noble mission of the artist, of the poetry of Catholicism, of the priest and philosopher Monsieur Félicité Robert de La Mennais, of the painters of the ‘Angelic’ school, of the Council of Trent, of human progress, and a thousand other beautiful things. Some, and not the least curious among them, infuse a little Republicanism into their religion. They link Robespierre with Jesus Christ in the most casual manner and, with praiseworthy seriousness, amalgamate the Acts of the Apostles with the Decrees of the Sacred National Convention, sacred being the sacramental epithet; others add, as a final ingredient, various Saint-Simonian ideas. These are squared off at the base, and complete the edifice; one must draw up the ladder after them. It is not granted to human absurdity to extend further — has ultra metas (having reached the limit) — they are the Pillars of Hercules of the grotesque.
Christianity is so fashionable, due to widespread hypocrisy (Tartuffery), that neo-Christianity itself enjoys a certain favour. It is said to have as many as one follower, including Gustave Drouineau (author of the ‘Contes Spiritualistes’, 1833).
An extremely curious variation on the strictly-moral male journalist is the one with a family full of females. He takes his show of modesty to the point of cannibalism, almost.
His manner of proceeding, though simple and easy to perform at first glance, is nonetheless buffoonish and superlatively entertaining, and I believe it worth preserving for posterity – to the last ‘nephew’, as the ‘periwigs’ of the so-called ‘great’ century used to say.
First of all, to pose as a journalist of this kind, one needs a few small preparatory items, such as two or three legitimate wives, a few mothers, as many sisters as possible, a complete assortment of daughters, and innumerable female cousins. Then one needs a play or a novel, a pen, ink, paper, and the services of a publisher. Perhaps one may need an idea, and several subscribers; but one can replace them with a modicum of philosophy and shareholders’ investment.
Once you have obtained all these, you can establish yourself as a ‘moral’ journalist. The following two recipes, suitably varied, are sufficient for copy.
Here follows the first draft of a model example of a ‘virtuous’ article.
‘After the Literature of Blood, the Literature of Filth; after the morgue and the penal colony, the hovel and the brothel; after rags stained by murder, rags stained by debauchery; after, etc. (according to need and space, one may extend one’s half a dozen lines, in this tone, to fifty or more), here we are. This is where the neglect of sound doctrine and the pursuit of romantic debauchery lead: the theatre, to which one dares not venture with a woman one respects without trembling, has become a school for prostitution. One visits with the promise of seeing some illustrious name, and one is obliged to withdraw with your young daughter, in the third act, troubled and disconcerted. One’s wife hides her blushes behind her fan; one’s sister, cousin, etc.’ (You may vary the titles; it is enough that they are all female.)
Note: there is one such who has been so moral as to say: ‘I would not take my mistress to see this play.’ I admire him, I love him; I hold him to my heart, as Louis XVIII held all France to his; for he has spawned the most triumphant, most pyramidal, most hair-curling, most grandiose idea that has entered into a man’s brain in this blessed nineteenth century into which so many, and such droll ones, have entered.
The following model example of a book review is expeditious, and within the reach of all pens:
‘If you seek to read this book, lock yourself in a room at home, securely; avoid leaving it lying around on a table. If your wife and daughter were to open it, they would be lost. This book is dangerous, this book counsels vice. It might have had great success in the novelist Claude-Prosper Crébillon’s day, in lesser mansions, at those fine suppers given by duchesses; but now that the moral code has been purified, now that the hand of the people has razed the worm-eaten edifice of the aristocracy, etc., etc., then, then, then — in every work, there must be an idea, an ideal... a moral and religious idea... a noble and profound vision meeting the needs of humanity; it is deplorable how young writers sacrifice the most holy of things to success, and waste their talents, otherwise estimable, on lewd descriptions that would make a dragoon-captain blush (the virginity of this dragoon captain is, after the discovery of America, the most beautiful such that has been made for many a long day). The novel we are reviewing here recalls Thérèse Philosophe (a pornographic novel by Jean-Baptiste de Boyer,1748), Félicia (by André-Robert Andréa de Nerciat, 1775), Le Compère Matthieu (by Henri-Joseph Delaurens, 1766), and the tales of Jean-Baptiste Willart de Grécourt.’ The virtuous journalist is immensely erudite as regards obscene texts; I would be curious as to why.
It is frightening to think that there are, according to the newspapers, many honest industrialists who have only these two formulas by which to live, they and the large ‘family’ they employ.
Apparently, I am the most profoundly immoral character to be found in Europe or elsewhere; since I see nothing more licentious in the romances and comedies of today than in those of the past, and can barely comprehend why the ears of the gentlemen of the newspapers have suddenly become so Jansenistically sensitive.
I think that not even the most innocent journalist would dare to say that ‘Pigault-Lebrun’ (Charles-Antoine-Guillaume Pigault de l’Espinoy), ‘Crébillon fils’ (Claude Prosper Jolyot de Crébillon), Louvet (Jean-Baptiste Louvet de Couvray), Voisenon (Claude-Henri de Fusée, Abbé de Voisenon), Marmontel (Jean-François Marmontel), and all those other writers of novels and short stories, celebrated in the eighteenth century and the early years of our own, do not exceed in immorality, since immorality they reveal, the most dishevelled and shameless productions of Messieurs ‘such and such’, whom I choose not to name, out of respect for their modesty.
It would prove a display of most blatant bad faith not to agree.
Let no one object that I have here cited minor or little-known names. If I have not touched on the brilliant and memorable, it is not because their greater authority fails to support my assertion.
Voltaire’s novels and tales are certainly not, despite their merits, any more likely to be given as prizes to boarding-school misses than the immoral tales of our friend ‘the Lycanthrope’ (Petrus Borel, the bohemian Joseph-Pierre Borel d’Hauterive, nicknamed ‘the Werewolf’), or even the moral tales of the sugary Marmontel.
What do we find in the comedies of the great Molière? The holy institution of marriage is flouted and ridiculed in every scene (in a catechismic and journalistic manner).
The husband is old, ugly and decrepit; he wears his wig askew; his clothes are no longer fashionable; he employs a beak-nosed cane, has a nose smeared with snuff, short legs, and a belly as large as a well-filled briefcase. He stammers, and speaks nothing but nonsense; he does much as he says; he sees nothing, he hears nothing; his wife is kissed in his presence; he has no idea what is being said: things proceed like this till he is well and truly declared a cuckold in his own eyes and those of the entire audience, who could not be more edified, and applaud wildly.
Those who applaud the most are those who are the most married.
In Molière’s work, marriage bears the name George Dandin or Sganarelle.
As for the adulterer, Damis or Clitandre; there is no name sweet and charming enough for him. He is always young, handsome, well-made, and a marquis at least. He enters humming the newest popular air; he advances a few steps on stage with the most deliberate and triumphant air in the world; he scratches his ear with the pink nail of his coquettishly crooked little-finger; he combs his beautiful blond hair with his tortoiseshell comb, and adjusts his voluminous sleeves. His doublet and breeches vanish beneath aiguillettes and ribbon-knots, the lace at his throat is of delicate workmanship; the scent of his gloves is richer than benzoin or civet; his plumes cost a louis a feather.
How bright his eye is, how bright his cheek! How smiling his mouth! How white his teeth! How soft and well-manicured his hand.
He speaks only madrigals, perfumed gallantries, in a beautiful and precious manner, with the finest air imaginable; he has read novels, and knows poetry; he is valiant and quick to draw his weapon, he scatters gold with both hands. Thus, Angélique, Agnès, and Isabelle can hardly restrain themselves from leaping into his arms, however well-bred, however much the ‘great lady’, they may be; and then the husband is regularly deceived in the fifth act, happy that things are not so from the very first.
That is how marriage is treated by Molière, one of the noblest and soberest geniuses who ever lived. Is there anything stronger to be seen in the indictments of marriage in George Sand’s novels Indiana and Valentine? Paternity is even less respected, if that is possible. See Moliere’s husbands: Orgon, Géronte, all of them.
How they are robbed by their sons, and beaten by their servants! How their advanced age is exposed, without pity, along with their avarice, stubbornness, and imbecility! — What jests! What mystifications!
How they are thrust out of life by the shoulders, these poor old fellows who take too long to die, and keep a tight hold of their wealth! What talk there is of parents lasting for an eternity! What pleas against the so-called rights of heredity, and how much more convincing all this is than Saint-Simonian declamation!
A father is an ogre, an Argus (Io’s hundred-eyed guard in Greek myth), a jailer, a tyrant, something good for nothing but delaying a marriage for three years until the final denouement. A father is the ridiculous husband complete, while a son is never ridiculed in Molière; for Molière, like the authors in every age, paid court to the younger generation at the expense of the older.
And his schemers like Scapin, with their Neapolitan-striped capes, their caps over their ears, their plumes sweeping the air before them, are they not the most pious of folk, the most chaste, and worthy of being canonized? The penal colonies are full of honest fellows who have not perpetrated a quarter of what they engage in. The rogueries of Charles Laisally’s Trialph are poor things compared to theirs. And the Lisettes (see Molière’s ‘L’École des Maris’) and the Martons (see Pierre Marivaux’s ‘Les Fausses Confidences’), what lively girls, they are! Our street-walkers are scarcely as impertinent, as quick with a saucy reply. How ably they deliver a lover’s note! How well they keep watch during a rendezvous! They are charming girls indeed, helpful, and good at giving advice.
It is a charming society that walks and strolls through these comedies and imbroglios. Duped tutors, cuckolded husbands, libertine servants, clever maids, love-mad young ladies, debauched sons, adulterous women; is this not more than a match for to the young, handsome, melancholic men, and the poor, weak, oppressed, and passionate women, in the dramas and novels of our fashionable writers?
And all this, minus a final dagger thrust, minus an obligatory cup of poison: the endings are as happy as those of fairy-tales, and everyone, even the husband, could not rest more content. In Molière, virtue is always reviled and conquered; it is she who wears the horns, and turns her back on the valet Mascarille; morality barely appears except at the end of Tartuffe in the somewhat bourgeois personification of that officer of the law, Loyal.
All that I have said here is not to topple Molière from his pedestal; I am not foolish enough to try shaking that bronze colossus with my little arms; I simply wish to demonstrate to the pious critics, frightened by new and romantic works, that the old classics, whose reading and imitation they recommend every day, far surpass ours in ribaldry and immorality.
To Molière I might easily add Marivaux and La Fontaine those two very opposite expressions of the French spirit, along with Mathurin Régnier, Rabelais, Clément Marot, and many another. But it is not my intention here to deliver, on the subject of morality, a course in literature for the benefit of the ‘virgins’ of the newspaper columns.
It seems to me that we should not make so much fuss about so little. We are fortunately no longer in the days of Eve, that tempting blonde, and we cannot, in good conscience, act in as primitive and patriarchal a manner as those in the Ark. We are not little girls preparing for our first communion; and, when we play at corbillon (a rhyming game), we do not answer ‘cream-pies’ (See Molière’s ‘L’École des Femmes’ Act I, Scene One). My naivety is quite vanished, and my virginity lost a while past; they are things one cannot possess twice; and, however fast we run we cannot own to them again, for nothing in the world is lost more swiftly than virginity, or escapes us faster than an illusion that flies from us.
Perhaps there is no great harm done after all, and whether knowledge is preferable to ignorance is a question I leave to be debated by those more learned than myself. The fact remains that our age is, I think, no longer one in which one can play at modesty and decency, or act in a childish and virginal manner, without rendering oneself ridiculous.
Since embracing civilisation, society has lost the right to be naive and prudish. There are certain blushes which are appropriate still for the bridal bed, but which are no longer so the following day; for the young woman must forget the girl she was, and if she does not it is an indecency which seriously compromises the husband’s reputation.
When I chance to read one of those fine sermons which have replaced literary criticism in the public press, I am sometimes overcome with profound remorse and apprehension, I who have on my conscience a few minor jests a little too strong in nature, such as a young man of fire and enthusiasm might own to, and reproach himself with.
Next to these Bishop Bossuets of the Café de Paris, these Father Bourdaloues of the Opéra balcony, these Catos, at so much per line, who scold the century in such an eloquent way, I find myself indeed the most dreadful scoundrel who has ever marred the face of the earth; and yet, Lord knows, the list of my sins, both capital and venial, with all the obligatory spaces and interlineations, could hardly, in the hands of the most skilled printer make one or two octavo volumes a day, which is little enough for one who has no pretensions to paradise in the other world through winning a Montyon prize (awarded annually by the French Academy of Sciences and the Académie Française), or of being a blushing rose in this one.
Le Café De Paris
Jean Béraud (French, 1849-1935)
Artvee
And then, when I reflect on the fact that I have encountered, beneath the table and even elsewhere, quite a large number of these dragons of virtue, I form a better opinion of myself, and consider that with all the faults that I may have they have another, and one which is indeed, to my eyes, the greatest and the worst of all – hypocrisy, I mean.
If you look closely, you might add another little vice; though one so hideous I really don’t dare name it. Come closer, and I'll whisper its name in your ear: it is that of envy. Envy, no less.
It is she who goes creeping and crawling through all those paternal homilies. However careful she is to hide her presence, we see her little flat viper’s head gleam from time to time, rising above the metaphors and rhetorical flourishes; we surprise her as she licks, with her forked tongue, her jaw all blue with venom, and we hear her hiss softly in the shadow of some insidious epithet.
I am well aware that it is unbearably conceited to pretend that others envy one, and is almost as nauseating as a wealthy person who boasts of their fortune. I am not so boastful as to believe that I have enemies and am envied; that is a happiness not granted to everyone, and I would probably not enjoy it for long: therefore, I will speak freely, and without ulterior motive, as someone disinterested in the matter.
One thing that is certain and easy to demonstrate to doubters, is the natural antipathy of the critic towards the poet, of the one who does nothing towards the one who does much, of the hornet towards the bee, of the gelding towards the stallion.
One only becomes a critic after it has been clearly established in one’s own eyes that one lacks the ability to be a poet. Before relegating oneself to the sorry role of cloakroom-attendant, or of scoring shots like a billiard marker or a tennis umpire, one will have long courted the Muse, and tried to devirginize her; yet lacked the vigour required; and with one’s breath failing, will have retreated pale and gaunt to the foot of the sacred mount.
I understand the feeling of hatred. It is painful to see another sit down to a feast to which one is not invited, or sleep with the woman who rejected one. I pity with all my heart the poor eunuch forced to attend on the frolics of the Grand Seigneur. He is admitted to the most secret depths of the harem; he leads the Sultanas to their baths; he sees those beautiful bodies, all dripping with pearls and more polished than agates, gleaming beneath the silvery waters of the great reservoirs; the most hidden beauties are seen by him without their veils. No one is embarrassed before him — he is a eunuch — the Sultan caresses his favourite in his presence, and kisses her on her pomegranate-hued mouth — in truth, his situation is an exceedingly false one and, by his countenance, he must be forever embarrassed.
The same is true of the critic who beholds the poet wandering the garden of poetry with his nine lovely odalisques (the Muses), or frolicking lazily in the shade of green laurels. It is hard for him not to pick up stones from the highway to throw at the poet, and harm him, as he strolls behind the fence, if he is skilful enough.
The critic who has produced nothing is a coward; he is like an abbot who courts a layman’s wife: the latter cannot contend with him, or reciprocate.
I believe one could pen a history at least as interesting as that of Tiglath-Pileser III (King of the neo-Assyrian empire) or Gemmagog (Pantagruel’s giant ancestor in Rabelais’ ‘Gargantua and Pantagruel’) who invented the poulaine shoe (elongated and pointed), in writing the history of the different ways of deprecating others’ work, from whenever to the present day.
There would be enough material for fifteen or sixteen volumes in folio; but I will take pity on the reader, and limit myself to a few lines – a gift for which I ask eternal gratitude and more. In a very remote period, lost in the mists of time, a good three weeks ago at least, the Medieval novel appeared, mainly in Paris and the suburbs. The coat of arms was held in great honour; steepled headdresses were not despised, unlaced, but buttoned, trousers were highly esteemed; daggers were beyond price; and the poulaine shoe was worshipped like a fetish. All was pointed arches, turrets, small-columns, stained glass-windows, cathedrals, and fortified castles; all was young ladies and gentlemen, pages and servants, rascals and soldiers, gallant knights and ferocious lords of the manor — things which were certainly more innocent than the most innocent of games, and which did no harm to anyone.
The critics, not waiting for a second novel, immediately begin the work of disparagement; as soon as the first appeared, they wrapped themselves in camel-hair shirts, and spread a bushel of ashes on their heads: then, in a loud doleful voice, began their cry:
‘The Middle Ages again, ever the Middle Ages! Who will deliver us from the Middle Ages, from this Middle Ages which is not the real Middle Ages, this Middle Ages of cardboard and terracotta, which is the Middle Ages only in name? Oh, those steely barons, in their steel armour, with hearts of steel in their steely breasts! Oh, these cathedrals with their ever-blossoming rose-windows and their ever-flowering stained-glass windows, their granite lacework, their openwork trefoils, their saw-edged gables, their stone chasubles embroidered like bridal veils, their candles, their chanting, their gleaming priests, their kneeling people, their murmuring church-organs, and their angels hovering and beating their wings beneath the vaulted ceilings! How they have ruined the Middle Ages for me, my Middle Ages, so fine and so colourful! How they have caused them to disappear beneath a layer of coarse whitewash! What garish illumination now! Oh, ignorant daubers, who think to have coloured a wall successfully by plastering red on blue, white on black, and green on yellow, you have viewed only the surface of the Middle Ages, you have in no way divined their soul; no blood circulates in the skin with which you have clothed your ghosts, no heart beats beneath your steel corselets, there are no legs in your chain-mailed trousers, no throat or belly behind your coats of arms: here are clothes with the shape of men, and that is all. So, down with the Middle Ages, as the makers (The word is out! The ‘makers’) remake them for us! The Middle Ages are an answer to nothing now, we want something new.’
And the public, finding the columnists were crying out against the Middle Ages, discovered a true passion for those poor Middle Ages, which they claimed to have slain at a stroke The Middle Ages invaded everywhere, aided by the intransigence of these newspaper critics: dramas, melodramas, romances, short-stories, poems, there were even Middle Ages vaudevilles, while Momus (the personification of unfair criticism in Greek myth) repeated his feudal outcry.
Alongside the Medieval novel, the carrion-novel (Gautier’s coinage, indicating the Gothic novel, involved with death and corpses) flourished, a charming form of the novel, that nervous young ladies and jaded cooks consumed in great quantities.
The critics, quickly recognising the odour, like crows flocking to a kill, tore to pieces with their beak-like pens, and shamefully put to death, this poor genre which only asked to prosper and putrefy peacefully on the greasy shelves of public reading-rooms. ‘What dare they not say? What dare they not write? A literature of the morgue or the galleys, nightmares of an executioner, hallucinations of a drunken butcher, or a galley-overseer in a hot fever!’ They benignly gave us to understand that these authors were assassins and vampires, that they had contracted a vicious habit, that of slaying their fathers and mothers, drank blood from skulls, used shinbones for forks, and sliced their bread with a guillotine.
And yet they knew better than anyone, having often lunched among them, that the authors of these delightful massacres were fine sons of decent family, good-natured and sociable, white-gloved, and fashionably short-sighted, feeding more readily on beefsteaks than on chops cut from human corpses, and more often drinking Bordeaux wine than the blood of a young maiden, or a newborn child. Having touched and read their manuscripts, they knew perfectly well that they were written with ink of the greatest virtue on English paper, and not with blood from the guillotine on the skin of a Christian flayed alive.
Yet whatever they said or did, the age was obsessed with carrion, and the charnel-house pleased it rather than the boudoir; the reader was simply caught on a hook baited with a little corpse already turning blue. A thing inconceivable; hook a rose to the end of your line, and spiders will slowly weave a web in the crook of your elbow, not the smallest little fry will you catch; but hang a worm or a piece of strong cheese from it, and the carp, barbels, perch, and eels will jump three feet high from the water to snap it up. Folk are not as different from fish as we generally choose to believe.
One might have thought the journalists had become Quakers, Brahmins, Pythagoreans, or bulls in the arena, so suddenly had they taken a dislike to the colour of blood. Never had they been seen so melting, so emollient; they were cream and buttermilk. They admitted only two colours, sky-blue and apple green. Pink was only admitted on sufferance, and, if the public had allowed, they would have led them to graze grass on the banks of the Lignon (in the Ardèche), side by side with Amaryllis’ flock (see Virgil’s ‘Eclogues’). They seemed to have exchanged their black tailcoats for the turtledove-hued jackets of Céladon or Silvandre (see the pastoral romance ‘L’Astrée’ by Honoré d’Urfé), and decked their goose-feather coats with pink pompoms, and favours shaped like pastoral crooks. They let their hair flow loose like a child, and turned themselves into virgins according to Marion Delorme’s recipe (Delorme was a notorious seventeenth century courtesan; see Victor Hugo’s play, of 1831, in which she declares that true, though illicit, love has returned her to a state of virginity), at which they had succeeded quite as well as she did.
They applied to literature that commandment of the Decalogue: ‘Thou shalt not murder’. The smallest murder could no longer be allowed in the theatre, and a play’s traditional fifth act became inadmissible.
They found the use of a dagger exorbitant, poison monstrous, the axe unspeakable. They would have liked their dramatic heroes to survive to Methuselah’s age; and yet it has been recognised, since time immemorial, that the aim of all tragedy is to have the poor wretch of a protagonist, who can do nothing to avoid it, eliminated in the last scene, just as the aim of all comedy is to unite in matrimony two imbecilic players of about sixty years of age.
It was at about this time that I threw into the fire two superb, magnificent medieval dramas (having made a duplicate, as is always done), one in verse and the other in prose, whose heroes were hung drawn and quartered in the middle of the stage, which would have been most charming and quite unusual.
To conform to the critics’ ideas, I have since composed an ancient tragedy in five acts, called ‘Heliogabalus’, in which the hero throws himself into a latrine, in an extremely original scene which has the advantage of requiring a set not yet seen in the theatre. I have also written a modern drama extremely superior to those concerning Mark Antony, Arthur, or l’homme fatal, where the providential reckoning arrives in the form of a pâté de foie gras from Strasbourg, which the protagonist consumes to the last morsel, after having committed several acts of rape, which, together with his remorse, produces an abominable bout of indigestion from which he dies. A moral ending if ever there was one, which proves that the Lord is just, and that vice is always punished and virtue always rewarded.
As for the ‘monster’ genre, you know how the critics treated it, how they addressed Victor Hugo’s characters: that man-eater Hans of Iceland (see his Gothic novel ‘Han d’Islande’ of 1823); the dwarf Habibrah (see his novel ‘Bug Jargal’, 1826); the bell-ringer Quasimodo (see ‘Notre-Dame de Paris’, 1831); and Triboulet (see his play ‘Le Roi s’Amuse’, 1832) who is merely a hunchback — all that strangely teeming family, all those gigantic toads who swarm and leap through the virgin forests and cathedrals of my dear neighbour’s novels (note that Hugo lived at 6 Place des Vosges from 1832-1848, Gautier at no.8 from 1828-1834). Neither the grand brushstrokes of a Michelangelo, nor his oddities worthy of a Jacques Callot, nor his chiaroscuro effects in the manner of Goya, nothing found favour with them; they referred him to his odes when he wrote novels, and to his novels when he wrote plays: the common tactics of journalists who always prefer what one has done to what one is currently producing. A happy author, however, is one who is recognized as superior, even by the critics, in all their work, except, of course, that which the critics are now reporting on, and who would only have to write a treatise on theology or a cookery-book to have their plays considered admirable!
As for the novel of the heart, the ardent and passionate novel, whose father is a German, Werther (see Goethe’s ‘The Sorrows of Young Werther’, 1774) and whose mother is a Frenchwoman, Manon Lescaut, (see the novel of that name by Antoine François Prévost d’Exiles, 1731) I uttered, at the start of this preface, a few words on the moral insects that have desperately attached themselves to that form of literature, on the pretext of defending religion and morality. Critical lice are like bodily lice that abandon the corpse to batten on the living. From the corpse of the Medieval novel, the critics have passed to the body of this, which has a tough and resilient skin that could well break their teeth.
I think, despite all the respect I have for these modern ‘apostles’, that the authors of so-called ‘immoral’ novels, without being as profoundly married as our virtuous journalists, generally have a mother, and that several of them have sisters, and are provided with a wider female family, too; but their mothers and sisters never read novels, even ‘immoral’ novels; they sew, embroider, and take care of household matters. Their stockings, as the playwright Eugène de Planard would say, are completely white, as their legs show, and not blue, and that fine fellow Chrysale, who hated learned women so much, would present them to the learned Philaminte (see Moliere’s play ‘Les Femmes Savantes’) as models of womanhood.
As for the wives of these gentlemen, since they have so many, however virginal their husbands may be, it seems to me that there are certain things of which they should have knowledge — in truth, it may well be that the former have taught them nothing, which suggests that these husbands wish to keep their wives in precious and blissful ignorance. Allah is great, and Muhammad is his prophet! Women are full of curiosity; let heaven and morality allow them to satisfy it in a more legitimate way than Eve, their grandmother, and not go asking questions of the serpent! And as for their daughters, if they have been to boarding school, I fail to see what books could teach them.
It is as absurd to say that a man is a drunkard because he describes a drunken orgy, or debauched because he tells of debauchery, as to claim that a man is virtuous because he has written a book on morality; every day we see the opposite. It is the character who speaks and not the author; if his hero is an atheist, it does not mean he is an atheist; if he makes the brigands act and speak like brigands, he is not, for that reason, a brigand. If that were true, we would have to guillotine Shakespeare, Corneille and all the tragedians; they committed more murders than Mandrin and Cartouche (infamous eighteenth-century outlaws); however, it is not so, and will not be so for a long time, I believe, however virtuous and moral criticism may become. It is one of the habits of such narrow-minded little scoundrels to always confuse the author with the work, and to resort to personal attacks, so as to add a degree of wretched and scandalous interest to their miserable rhapsodies, which they know no one would read if they contained only their individual opinion.
I scarcely comprehend where all this outcry is leading, what the point might be of all this howling and anger, and what it is that drives these small-time Geoffrois de Charny (Geoffroi de Charny was a highly renowned fourteenth century knight) to appoint themselves the Don Quixotes of morality, who, like true literary policemen, seize and pummel, in the name of virtue, any idea that wanders about in book-form with its wimple (cornette) askew or its skirt hitched a little too high. It is most singular.
It is the age, whatever they may claim, that is ‘immoral’ (if the word means anything, which I very much doubt), and no other proof is needed than the quantity of ‘immoral’ books it produces, and the degree of success they achieve. Books reveal our moral state; our moral state is not inspired by books. The Regency made Prosper Jolyot de Crébillon, it was not Crébillon who made the Regency. François Boucher’s little shepherdesses wore make-up and were carelessly dressed, because the little marquises of his age wore make-up and were carelessly dressed. Paintings depict their models; the models are not born from paintings. I know not who said, I know not where, that literature and the arts influence morality. Whoever it was, he was undoubtedly a great fool. It is as if one said: seeds cause spring growth; whereas, on the contrary, spring causes seeds to grow, just as cherry-trees fruit because it is summer. Fruit burdens the tree, not the tree its fruit, which is indeed a law eternal and invariable in its application; centuries follow one another, and each bears its fruit, which is never quite that of the preceding century; books are the fruit of morality.
Alongside these moralistic journalists, beneath their shower of homilies like summer rain in a park, there have arisen, between the wooden trestles of the Saint-Simonian platform, a host of little, mushrooms of a rather curious new species, whose natural history I will reveal.
They are the utilitarian critics. Wretched folk with noses too short for spectacles, yet who cannot see beyond their noses.
When an author sets down some volume, a novel or a book of poetry, on the utilitarian critic’s desk, that gentleman nonchalantly leans back in his armchair, balances the thing on its hind legs, and, rocking to and fro with a business-like air, puffs himself up and cries: What is the point of this book? How can it be applied to the moral welfare and social well-being of the most numerous and poorest classes? What! Not a word within it as regards the needs of society, nothing educational or progressive! Why, rather than striving for the over-arching synthesis of humanity, and following, via the events of history, the phases of regenerative and providential thought, do authors write poems and novels that lead nowhere, and which fail to set the generations on the path of the future? How can they concern themselves with form, style, or rhyme in the presence of such grave themes? What do style, rhyme, or form have to do with us? Progress is what matters (poor wretches of authors, they are so naive)! Society is suffering, it is prey to a vast inner turmoil (translation: no one subscribes to utilitarian newspapers). It is up to the poet to seek the cause of this malaise and to cure it. He will find the means by empathising, heart and soul, with humanity (philanthropic poetry, that indeed would be something rare and charming!) We await such poets; we summon them with all our might. When such a fellow appears, his will be the acclamations of the crowd; his, the palm; his, the crown; his, the Prytaneum (the seat of Government) …’
Fine; but, as I would have the reader remain awake till the end of this sacred preface, I will not continue in faithful imitation of the utilitarian style which, by its very nature, is somewhat soporific, and might replace, to advantage, both laudanum and academic discourse.
No, you imbeciles, no, you goitrous cretins, a book won’t add gelatine to soup; a novel is not a pair of boots without seams; a sonnet, is not a jet-spray; a drama is not a railway-track, all things which are essential to civilisation, and which set Humanity on the path of progress. By the innards of all the Popes past, present and future, no, no, two hundred thousand times no.
One cannot make a cotton cap from a metaphor, or wear a simile like a slipper; or use an antithesis as an umbrella; or, sadly, wrap a few colourful rhymes round one’s stomach as a waistcoat. I own to the profound conviction that even an ode is too thin a garment for winter, nor would one be better dressed in a stanza, an antistrophe, or an epode, than that Cynic’s wife who was content with her virtue alone for a chemise, and went about stark naked, or so the story goes. However, it is true that the famous Seigneur de La Calprenède (Gauthier de Costes) once had on a suit of clothes, and when asked what it was made of, he replied: Silvandre, which was a play of his whose performance had recently met with success.
Utilitarian reasoning makes one shrug one’s shoulders above one’s head, far higher than those of the Duke of Gloucester (see Shakespeare’s ‘Richard III’). Those who claim to be economists, and want to rebuild society from the ground up, seriously put forward such nonsense.
A novel has two uses: one material, the other spiritual, if one can use such a word as ‘use’ in relation to a novel. The material use is as follows. First of all, it provides the few thousand francs that go into the author’s pocket and ballast him so that the Devil or the wind fail to blow him away; for the publisher, it is a fine thoroughbred horse that prances and snorts as it pulls its ‘ebony and steel cabriolet’ along, as Le Figaro puts it (a reference to Eugène Renduel, the fashionable bookseller, and publisher of Gautier’s works including this one, who possessed just such a carriage); for the paper merchant, one more factory beside a river, and often the means of spoiling some beautiful location; for the printers, a few tons of wood-pulp to feed their printing-presses each week; for the reading-room, a pile of proletarian verdigris, and a quantity of grease, which, if it were properly collected and used, would render whaling superfluous. Its spiritual use is that, while reading a novel, one dozes, and avoids reading useful, virtuous, and progressive newspapers, or other such indigestible and stupefying drugs.
Let it be said: novels do not contribute to civilisation. I will not speak of tobacconists, grocers, and purveyors of fried food, who have a great interest in that branch of literature, the paper it uses being, in general, of a superior quality to that of newspapers.
In truth, there is something laughable about the dissertations of these Republican or Saint-Simonian gentlemen. I would ask, firstly, what exactly that great hulking noun means with which they daily fill the emptiness of their columns, and which serves as their shibboleth and sacramental term — Utility: what is this word, and to what does it apply?
There are two kinds of utility, and the word’s meaning is always merely relative. What is useful to one is not useful to another. You are a cobbler; I am a poet. It is useful to me that my first line rhymes with my second; a rhyming dictionary is of great use to me. You have no use for it in repairing an old pair of boots, and it is fair to say that an awl and a cutter would be of little use to me in writing an ode. Then, you will object that a cobbler is far above a poet, and that one can do without the latter more easily than the former. Without claiming to demean the illustrious profession of cobbler, which I honour as much as the profession of ‘constitutional monarch’, I will humbly admit that I would rather see my shoe unstitched than my verse ill-rhymed, and would rather do without boots at all than poetry. Hardly ever going out, and getting around more by my brains than my feet, I wear out my shoes less than the virtuous republican who runs from one ministry to another, merely to be granted some post or other
I know there are some who prefer windmills to churches, and bread for the body to that of the soul. To them, I have naught to say. They deserve to be economists in this world, and also in the next.
Is there anything absolutely useful on this earth, in this life of ours? First of all, it is of little use for us to exist on this planet. I challenge the most learned of the crew to say what use we are, unless it is to subscribe to Le Constitutionnel or some other newspaper of the kind.
And if the usefulness of our existence is to be admitted a priori, what things are really useful in supporting it? Soup, and a little meat twice a day, that’s all that’s needed to fill one’s stomach, in the strict sense of the phrase. Man, for whom a coffin two feet wide by six long is enough, and more, after his death, needs scarcely more space when alive. A hollow cube seven to eight feet in all directions, with a hole to allow him to breathe, a single cell, that is, of the hive, is enough to house him and protect his back from the rain. A blanket, drawn carefully around his body, will defend him as well against the cold as the most elegant and best-cut tailcoat by Jean-Jacques Staub (the renowned tailor, at 92 Rue de Richelieu), or indeed better.
With all these, he will be able to subsist, literally. They say one can live on twenty-five centimes a day; but to prevent oneself from dying is not to live; and I cannot see that a city organized on utilitarian lines would be any more pleasant to live in than the cemetery of Père-la-Chaise.
Nothing that is beautiful is indispensable to life. If we were to eliminate flowers, the world would not suffer much materially; yet who would wish to dispense with flowers? I would sooner relinquish potatoes than roses, and I believe that there is scarcely a single utilitarian in the world capable of tearing up a bed of tulips to plant cabbages instead.
What is the use of female beauty? As long as a woman is medically sound and able to bear children, she will always suffice as far as the economists are concerned.
What use is music? What use are paintings? Who are we, who are so foolish as to prefer Mozart to Armand Carrel (co-founder of the Republican newspaper ‘Le National’), or Michelangelo to the inventor of Dijon mustard?
Nothing is truly beautiful except that which serves no purpose; everything useful is ugly, since it is the expression of some need or other, and those of human beings are ignoble and disgusting, like their poor, weak natures. The most useful place in a house is its latrine.
I, with all due respect to these gentlemen, am one of those for whom the superfluous is necessary, and I cherish things and people in inverse proportion to the services they render. To a certain useful vase of mine, I prefer a Chinese vessel, adorned with dragons and mandarins, which is no use to me at all, and the talent of mine I most prize is my inability to divine anagrams or charades. I would happily renounce my rights as a Frenchman and a citizen, in order to view an authentic painting by Raphael, or a beautiful woman naked: Princess Borghese, for example, posing for Canova, or Giulia Grisi taking her bath. I would very willingly consent, for my part, to the return of that cannibal Charles X, if from his castle in Bohemia, he brought me a case of Tokay, or Schloss Johannisberg (the first Riesling winery), and I would find the electoral laws quite broad enough if certain streets were more so, and other things less. Although I am not a dilettante, I prefer the sound of the violin’s horsehair, and that of the tambourine, to the bell of Monsieur le Président. I would sell my trousers for a signet ring, and my bread for a pot of jam. The most becoming occupation for a civilised man, it seems to me, is to do nothing, or to smoke his pipe or cigar studiously. I also own to a great respect for those who play skittles, and also for those who write excellent verse. You see that my principles are far from being utilitarian, and that I will never be the editor of a virtuous newspaper, unless I become a convert, which would be rather droll.
Instead of establishing a Montyon Prize to reward virtue, I would prefer to grant, like Sardanapalus, that great philosopher who has been so badly misunderstood, a large bonus to whoever would invent a new pleasure; since enjoyment seems to me the goal of life, and the only useful thing in the world. The Creator wanted it so, he who made women, perfume, sunlight, beautiful flowers, fine wines, frisky horses, greyhounds, and angora cats; he who did not say to his angels: ‘Be virtuous’, but: ‘Love’, and who gave us a mouth with skin more sensitive than the rest with which to kiss women; eyes raised aloft to view the sunlight; a subtle sense of smell to breathe the soul of flowers; sinewy thighs to squeeze the flanks of stallions, and fly as fast as thought, without the need for the railway and its steam engines; delicate hands to caress the elongated heads of greyhounds, and the velvety backs of cats, and the polished shoulders of less virtuous creatures; and who, finally, has granted to us alone the triple and glorious privilege of drinking without our being thirsty, of striking a spark, and of making love in every season, which distinguishes us from the brute creatures far more than the habit of reading newspapers and agreeing charters.
Lord, what a foolish thing the supposed perfectibility of the human race is, a thing which we hear talked of constantly! As if one were to claim that human beings are machines capable of improvement, and that a more tightly-meshed cog, a more suitably-placed counterweight will make them work in a more convenient and easier way. When we have succeeded in giving a man a double stomach, so that he can chew his cud like an ox, and eyes on the back of his head, so that, like Janus, he can see those who stick their tongues out at him from behind and can contemplate his backside in a less awkward pose than that of the Venus Callipyge in Naples, and planted wings on his shoulder-blades so that he is not obliged to pay six sous a time to travel by omnibus; when we have created a single new organ for him, then fine, the word ‘perfectibility’ will signify something. Despite all our wondrous perfections, what is done now that was not done just as well or better before the Flood?
Can we drink more than we drank in the days of ignorance and barbarism (in their ancient form)? Alexander the great, the equivocal friend of the handsome Hephaestion, never failed to drink deep, even though he lacked a ‘Journal of Useful Knowledge’ (created by Émile de Girardin, in 1831) in his day, and I know of no utilitarian who would be capable of draining, without becoming oedemic, swollen that is to a greater extent than Emmanuel Lepeintre (‘Lepeintre Jeune’, a comic actor famous for his obesity) or an adult hippopotamus, the huge cup he called the Cup of Heracles. That Marshal of France, François de Bassompierre, who emptied a dozen such (see his ‘Mémoires’, 1665), while drinking the health of the canons of Saverne, seems to me singularly estimable in that regard, his act being little susceptible to perfectibility.
What economist could enlarge our stomachs so as to hold as many beefsteaks as Milo of Croton, who ate an ox? The menus of the ‘Café Anglais’, or ‘Le Grand Véfour’, or any other celebrated Parisian restaurant you like, seem to me meagre and ecumenical in the extreme, compared to Trimalchio’s dinner menu (see Petronius’ ‘Satyricon’). At what table do they now serve a sow and her twelve wild boars in a single dish? Who alive now has eaten moray eels and lampreys fattened on human flesh? Do you really believe Jean Brillat-Savarin perfected the work of Caelius Apicius (see the ‘De re culinaria’)? Is it at Chevet’s that Vitellius’s fat tripe-seller would find enough to fill that emperor’s famous dish he called ‘The Shield of Minerva’ with pheasant and peacock brains, flamingo-tongues, and pike-livers (see Suetonius’ ‘The Twelve Caesars’)? Do the oysters eaten at ‘Au Rocher de Cancale’ really render them as highly sought after as were those of the Lucrine Lake, which was devoted to them especially. The little suburban houses of the Regency marquises are wretched places for emptying a wine-bottle, compared to the villas of the Roman patricians, at Baiae, Capreae and Tibur. Should not the cyclopean magnificence of those great voluptuaries who built eternal monuments in which to indulge the pleasures of a day cause us to fall flat on our faces before the genius of the ancients, and forever erase from our dictionaries the word perfectibility?
Have we added a single deadly sin to the total? Sadly, there are only seven, just as before; the number of ways the just may fall from grace, which is a mediocre number. I doubt that, at the rate we are going, even after being besieged by Progress, any lover would be capable of repeating the thirteenth labour of Hercules (traditionally, that of impregnating forty-nine of the fifty daughters of King Thespia, in a single night). His marathon love-making is regarded, by many, as his greatest feat. Can one be any more agreeable to the Lord than in the days of Solomon? Many illustrious scholars and most respectable ladies hold completely the opposite opinion, and claim that agreeableness is decreasing. Well then, why talk of progress? I know you will tell me we have an upper house and a lower house, that it is hoped that soon everyone will possess the vote, and the number of representatives be doubled or tripled. Do you think too few errors are perpetrated by the National Assembly, and are an insufficient number for the nasty brew they mix? I scarcely see the point of depositing two or three hundred provincial politicians in a wood-panelled salon (in the Palais Bourbon), with a ceiling painted by Alexandre-Évariste Fragonard, simply to have them fiddle with, and mar, I know not how many absurd or atrocious petty laws. What matters it whether a sabre, an aspergillum (for sprinkling holy water), or an umbrella governs your parliament! It is always simply a stick, and it surprises me that devotees of progress should argue over the choice of stick that tickles their shoulders, when it would be much more progressive and less costly to break it and cast the pieces to the Devil.
The only one among you who possess a modicum of common sense is a madman, a mighty genius, an imbecile, a divine poet far above Lamartine, Hugo and Byron; he is Charles Fourier the Phalansterian (and Utopian) who is all of the above in one: he alone employs logic, and has the audacity to push his conclusions to the end. He affirms, without hesitation, that human beings will soon possess a tail fifteen feet long with an eye embedded at the end; which is progress, indeed, and would allow one to do a thousand fine things that could not be done before, such as knocking out an elephant without a blow from one’s fist; swinging from trees without a rope, as easily as the fittest macaque; doing without an umbrella or parasol, by spreading one’s tail over one’s head in a plume, as squirrels do who cheerfully lack umbrellas, and a host of other prerogatives that would take too long to enumerate. Several Phalansterians even claim they already have a small one that can only grow longer, if the Lord grants them life.
Charles Fourier has invented as many species of animals as Georges Cuvier, the great naturalist. He has invented horses that will be three times the size of elephants, dogs as big as tigers, fish capable of feeding more people than the two employed by Jesus Christ in that ‘miracle’ which the unbelieving Voltaireans think an April Fool’s jest, and I a parable of some magnificence. Fourier has built cities beside which Rome, Babylon and Tyre are mere molehills; he has piled Babels one upon another, and produced infinitely more spirals in rifling a gun-barrel than those in all the engravings by John Martin; he has imagined I know not how many orders of architecture and new culinary seasonings; he has outlined a project to build a theatre that would seem grandiose even to Romans of the Empire, and prepared a menu that even Lucullus or Nomentanus would perhaps have found adequate for a dinner with friends; he promises to create new pleasures, and develop the organs and the senses; he cannot but render women more beautiful and more voluptuous, men more robust and more vigorous; he guarantees your fertility, while proposing to reduce the number of inhabitants of the world so that everyone is at ease here; which is more rational it seems than urging the proletarians, except when cannonading them in the streets when they proliferate too greatly, and gifting them bullets instead of bread, to create others.
It is only in this way that Progress is possible. All the rest is a savage mockery, a witless farce, not even useful for fooling gawping idiots.
The phalanstery (a building designed for a self-contained Utopian community) is truly an improvement on the Abbey of Thélème (see Rabelais’ ‘Gargantua and Pantagruel’, Book I:52), and relegates the Earthly Paradise definitively to the class of things that are wholly bewigged and outdated. The Thousand and One Nights and Countess d’Aulnay’s tales (see her collection ‘Les Contes des Fées’, 1697) alone can successfully compete with the phalanstery. What creative fecundity! There is enough in the idea to defray three thousand marvellous cartloads of romantic or classical poetry; and our versifiers, academicians or not, are quite unimaginative, compared to Charles Fourier, the inventor of ‘passionate attraction’. This idea of using forms of motion that we have until now sought to repress is most assuredly a noble and powerful idea.
Oh! You say that we are making progress! If, tomorrow, a volcano were to erupt beneath Montmartre, shroud Paris in ash, and bury her in a tomb of lava, as Vesuvius once did Stabia, Pompeii, and Herculaneum, and then, a thousand years from now, the antiquarians of that age were to carry out excavations, and exhume the corpse of our dead city, tell me what monument, built now, if any remained standing, could equal the splendour of the great buried Gothic cathedral of Notre-Dame? A fair idea of our later art might be transmitted by uncovering the Tuileries as retouched by Pierre-François-Léonard Fontaine! The statues from the Pont Louis XV (the Pont de la Concorde; the statues are now dispersed) would also make a fine effect, transported to the museums of that day! Were it not for the paintings of the old schools, and the statues from antiquity or the Renaissance, filling the gallery of the Louvre, that long, shapeless corridor; if it were not for Ingres’ ceiling (‘The Apotheosis of Homer’), which might prevent their believing Paris to have been merely a Barbarian encampment, a village of Welshmen or cannibalistic Tupi Indians, what they would find amidst their excavations would be most curious. National Guards’ sabres, and firefighters’ helmets, and coins struck using an ill-formed die, that is what would be found in place of those beautiful weapons, so curiously worked, that the Middle Ages left at the foot of its towers and in its ruined tombs, and of those medals that fill Etruscan vases and litter the foundations of every Roman building. As for our miserable furniture in wood veneer, all these wretched chests, bare, ugly, and mean that we call sideboards or bureaus, all these shapeless, fragile utensils, I trust time would take pity on them sufficiently and destroy even the smallest vestige.
One fine day, a fancy seized us, that of building a magnificent and grandiose monument. We were obliged to borrow its plan from the ancient Romans; and, even before its completion, our Pantheon bent on its legs like a rickety child, and staggered like an invalid, dead-drunk, so much so that we were forced to provide it with crutches of stone, without which it would have fallen, piteously, full length, in front of all, and given the nations an object of amusement for a hundred years and more. We sought to plant an obelisk in one of our squares; we were driven to stealing one from Luxor, and it took us two years to bring it here. Ancient Egypt lined its roads with obelisks, as we line ours with poplar trees; she bore bundles of them in her arms, as a market gardener carries bundles of asparagus, and carved monoliths from the flanks of her granite mountains more easily than we can carve a toothpick or an ear-scoop. A few centuries ago, we were blessed with Raphael, and Michelangelo; now we have the ever-popular Paul Delaroche, all because we are progressing. You boast of your Opéra; ten Opéras like yours could have danced the saraband in the Roman Circus. The animal-trainer Henri Martin himself, with his tame tiger, and poor gouty lion asleep like a subscriber to the Gazette, is a miserable thing compared to the gladiators of antiquity. What are your benefit performances that last until two in the morning, when you think of those Games that lasted a hundred days, those performances where real ships actually fought over an actual sea; in which thousands of men studiously cut each other to pieces — turn pale, O, heroic Antonio Franconi (founder of the equestrian theatre, Cirque Olympique)! With the water extracted, the sandy arena displayed roaring lions and tigers, fearful extras serving for only a single occasion, and the leading role was filled by some robust Dacian or Pannonian athlete who was often unable to be there to take his bow at the end of the performance, and whose leading lady was a beautiful but greedy Numidian lioness hungry from fasting for three days? Does not a tightrope-walking elephant seem superior to Mademoiselle George (Marguerite Georges)? Do you think Marie Taglioni’s dancing better than that of Arbuscula (a stage performer in Ancient Rome), or Jules Perrot’s better than that of Bathyllus? I am convinced that Roscius would have yielded nothing to Bocage (Pierre-Martinien Tousez), excellent though the latter is. Galeria Copiola, of Ancient Rome, filled the role of an ingénue at the age of a hundred and four. It is fair to say that the oldest of our young ladies is hardly more than sixty, and that Mademoiselle Mars (Anne Salvetat) is showing no sign at all of progress in that direction. The Romans had three or four thousand gods in whom they believed, and we have only one, in whom we scarcely believe; this is progress of a curious kind. Was not Jupiter stronger than Don Juan, and a nobler seducer? In truth, I know of nothing superior that we have invented or even perfected.
Louis Béroud (1852–1930)
L'escalier de l'opéra Garnier (1877)
Wikimedia Commons
After the ‘progressive’ journalists, as if to serve as their antithesis, come the ‘jaded’ journalists, who are usually twenty years old or so, who have never left their neighborhood, and have only ever slept with the housemaid. These folk are bored by everything, exasperated by everything, and wearied by everything; they are sated, numbed, worn out, unreachable. They know in advance what you are going to say; they have seen, felt, experienced, heard everything that it is possible to see, feel, experience, or hear; the human heart has no corner so remote that they have not shone a lantern there. They tell you, with marvellous aplomb: ‘The human heart is not like that; women are not like that; this character is false.’ or else they cry ‘What then! Always love or hatred! Always men and women! Cannot we be told of something else? But man, indeed, is worn down to the bone, and woman even more so, since Honoré de Balzac involved himself with them. Who shall deliver us from men and women? Do you think, sir, that your tale is new? It is new only in the manner of the Pont Neuf: nothing in the world is more commonplace; I heard the same I know not where, when I was being wet-nursed or elsewhere; I have been listening to the same for ten years or more. Besides, understand, sir, that there is nothing I am not acquainted with, that everything seems worn out to me, and that your idea, were it as virgin as the Virgin Mary, I would no less affirm to have seen as a whore by the roadside, in the arms of the lowest scribbler, the meanest of pedants.’
These jaded journalists were responsible for ‘Jocko the Brazilian Monkey’, ‘The Green Monster’, ‘The
Lions of Mysore’ (all pieces performed at the Cirque Olympique) and a thousand other wonderful inventions.
They complain endlessly of being obliged to read books and view plays. Regarding some poor vaudeville performance, they speak of almond trees in blossom, fragrant lime-trees, the spring breeze, the scent of fresh foliage; they become lovers of nature like Young Werther, yet have never set foot outside Paris, and would not know a cabbage from a beetroot. If it is winter, they will tell you of the pleasures of the domestic hearth, the crackling fire and the andirons, slippers, and reverie, and dozing; they will not fail to quote the famous line from Tibullus:
‘Quam juvat immites ventos audire cubantem’
‘What joy to hear the raging winds as I lie there’
(See Tibullus: Elegies I:1, line 45)
by which means they grant themselves a little frisson at once disillusioned and naive, the most charming in the world. They will pose as men whom the works of mankind can no longer move, whom dramatic emotions leave as cold and as dry as the knife with which they sharpen their pen, yet who nonetheless cry out, like Jean-Jacques Rousseau: ‘Behold the periwinkle!’ (See Rousseau’s ‘Confessions’ Book VI.) Such folk profess a fierce antipathy towards the colonels played on stage at the Théâtre du Gymnase, the uncles from America, the cousins male and female, the wise old soldiers of the Guard, and the amorous widows, and attempt, it seems, to cure us of vaudeville by proving every day, in their column-inches, that not all French people are born intelligent. In truth, I find little harm in it; quite the opposite, and I am happy to recognise that the extinction of vaudeville, or comic-opera, in France (it being the national genre) would be one of the greatest blessings of heaven. But I would like to know what kind of literature these gentlemen would be prepared to accept in its place, though indeed it could prove no worse.
Others preach against false taste, and translate Seneca’s tragedies. Lately, to complete the order of march, a new battalion of critics has formed of a kind not seen before.
Their formula for criticism is the most convenient, most extensible, most malleable, most peremptory, most superlative, and most triumphant that a critic could ever imagine. Zoilus (a critic of Homer’s works noted for his harsh and malignant attacks) would surely have appreciated it.
Before now, when one wanted to diminish any work, and discredit it in the eyes of patriarchal and naive subscribers, one trotted out false or perfidiously isolated quotations; one truncated sentences and mutilated verses, so that even the author found himself to be the most ridiculous being in the world; one accused him of imaginary plagiarisms; one compared passages of his book with passages in ancient or modern texts, which had not the least connection with it; one accused him, in ranting style, and with many solecisms, of being ignorant of his own native language, of mangling the French of Racine and Voltaire; one proclaimed, in all seriousness, that his work encouraged cannibalism, and that his readers would inevitably become cannibalistic or at least rabid in a week; it was all wretched, retrogressive, spiritless, fossilised. By dint of having reiterated it in newspaper columns and reviews, the accusation of immorality was rendered so inadequate, and useless, that only Le Constitutionnel, a modest and progressive newspaper, as we know, still had the desperate courage to employ it.
Therefore, ‘anticipatory’ criticism has been invented, prospective criticism. Do you not see, at first glance, how charming the idea is, and how imaginative? The recipe is simple, and I can reveal it here: the work that will be considered fine, and will be highly-praised, is the work that has not yet appeared. The work that has appeared is infallibly detestable. That of tomorrow will be superb; but sadly, it is always today.
It is a form of criticism based on the same principle as that of the barber whose sign bore these words written in large letters: ‘Free Shave Here Tomorrow!’ All the poor devils who read his placard promised themselves that next day they would experience the ineffable and sovereign sweetness of being shaved once in their lives without spending a penny: and such was their delight the hair on their chins grew half a foot during the night preceding this happiest of days; but, once the napkin was round their necks, the barber demanded his fee; they must cough up, or he would treat them as people did the thieving walnut-pickers and apple-gatherers in Le Perche (in Normandy, and noted for both products) and he swore a great Sacredieu of an oath that he’d cut their throats with his razor, unless they paid him, while the poor fellows, teeth chattering, pointed, pitifully and wretchedly, to the placard with its sacred inscription. ‘Ha, ha! Little fools!’ laughed the barber, ‘You’re no scholars, back to school with you! The sign says: ‘Tomorrow’. I’m not so daft as to shave you ‘today’ for free; my colleagues would scorn me for hurting the trade. Come back in a week that has three Thursdays, that’s best. A miserly old beggar I’d be, if I didn’t shave you for free, then, on the word of an honest barber.’
Authors who read a ‘prospective’ article, in which current works are denigrated, flatter themselves that the book they are writing will be the texts of the future. They try to accommodate the critic’s ideas, as far as possible, and to become socially-oriented, progressive, moralistic, palingenetic (regenerative), mythical, pantheistic, followers of Philippe Buchez (a disciple of Saint-Simon), thinking in that way to escape a formidable decree of anathema; but what happens to them is what happened to the barber’s customers — today is not the eve of tomorrow. That forever-promised day will never dawn; for the barber’s formula is too convenient to be abandoned quite so soon. While decrying the author, of whom one is jealous, and whose book one would like to annihilate, one dons gloves and demonstrates one’s highly-generous impartiality. One seemingly asks nothing more than to find something good therein to praise, yet one never does. This recipe is far superior to the one I termed ‘retrospective’, which consists of praising only past works, which are no longer read, and which trouble no one, at the expense of modern works, which the author cares for, and which involve their self-esteem more directly.
I declared, before commencing this review of gentlemen-critics, that the material could well provide fifteen or sixteen thousand volumes in folio, but that I would content myself with a few lines; I fear that these few lines will be lines each two or three thousand fathoms long, resembling those large pamphlets so thick that not even a cannon-ball could pierce them, which perfidiously bear the title: a ‘Word on the Revolution’, a ‘Word… on this or that’. The history of the words and deeds, and of the multiple loves, of the diva Madeleine de Maupin would then run a high risk of being rejected, and the reader should understand that an entire volume is not too much to sing the adventures of that beautiful Bradamante (see Ariosto’s ‘Orlando Furioso’ for the warrior-maid of that name), in a worthy manner. That is why, however much I may wish to continue describing the coat-of-arms of the illustrious Aristarchus (of Samothrace, the critical editor of Homer’s works) of the day, I will rest content with the sketch I have just drawn, adding a few thoughts on the benevolent natures of my kind-hearted brothers in Apollo, who, as dumbly as Cassandra in the commedia dell’arte, remain in receipt of the blows from Harlequin’s baton, and kicks in the backside from Paillasse the clown, without being moved any more than a statue is.
They resemble the fencing master who, under attack, crosses his arms behind his back, and receives on his bared chest all the thrusts of his adversary, without attempting a single parry. The whole matter is like a plea where the royal prosecutor alone has the right to speak, or a debate where no reply is allowed.
The critic slashes here and there. He cuts from on high, and slices from the ground up. Absurd, detestable, monstrous: it means nothing, it means everything. A drama is performed, the critic goes to view it; it turns out that it in no way corresponds to the drama which, given its title, he had conceived in his head; then, in his column, he substitutes his own drama for the author’s drama. He writes long erudite tracts; he pours forth all the knowledge he acquired the day before in some library, and ill-treats those from whom he should learn, the least of whom has shown themselves more able than himself.
Authors endure this with a magnanimity, a patience, that seems truly inconceivable. Who, after all, are these critics with such piercing tones, such abrupt speech that one would think them true sons of the gods? They are simply fellows with whom we went to college, and who evidently benefited less from their studies than we did, since they produce nothing, and can do nothing but scorn and befoul those of others, like true Stygian Stymphalides (the monstrous birds of Heracles’ Sixth Labour in Greek myth).
Would it not be something to criticise the critics themselves? For these mighty folk, who are forever expressing their disgust, and are so proud and difficult, are far from possessing the Pope’s supposed infallibility. If one did, there would be enough to fill a daily newspaper of the largest format. Their historical, and other, blunders, their fabricated quotations, their errors in the use of the French language, their plagiarisms, their drivel, their hackneyed, tasteless jokes, their poverty of ideas, their lack of intelligence and tact, their ignorance of the simplest things which easily allows them to take Piraeus for a man, and Paul Delaroche for a painter, would provide authors with ample means to take revenge, with no more work to do than underline the relevant passages in pencil and reproduce them verbatim; for the title of critic does not grant one the title of great writer, and merely by reproaching others for poor language or taste one does not, thereby, avoid making them oneself; our critics prove it every day. If a Chateaubriand, a Lamartine, or the like were the critic, I might concede that one should get down on one’s knees and pay worship; but that some little X, Y, or Z, or other letter of the alphabet between A and W, should play Quintilian (the Roman critic and orator), and scold one in the name of morality and noble literature, that is what ever revolts me and goads me to unparalleled fury. I would welcome an order from the police that would forbid certain names from attacking certain others. It is true though that a cat can look at a king, and that Saint Peter of Rome, giant as he was, could not prevent the Trasteverini (the inhabitants of the Trastevere, ‘over the Tiber’) from pelting him, vigorously, yet I still cannot believe it wrong to command, as regards certain monumental reputations: ‘No dumping of rubbish here.’
Charles X alone understood the matter. By ordering the suppression of the newspapers, he rendered a great service to the arts and civilisation. Newspapers are akin to brokers or horse-dealers, interposing themselves between artists and the public, between the king and the people. We know the fine things that have resulted from this. Their perpetual barking deafens inspiration, and sows such misgivings in hearts and minds that one dares trust neither the poets not the government; something which renders royalty and poetry, two of the greatest things in the world, impossible, all to the great misfortune of the people, who sacrifice their well-being for the dubious pleasure of reading, every morning, a few ill-written sheets of an ill-intentioned paper, printed in poor ink and in a feeble style. There was no art criticism under Julius II, and I know of no articles criticising Daniele da Volterra, Sebastian del Piombo, Michelangelo, or Raphael, nor Lorenzo Ghiberti, nor Benvenuto Cellini; and I think that, for people who had no newspapers, who knew neither the word ‘art’ nor the word ‘artistic’, they showed talent enough, and acquitted themselves not too badly at their profession. Reading newspapers inhibits true scholarship and artistry; it is like a daily excess that makes you arrive enervated and lacking strength at the bed of the Muses, those harsh and difficult girls who demand fresh and vigorous lovers. The newspaper kills the book, as the book has killed architecture, and as artillery has done away with the need for courage and muscular strength. We have no idea of the pleasures that newspapers rob us of. They steal the virgin nature of all things from us; they leave us nothing of our own, and unable to comprehend a book ourselves. They rob the drama of theatrical surprise, and inform one of all the denouements in advance; they deprive one of the pleasure of commenting, chattering, gossiping and backbiting, of writing a new story, or peddling a true one for a week or more in all the salons of the world. They intone ready-made judgments to us, in spite of ourselves, and warn us against things we might like; they make the sellers of sulphur-tipped matches, if they have any brains left, talk as impertinently about literature as provincial academicians; all day long, they would have us hear, instead of naive ideas or individual nonsense, badly digested scraps of newspaper which resemble omelettes, uncooked on one side and burnt on the other, which we are drowned in anew, mercilessly, every three or four hours, and which tell us little that babes at the breast do not already know; they dull our taste, and make us like those drinkers of peppered-brandy, those swallowers of lime-juice, who no longer find any flavour in the most generous wines, and are unable to grasp their flowery and perfumed bouquet. If Louis-Philippe, once and for all, were to suppress all literary and political journals, I would be infinitely grateful to him, and I would immediately rhyme for him a beautiful, wild dithyramb in free verse with optional rhymes, signed: ‘Your very humble and very faithful subject etc.’ Let no one imagine that literature would die; in the days when there were no newspapers, a quatrain occupied all of Paris for eight days and the opening of a new play, six months.
It is true that one would lose the pleasure of the advertisements at thirty sous a line, and the eulogies, and one’s fame would be less immediate and less astounding. But I have thought of a most ingenious way of replacing the advertisements. If by the time this glorious novel of mine goes on sale, my gracious monarch has abolished the newspapers, I will most assuredly employ it, and I promise myself wonders and marvels. When the great day arrives, twenty-four criers on horseback, in my publisher’s livery, with his address on their fronts and backs, each bearing in their hand a banner on which the title of the novel will be embroidered on both sides, and each preceded by a drummer and a tambourine-player, will traverse the city, and, halting in the squares, and at the crossroads, will call out, in loud and intelligible voices:
‘Not yesterday, not tomorrow, but today, the admirable, inimitable, divine, and more than divine novel by the world-famous Théophile Gautier, entitled ‘Mademoiselle de Maupin’, is published; a novel that Europe, the rest of the globe, and even Polynesia, have awaited, impatiently, for a year or more. Five hundred copies are being sold every minute, and further copies will follow every half-hour; the nineteenth edition is already in play. A picket of municipal guards at the shop-door are there to restrain the crowds and quell disorder.’ — It would certainly be well worth a three-line advertisement in the Journal des Débats and Le Courrier Français, amidst those for elasticated-belts, crinoline-collars, baby-bottles with indestructible teats, Regnaud’s Balsamic Paste, and various cures for the toothache.
May 1834.
Chapter 1: D’Albert to Silvio
My dear friend, you complain of the infrequency of my letters. What would you have me write, except that I am well and still hold the same affection for you? These are things that you know perfectly well, being perfectly natural, given my age, and the fine qualities I see in you, that it is well-nigh ridiculous to make a wretched sheet of paper travel a hundred leagues and yet say nothing more. I have searched, in vain; I find nothing worth reporting. My life is the most eventless in the world, and nothing arrives to break its monotony. Today brings on tomorrow as yesterday brought on today; and, without displaying a prophet’s conceit, I predict, boldly, each morning, what will happen each evening.
Here is the story of my day: I rise, it goes without saying; thus, each day begins; I breakfast, I perfect my fencing style, I exit, I return, I dine, I pay a few visits, or occupy myself with a book: then retire to bed precisely as I did the previous day; I fall asleep, and my imagination, not being excited by anything new, grants me only worn-out, hackneyed dreams, as monotonous as my real life: it is scarcely entertaining, as you see. However, I am better-adapted to this existence than I might have been six months ago. I am bored, it is true, but in a quiet and resigned manner, which does not lack a certain sweetness, which I might willingly compare to those warm pallid autumn days in which, after the excessive heat of summer, one finds a secret charm.
This existence, though seemingly I have accepted it, is scarcely made for me however, or at least it bears very little resemblance to the one I dream of, and to which I believe myself suited. Perhaps I am wrong, and actually I am fit for no better a life than this; but I find that hard to believe, for, if it were my true destiny, I would surely have embraced it more readily, and not been bruised, in so many places and so painfully, by its sharp corners.
You know how strange adventures have an all-powerful attraction for me, how I adore everything that is singular, excessive, and dangerous, and with what avidity I devour novels and traveller’s tales; there is perhaps no imagination on earth wilder or more vagrant than mine: well, I know not why, nor through what fatality, I have failed to experience an adventure; have never made a journey. For me, a tour of the world is a tour of the city in which I live; I touch the horizon on every side; I rub shoulders with reality. My life is that of the sea-shell in the sand, the ivy wrapped around a tree, the cricket on the hearth. In truth, I am astonished my feet have not yet taken root. Love is depicted wearing a blindfold; it is Destiny should be pictured so.
I have for servant a somewhat heavy and stupid sort of peasant, who has travelled as far as the north wind, who has been to the Devil, I know not where, who has seen with his own eyes everything I form such beautiful ideas of, and yet he cares about it all as little as does a glass of water; he has found himself in the most bizarre of situations; he has engaged in the most astounding adventures one can engage in. I encourage him to talk sometimes, and grow furious thinking that all these fine things have happened to a lout capable of neither feeling nor reflection, and who is only good for what he can do, that is to say, brush clothes and clean my boots.
It is evident that the life of this scoundrel should have been mine. As for him, he thinks me very happily situated, and is profoundly astonished to see me as sad as I am.
All this is scarcely interesting, my poor friend, and hardly worth writing about, is it not? But, since you absolutely wish me to write to you, I must tell you what I think and feel, and relate the history of my ideas, in the absence of events or action. There may be little order and novelty in what I have to tell you; but you have no one to blame but yourself, since it is what you wish to hear.
You are my friend from childhood, we were raised together, our life has for long been a shared one, and we are used to exchanging the most intimate thoughts. I can therefore relate to you, without a blush, all the nonsense that fills my idle brain; I will add not a word, nor subtract a word. With you I set aside all self-esteem. Also, it shall be the exact truth, even as regards petty and shameful things; assuredly, I shall not hide myself from you.
Under the shroud of indifference, of wearisome ennui, of which I spoke just now, a thought, more torpid than dead, sometimes stirs; I do not always reach the sweet and sad calm that melancholy yields. I have relapses and slip back into my former state of agitation. Nothing is more tiring in the world than these tempests without reason, these impulses without aim. On such days, though I have no more to do than on any other, I rise early in the day, before the sun, feeling an urge to hurry, feeling I shall never possess the time I need; I dress swiftly, as if the house were on fire, donning my clothes at random, lamenting every lost minute. Someone who saw me might think I was hastening to an amorous rendezvous, or some financial affair — not at all — I have no idea where I am going; but go I must, and would think my salvation compromised if I stayed. It seems to me that someone without is summoning me, that my destiny is passing by, this very moment, in the street; that it is a matter of life and death.
I descend the stairs, looking bewildered and surprised, my clothes in disarray, my hair unkempt; people turn to laugh at me, thinking me some young debauchee who has spent the night in the tavern, or elsewhere. I am drunk indeed, though I have not been drinking, and am as drunken as my footsteps, sometimes slow, sometimes rapid. I travel from street to street like a dog that has lost its master, searching at random, restless, alert, turning about at the slightest noise, passing amidst each group without heeding the rebuffs of the folk I collide with, and gazing everywhere with a clarity of vision I lack at other times. Then I am made aware, suddenly, of being in error; that what I seek is, assuredly, not there, that I must journey further; to the other end of the town, who knows? And I set off as if the Devil were bearing me away. I only touch the ground with the tips of my shoes, seeming to weigh not an ounce. I must look strange, indeed, with my furiously busy expression, my arms gesticulating, as I utter inarticulate cries. When I think of it all calmly, I laugh at myself whole-heartedly, which nonetheless fails to stop me, I’d have you believe, from recommencing my course at the first opportunity.
If someone were to ask why I am racing about amid crowds, I would certainly be most embarrassed to answer. I am in no hurry to arrive, since I am going nowhere. I am unafraid of being late, since I have made no appointment. No one is waiting. I have no reason to hurry.
Is it an opportunity for love, an adventure, a woman, an idea, or a tilt at fortune, something missing from my life, that I seek without realising, driven by some vague instinct? Does my existence need to be rendered complete? Is it merely the desire to quit myself and my home, the tedium of my situation desiring another? It is something of all these things, and perhaps all of them at once. The fact remains: it is a most unpleasant state of being, a feverish bout of irritation which is commonly succeeded by plain apathy.
I am often possessed by the idea that, if I had only left an hour earlier, or redoubled my pace, I might have arrived in time; that, while I was passing through this street, what I was seeking was traversing some other, and that the intensity of traffic alone was enough to make me miss what I had been pursuing, at random, for so long.
You cannot imagine the depth of sadness, the profound despair, into which I fall when I realise all of it leads to nothing, that my youth is passing by, yet no perspective opens before me; then all my idle passions murmur dully in my mind, and devour each other for lack of alternative nourishment, like the creatures in a zoo whose keeper has forgotten to feed them. Despite the stifled, subterranean disappointments of each day, there is something in me that still resists, and does not wish to die. I own to no hopes, for to hope one must feel desire, a certain propensity for wishing that things would turn out in one way rather than another. I desire nothing, for I desire all. I do not hope, or rather I no longer hope, hope being only too foolish, and it is a matter to me of profound indifference whether a thing is, or is not. I wait: for what? I know not, but I wait.
It is a quivering wait, full of impatience, interspersed with jolts and nervous movements, like that of a lover waiting for his mistress. No one arrives. I fly into a rage or begin to cry. I wait for heaven to open for an angel to descend, and grant me a revelation; for a revolution to break out and for me to be offered a throne; for a virgin out of a Raphael painting to detach herself from the canvas, descend, and embrace me; for relatives I do not possess to die, and leave me enough wealth that my fantasies will bathe in a river of gold; for a hippogriff to take me and carry me off to unknown regions. Whatever I am waiting for, it is surely nothing commonplace or mediocre.
I reach the point that, on returning home, I never fail to say: ‘Has anyone been? Is there a letter? Is there anything new?’ I know perfectly well there is nothing, that there can be nothing. It matters not; yet I am always most surprised and disappointed on receiving the usual answer: ‘No, sir, nothing at all.’
Sometimes, however, though rarely, the thought is more precise. It is of some beautiful woman whom I do not know in the least, who knows nothing of me, whom I have met at the theatre or in church, and who paid me not the least attention. I scour the whole house, and not until I have opened the door of the very last room – I hardly dare say this, it seems so foolish – I hope she has come to see me, I hope she is there. It is no conceit on my part. I am so little conceited that several women have spoken very tenderly about me to others, saying that I seem indifferent to my own talents, and think little of my own remarks. It is prompted by something other.
When I am not stupefied by boredom and discouragement, my soul awakens and regains all its former vigour.
I hope, I love, I desire, and my desires are so violent that I imagine them drawing everything towards them, as a strong magnet attracts iron particles to itself, even distant ones. That is why I wait for what I seek, instead of advancing towards it, and often neglect the opportunities that offer themselves most favourably to my hopes. Another person would write the most loving note in the world to the god or goddess of his or her heart, or would seek the opportunity to draw closer to them. As for me, I ask my messenger for the answer to a letter I have not yet written, and spend my time constructing in my head the most marvellous situations whereby I might make myself appear in the most unexpected and favourable light to the one I love. One could make a book larger than Polybius’ Histories, out of all the stratagems, more ingenious than those in his work, that I have conceived by which I might introduce myself to her, and reveal my passion. Yet it would suffice to say to one of my friends: ‘Introduce me to Madame So-and-So,’ and to then offer her a compliment of a mythological nature suitably punctuated with sighs.
Hearing all this, one might think I was fit for the asylum; however, I am a fairly reasonable fellow, and have not often acted wildly. All takes place in the cellar of my soul, and all my ludicrous ideas are buried, carefully, deep within me; from without one sees nothing, and I have the reputation of being a quiet and cold young man, somewhat insensitive to women, and indifferent to the things of his age; which is as far from the truth as the world’s judgments usually are.
Nonetheless, despite all obstructions, a few of my wishes have been fulfilled, and through the small amount of joy the accomplishment of those aims has caused me, I have come to fear others’ accomplishments. You will remember the childish ardour with which I desired to have a horse of my own; my mother gifted me one quite recently; it is ebony black, with a little white star on its forehead, a full mane, shiny coat, slender legs, precisely as I desired. When they brought him to me, it gave me such a shock that I remained, for a good quarter of an hour, utterly pallid, without being able to recover; then I mounted him, and without saying a single word, set off at full gallop, and rode for more than an hour straight ahead, over the fields, in a rapture difficult to imagine: I did so every day for more than a week, and know not, in truth, how I failed to kill him, or at least leave him winded. Little by little all this great ardour subsided. I have put my horse to a trot, then a walk, and ended by riding him so nonchalantly that he often stops without my noticing; pleasure turned into habit far more quickly than I would have believed. As for Ferragus, that is what I named him, he is truly the most charming creature one could see. He has hair on his fetlocks like eagle-down; he is lively as a goat, and gentle as a lamb. You will find great pleasure in a gallop when you visit; and although my fury for riding has subsided, I still love him very much, for he has a most estimable character, and I sincerely prefer him to many a person. If you only heard how joyfully he neighs when I go to see him in his stable, and with what intelligent eyes he regards me! I confess I am so touched by his testimonies of affection, that I embrace his neck, and kiss him quite as tenderly as if he were a beautiful girl.
I had another desire, one more vivid, more ardent, more perpetually present, more dearly cherished, for which I had built a ravishing house of cards in my soul, a palace of chimeras, frequently razed, yet raised again with a desperate show of constancy. My wish was to possess a mistress, a mistress entirely my own, like my horse. I know not if the realisation of this dream would soon fine me as cold as did the realisation of the other. I doubt it, but perhaps I am wrong, and I shall weary of her as quickly. Through some peculiar trait, I desire what I desire so frantically, yet without doing anything to procure it, that if, by chance or otherwise, I arrive at the object of my wish, I have such strong moral qualms, and am so troubled, that I feel faint and no longer have enough vigour to enjoy it: also, things which come to me without my having wished for them usually give me more pleasure than those which I have coveted most ardently.
I am twenty-two years old; I am no longer a virgin. Alas! One is no longer so at this age, neither in body nor in heart, which is far worse. Apart from those who pleasure people for money, whom one should count no more than one does a lascivious dream, I have indeed had, here and there, in some obscure corner or other, a few honest women, or ones who were nearly so, neither beautiful nor ugly, neither young nor old, such as offer themselves to young folk who own to no settled affair, and whose heart is idle. With a little goodwill, and a fairly strong dose of romantic illusion, one may call that possessing a mistress, if you wish. As for me, it is impossible for me to do so, and if I had a thousand adventures of that kind, I would still believe my wish as unfulfilled as ever.
So, I have not yet had a mistress, though all my desire is to have one. It is an idea that particularly troubles me; for it is not the result of an effervescent temperament, hot bloodedness, or the first flowering of puberty. It is not the woman that I desire, it is simply a woman, a mistress; I want her, I will have her, and soon. If I fail, I confess I shall not recover from the failure, for it would result in an inward confirmation of my timidity, a dull sense of discouragement which would seriously influence the rest of my life. I would believe myself lacking in certain respects, inharmonious or disjointed, deformed in mind or heart; for what I ask is only just, and nature owes it to every man. Until I have achieved my goal, I will look upon myself as a mere child, and will lack that confidence in myself I should possess. A mistress is for me the only manly dress for a young Roman.
I see so many men, base in every way, with beautiful women, whose lackeys they are barely worthy of being, that I blush for them, and for myself. It leaves me with a poor opinion of women to see them fall in love with such louts, who despise and deceive them, rather than giving themselves to a loyal and sincere young man who would consider himself fortunate, and would adore them on his knees; to myself, for example. It is true that such men clutter the drawing-rooms, flaunt themselves before all the beauties, and are always leaning on the back of some armchair, while I remain at home, my forehead pressed to the window-pane, watching the river steam, and the fog rise, while silently erecting in my heart that perfumed sanctuary, that wondrous temple where I shall lodge the future idol of my soul. A chaste and poetic occupation, for which women are as little grateful as could be.
Women have very little taste for mere contemplation, and particularly prize those who put their ideas into action. After all, they are not wrong. Obliged, by their education and social position, to be silent and wait, they naturally prefer those who approach them and speak, so rescuing them from a false and tiresome situation. I feel all that; but I will never, in my life, be able to take it upon myself, as I see many do, to rise from my place, cross a room, and say, unexpectedly, to some woman: ‘You look like an angel in that dress’, or, ‘Your eyes, this evening, are particularly radiant’.
All this does not stop me from absolutely needing a mistress. I know not whom it will be, and I see none among the women I know who can suitably fulfil that important role. I find in them very few of the qualities I require. Those who are sufficiently young lack sufficient beauty or intellect; those who are young and beautiful possess a base and repulsive degree of virtue, or lack the necessary freedom; and then there is always some husband, brother, mother or aunt, or I know not what, who has all-seeing eyes and expansive ears, and who must be cajoled or hurled out the window. Every rose has its aphids, every woman has crowds of relatives from whom she must be carefully weeded, if one is ever to reap the fruit of her beauty. Even her second cousins in the provinces, whom we have never seen, seek to maintain the immaculate whiteness of their dear cousin in all its purity. It is nauseating, and I will never have the patience needed to uproot all the weeds, and prune all the brambles, that inevitably obstruct one’s path to a pretty woman.
I dislike mothers, greatly, and I like little girls even less. I must also confess that married women offer only a most mediocre attraction. There is a degree of confusion and complication in such a case which revolts me; I cannot bear the idea of sharing. The woman who has both a husband and a lover, prostitutes herself to one of the two, and often to both; and then, I could not consent to give way before another. My natural pride could not bend to such degradation. I will never depart simply because another man has arrived. Even if the woman is compromised and lost, even if we fight with knives, each one with one foot on her body, I will remain. Hidden staircases, wardrobes, closets, all the machinations of adultery, are no use to me.
Nor am I fond of what is called virginal candour, the innocence of youth, purity of heart, and those other charming things that are most effective in verse form; I call them mere silliness, ignorance, imbecility, or hypocrisy. The virginal candour that consists of sitting on the very edge of an armchair, arms pressed against one’s body, one's eye on the tip of one’s corset, and speaking only with the permission of one’s grandparents, that innocence which holds a monopoly in uncurled hair and white dresses, that purity of heart which wears collared bodices because it has no throat or shoulders to speak of as yet, seems to me, in truth, no very wondrous thing.
I care naught for making some little fool spell out the alphabet of love. I am neither old enough nor corrupt enough to take pleasure in that: moreover, I would have scant success, since I have never been able to teach anything to anyone, even of what I know best. I prefer women who read to one fluently; one reaches the end of the chapter sooner; and in all things, and especially in love, the end is what one must consider. In that respect, I am rather like those people who take a novel by the tail, and read the denouement before turning to the first page.
This mode of reading and loving has its charm. One savours the details more when the ending is settled, and it is the first chapter that presents the unexpected.
So much for the little girls and the married women, who are now excluded from the role. It must therefore be among the widows that I must choose my divinity. Alas! I am afraid, though they are all that remain, that I will scarcely find there what I long for.
If I were to fall in love with one of those pale narcissi bathed in the warm dew of tears, and leaning with melancholy grace over the new marble tomb of some happily and recently deceased husband, I would certainly be, and in short order, as unhappy as her deceased husband was in his lifetime. Widows, however young and charming they may be, have a serious disadvantage that other women lack: if you are not on the best of terms with them and a cloud darkens the sky of love, they immediately, and with an excessively contemptuous air, cry: ‘Ah! How badly you are behaving today! Exactly like my spouse. When we were quarrelling, he spoke in the same way. How singular, your voice and look are to his; when you are angry, you cannot imagine how much you resemble my husband; it’s quite frightening.’ It is far from pleasant to hear such things said to one’s face, point-blank! There are widows who even go so far as to praise the deceased, as in a eulogy, and to glorify his heart and his legs at the expense of your legs and heart. At least, with women who have only lovers, whether one or more, one has the ineffable advantage of never hearing one’s predecessor spoken of, which is a consideration of no minor interest. Women have too great a love for what is right and proper not to maintain a discreet silent in such cases, and all such matters are relegated to the past as swiftly as possible. It is clearly understood: one is always a woman’s first lover.
I doubt there can be a serious counter to such a well-founded aversion. It is not that I find widows entirely unattractive if they’re young and pretty and have not yet quit the state of mourning. There are their languid little airs, their little displays of letting their arms droop, bowing their necks, swelling their throats like bereaved turtledoves, their simpering, while softly and charmingly veiled in transparent crepe, a coquetry of grief which is easily understood, sighs skillfully managed, tears that fall so fittingly, and grant the eyes such brilliance! Certainly, second only to wine, if not before it, the liquor I best like to drink is that beautiful, clear, limpid tear trembling at the tip of a dark or a blond eyelash. How can one resist? One cannot. And then a black dress becomes a woman so well! White skin, leaving poetry aside, contrasts with it like ivory, snow, milk, alabaster, every whiteness on earth employed by madrigal makers: while a dark skin shows only a hint of darkness, full of vivacity and fire. Mourning clothes favour a woman; the reason I shall never marry is for fear my wife will do away with me, so as to wear them on my behalf. There are women, though, who have no idea how to take advantage of their grief, and who cry in such a way as to make their noses red and their faces resemble those grotesque masks that adorn fountains: it is a reef on which many run aground. It takes a deal of charm and artfulness to cry in a pleasing manner; and without those attributes, one runs the risk of lacking consolation for many a long day. However great the pleasure of rendering some Artemisia unfaithful to the shade of her King Mausolus, I prefer my choice of she whose heart I seek in exchange for mine not to be made amongst that weeping crowd.
I hear you say, at this point: ‘Then, who will you accept?’ ‘You reject young women, married women, widows. You dislike mothers; and I suppose you like grandmothers no better. Who the Devil can you love then?’ That is the question; one without an answer as yet, which if I found it would lessen my torment. Until now, I have loved no woman, but I love and have loved, ‘to love’. Though I have had no mistresses, and the women I have had only roused desire in me, I have known and know Love itself: I love not this one or that, not one rather than another, but one I have never seen, yet who must exist somewhere, and whom I will find, God willing. I know exactly what she is like, and when I meet her, will recognise her.
I have often imagined the place where she lives, the dress she wears, her eyes and hair. I hear her voice; I would know her step among a thousand others, and if, by chance, someone pronounced her name, I would turn my head; it is impossible for her not to possess one of the half a dozen names I have assigned to her in my mind.
She is twenty-six years old, no more, no less either. She is no longer inexperienced, and yet not jaded. It is a charming age at which to make love fully, without childishness, and without libertinism. She is of average height. I do not wish her a giantess or a dwarf. I want to be able to carry my goddess from the sofa to the bed myself; but it would displease me to have to search for her there. It is a requirement that, raising herself a little on tiptoe, her mouth reaches mine for a kiss. That is the right height. As for her plumpness, she must be not too thin. I am a bit of a Turk in this respect, and it would displease me somewhat to find a bony ridge where I seek a curve; a woman’s skin must be well filled, her flesh good and firm like the fruit of an unripe peach: that will be exactly how the mistress I seek is made. She is blonde with dark eyes, pale as a blonde but with the colouring of a brunette, and with something crimson and sparkling in her smile. The lower lip a little broad, the pupils swimming in moisture, the throat rounded, slender, and smooth, the wrists narrow, the hands long and well-formed, the gait undulating like a snake risen on its tail, the hips full and moving, the shoulders broad, the nape of the neck covered with down: a model of beauty both refined and strong at the same time, elegant but lively, poetic but real; an idea of Giorgione’s executed by Rubens.
Here is how she is costumed: she wears a dress of scarlet or black velvet, with slits of white satin or silvery cloth, an open bodice, a large Medici ruff, a capriciously rumpled felt hat like that of Helena Fourment, with long white feathers curled and crimped, a gold chain or a band of diamonds around her neck, and a quantity of large rings, variously enamelled, on the fingers of both hands.
I would not have her lack a ring or a bracelet. The dress must be true velvet or brocade; at most I would allow a descent to satin. I prefer a crumpled silk skirt to a linen one, and a headdress of pearls or feathers rather than natural flowers or a simple bow: I know that often the lining of a linen skirt is at least as attractive as that of a silk skirt; but I prefer the silk. Also, in my reveries, I have endowed myself with many a queen as my mistress, many an empress, princess, sultana, many a famous courtesan, but never a bourgeois woman or a shepherdess; and, in my most wayward thoughts, I have never abused a woman on a carpet of grass, or a bed of serge d’Aumale (from which military coats were made). I think beauty a diamond that should be mounted and set in gold. I cannot imagine a beautiful woman without a carriage, horses, footmen, and everything else one possesses with a hundred thousand francs a year: there is harmony between beauty and wealth. The one demands the other: does not a pretty foot call for a pretty shoe? A pretty shoe calls for carpets and a carriage, and what follows. A beautiful woman ill-dressed and in an ugly house is, in my opinion, the most painful sight one can see, and I could bear her no love. Only the rich and beautiful can be in love without seeming ridiculous or rousing pity. For that reason, few have the right to be in love. I myself, first and foremost, would be excluded, nonetheless, that is my opinion.
Madame Moitessier (1851)
Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres (French, 1780 - 1867)
Artvee
It will be evening when we meet for the first time, in front of a lovely sunset. The sky will possess those orange, pale-yellow, and light-green tones that one sees in paintings by the old masters: there will be a great avenue of chestnut trees in bloom, and ancient elms their branches full of doves, beautiful trees of a fresh, dark green, their moist shade full of mystery; a few statues and marble vases here and there, their snowy whiteness highlighted against the verdant background; a pond over which the usual swan sails; and in the distance a castle in brick and stone, as in the time of Henri IV, with a pointed slate roof, tall chimneys, weather vanes on all the gables, and tall narrow windows. At one of these windows, leaning, in melancholy mood, on the balcony, the queen of my soul in the attire I described just now; behind her an African servant holding her fan, her parakeet on his arm. Nothing is missing, as you see, and all perfectly absurd. The beautiful woman drops her glove; I pick it up, kiss it, and return it to her. The conversation begins; I reveal all the wit I lack; I say charming things; she responds, I reply, with a luminous shower, a firework display, of dazzling words. In short, I am adorable, and adored. Supper time arrives, I am invited; I accept. What a supper, my dear friend, and what a chef my imagination! Wine sparkles in the glasses, a blond and golden pheasant steams in a dish with a coat of arms: the feast is prolonged well into the night, and you may imagine that it is not at my house that it ends. Is that not something worth dreaming of? Nothing in the world seems simpler and, in truth, it is surprising it has not occurred a dozen times, rather than being dreamed of but once.
Henry VI and Sully before the Château Royal de Fontainebleau (1818)
Alexandre Louis Robert Millin du Perreux (French, 1764-1843)
Artvee
Sometimes, I am in a vast forest. The hunt is here; the horn sounds, the hounds bark and course the path with the speed of lightning; the beautiful woman, riding side-saddle, is mounted on a Turkish horse, one as white as milk, and as frisky and lively as can be. Though she is an excellent rider, he paws the ground, prances, and rears, and she fins it more than troublesome to restrain him; he grips the bit in his teeth, and bears her straight towards a precipice. I swoop from the heavens, on purpose, I restrain the horse, I take the fainting princess in my arms, I restore her to her senses and escort her back to her castle. What well-born woman would refuse her heart to a man who has risked his life for her? None; and gratitude is a by-way that swiftly leads to love.
You will at least agree that when I indulge in romance, it is not half-heartedly, and that I act as madly as anyone can. I am ever the same, for nothing in the world is darker than madness which acts with reason. You must also agree that when I write letters, they are volumes rather than mere notes. In all things, I prefer what exceeds the usual limits. That is why I love you. Refrain from making fun of all the nonsense I scribble: I am quitting the pen to set my ideas in action; for I forever return to my refrain: I desire a mistress. I know not if it will be the lady in the park, or the beauty on the balcony, but I bid you farewell as I set forth in search of her. My resolution is made. Even if she I seek is concealed in the depths of Cathay, or at Samarkand, I will know how to discover her. I shall let you know of the success of my enterprise, or of its failure. I hope to see it successful: wish me luck, my dear friend. As for myself, I shall dress in my finest clothes, and leave my house determined to return only with a mistress who accords with my ideas. I have dreamt enough. Now, I must act.
The End of Part I of Gautier’s ‘Mademoiselle de Maupin’