Zangwill
Our Fatherland
Charles Péguy
Notre Patrie
It was a revelation, and I shall not write, this time, the cahier I had set aside for myself, the one I had promised myself to write covering the four years of this legislature; it will be for another time, and, as usual, that other time will doubtless never come; a cahier of synthesis and retrospection, a cahier of summary, a little summary of contemporary history for the use of patient dauphins, in which I had proposed to assemble, to organize, to recall to myself, in a certain order, several studies that seemed to me indispensable to pursue, or to begin, for the opening of this seventh series, studies bearing themselves, as is proper, on the political and social movement since the beginning of this Chamber, and particularly, as one might expect, since the beginning of Combism.
I expected it myself, like everyone else. One must expect what one’s trade demands, and the obligations of one’s trade, the periodic obligations. No trades imply periodic obligations—the word itself says so—quite like the manufacture of periodicals. One must expect it. One gets used to it. One manages through crop rotations, and one comes quite well, like modern farmland, to do without fallow periods.
Against my will, through the ministry of these cahiers, I have nonetheless become somewhat of a journalist; that is to say, a man who follows events: I do not deny it; I should feel neither shame nor remorse about it; a fortnightly journalist, if one may say so, I shall not disown the trade I practice; a monthly or half-yearly journalist, a journalist nonetheless, my misery is the common misery: I must follow events, an excellent exercise for finishing the work of convincing oneself that truly events do not follow us.
They doubtless have other things to do; better or worse; journalist, fortnightly or half-yearly, I could not let this legislature fall away and the next elections prepare themselves without attempting to cast backward an historian’s glance upon the events of these last four years; a rather large number of these events seemed to me important, serious; as they occurred they had seemed important to me; I was not entirely sure they would seem so to me still today; but, in our wretched trade, we must pretend to believe it; of themselves they organized themselves, arranged themselves in tiers, sketched out the plan of the cahier I had to write; truly this cahier was already made, like those cahiers that certain authors bring me; there was nothing left but to write it; that is to say, there was nothing left but to make it; the resignation of Waldeckism and the beginning of Combism; how Combism claimed to be the direct lineage of Waldeckism; sincerely perhaps, at least for certain men, and for certain circumstances, and for a certain part, and for certain ideas; deceitfully certainly, for almost all the persons, in almost all the circumstances, for the greater part, and for almost all the ideas; to measure, to gauge the legitimacy of this claim; how yes, Combism was in a certain sense the lineage of Waldeckism; how it was not the direct lineage, but a bastard lineage; how it was bound to become, how it rather quickly became the very negation of it; how, in fact and in possession, it became the master of the inheritance, legitimate heir in a certain sense, supposed heir for the greater part, usurper, more unworthy day by day; how this lineage, real, claimed, slipped away day by day as Combism advanced toward the domination of the Republic; the Combist domination; whether the establishment of Combist domination was not essentially an establishment of Jaurèsist domination; the Combist domination; whether the exercise and maintenance of Combist domination was not essentially the exercise and maintenance of Jaurèsist domination; entirely so during almost the whole time; barely lightened toward the end, with unexpected returns all the more frenzied, all the more insane, because everyone, and those concerned almost as much as anyone, felt imminent the ruin of the system; and that this ruin, once acquired, once obtained, would remain definitive; that one would not return to it; how and by how much this form of Caesarism was more dangerous than all the previous forms; how and by how much this form not yet tested, precisely because it had not yet been tested, was profoundly more dangerous than all the forms hitherto known and classified; how it manifested itself; how it was organized; how it acted; by what procedures; or even by what methods; how it culminated and descended again in rays; in what way it resembled the known forms; in what way it was new; that the government of the Republic and the true, old, traditional and religious republicans, I mean the men who had this true religion of the Republic, by dint of having their eyes fixed on the old realities, on the recent threats, on the present intentions, on the new appearances of military Caesarism, by dint of being frightened by it, terrified, fascinated, were bound infallibly to fall, and quite innocently, into the realities of civil Caesarism; which is the more dangerous, military Caesarism or civil Caesarism; that it is perhaps civil Caesarism; precisely because until now one has been much less wary of it; of the moral innocence of the old republicans; and also of their mental innocence, which we commonly call ignorance; that through fear and fascination with military Caesarism this ignorance was bound infallibly to fall into civil Caesarism; that through fear and fascination with Caesarism in epaulettes, it was bound infallibly to fall into Caesarism in a jacket; that it is today demonstrated that a man can with impunity exercise a pitiless Caesarism in the Republic, provided he is not handsome, that he is not military, that he wears poorly even civilian dress, above all that he does not know how to ride a horse; finally, that one can call him “the little father So-and-so”; that if need be, if he were popularly ugly, it would be all the better; of the capital importance of the designation “little father” in our contemporary history; and in the organization of demagoguery; that the popularity of the “little father” type is the most essential of all for an ambitious man; that it is therefore also the most dangerous for the reality of the Republic; thus, that the very characteristics which were so to speak required and constitutional for the old classical Caesarian ambitions, have on the contrary become, for the modern contemporary Caesarist ambitions, the most automatic causes of impediment; that M. Berteaux did the greatest harm to his candidacy for the presidency of the Republic by mounting a horse, with boots, even civilian ones, at the last great military maneuvers this September; that one of his friends ought to tell him; that one must not know how to ride a horse, dress well, even in a frock coat, have spurs, cut a fine figure; above all, one must absolutely not recall Félix-Faure; that everything is permitted on the contrary, and that everything is promised to any little fellow, little father, little popular man; suitably supported by a whole network of political ward committees; how the law on the congregations was applied, an inheritance from the government that had preceded; how it was applied disloyally, despite the great protest, stifled in a deliberate silence, of the great Bernard-Lazare; that it was applied quite otherwise than it had been voted, by a forcing of the text; that consequently its application was an operation of public disloyalty; not only that this application was an act of public disloyalty, but that it was a new application of the principle of raison d’État; that raison d’État, which had triumphed in the corruption of Dreyfusism, was never so powerful as in the triumph of Combism; the abdication, the great abdication of M. Waldeck-Rousseau; the grandeur and unique sadness of this departure, which seemed from the very beginning an eternal departure; how, in his very retreat, and in the preparation of his death, he tried, a second, and a last time, to save the Republic; of the resistance that little by little recognized itself among the true republicans; of this resistance that organized itself; what admirable efforts, quickly repressed by illness and by the advances of death, M. Waldeck-Rousseau imposed upon himself to give, with one last turn of the helm, the right direction; and the shameful reception he received; from men who owed him everything; who without him would have been nothing, condemned to or condemned by the nationalist reactionary demagoguery; in what spirit the separation of Church and State was prepared; but in what spirit it was to be carried out; conceived in a Combist spirit; but carried out in a spirit much more republican; that the law currently being voted on the Separation of Church and State appears to be the continuation of the law on the Congregations; but that what is happening to the law on the Separation is the contrary of what happened to the law on the Congregations; that the law on the Congregations, prepared, made, and voted Waldeckist, was executed, applied in a Combist manner; and that the law bearing on the separation of Church and State on the contrary, prepared in a Combist manner, was amended juridically, will be voted rather juridically, that is to say, in a certain sense, somewhat Waldeckist; what was the Government’s policy toward the Holy See; and what had been the Holy See’s policy toward the French government; how the anticlericals conducted themselves; how the anti-Catholics conducted themselves; how the clericals conducted themselves; how the Catholics did not conduct themselves; how the liberals, the libertarians, the men and citizens of liberty, began to recover themselves, and how they finally conducted themselves; how the great death of Waldeck-Rousseau was finally learned of; how this death, this slow death, was immediately judged an absolutely irreparable misfortune; how the law on workers’ pensions was postponed; how the law establishing an income tax was further postponed; why; whether it is true that General André, Minister of War, forgotten today, disorganized the army, which was still rather organized; in what sense and how; whether it is true that M. Camille Pelletan, today a journalist, then Minister of the Navy, finished disorganizing a naval force that was scarcely an organized force anymore; in what sense and how; whether there was not, in the same sense, a disorganization of France itself; that there was assuredly a disorganization, a decomposition, and a corruption of the old Dreyfusism; assuredly a disorganization, a decomposition, and a corruption of the old socialism; that Dreyfusism, becoming governmental, political, parliamentary, ceased to be a true Dreyfusism; that socialism, becoming governmental, political, parliamentary, became statism and ceased to be a true socialism; how the revolutionary spirit was attacked at its deepest sources; how the French revolutionary tradition was injured in its oldest resources; how a universal Jaurèsism for nearly four years raged: for it is not enough to say that it reigned; that is to say, a political and social opportunism without the grandeur and without the competence of the old opportunists; how anarchism itself did not remain unscathed; having received many blows, having admitted many political and literary contaminations; how a popular and jesting little fellow can become a great tyrant without anyone noticing; how the popularity of Caesarism makes the most dangerous outcome of democracies; how easy it is to establish an autocracy in France, provided certain forms are respected, even while respecting no reality, no liberty; how the Republic, by dint of guarding itself against the invasions of external Caesarisms, in a manner so to speak professional, was condemned not to see rising the intravasions of the far more dangerous internal Caesarism; but how there still remained a few free citizens; how denunciation, which had always existed in the practice of governments and parties, was organized into official theory, governmental, political, parliamentary, and supposedly republican; thus how Freemasonry, which in heroic times had rendered so many true services to the Republic, to liberty, to free thought, at one stroke, having betrayed liberty, free thought, nearly made the Republic lose all the advantage it had formerly contributed to helping it obtain; and to free thought all the advantages it had formerly contributed to helping free thought obtain; how from the very beginning of this ministry, favor, the privilege of favor, political favor, governmental favor, which had always existed in the practice of governments and parties, in political mores, was scandalously erected into official theory, governmental, political, parliamentary, and supposedly republican; how a League instituted for the defense of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen itself became, despite courageous resistances, rather numerous, a parliamentary political organism; how it somewhat neglected the old rights of the old men, and the old rights of the old citizens; how all these old rights became the least of its concerns, far from having remained the eldest of its principles; how this great League, instituted by serious authors, by just men, by Fathers of the Republic for nobler destinies, despite courageous resistances came to miss no opportunity for demagoguery; how it did political work in the accomplishment of an unofficial Combism, a second Combism doubling, redoubling the official Combism; an annex to the official Combism; how it intervened in the execution of the anti-congregationalist law; how it did not intervene as it should have in the separation of Church and State; how it made itself, despite courageous resistances, the promoter of denunciation; how finally Combism suddenly collapsed; at least in appearance, for, after all, the collapse was not sudden; under what apparent and real pressures; under what real non-apparent pressures; that there were in the downfall of Combism, besides a growing general disgust, besides a kind of impossibility of continuing almost officially noted in proper parliamentary language, political causes, perhaps peculiar, and a little mysterious; good and bad ones, as always; perhaps, this time, and by exception, as many good as bad; that there had always been during the Combist domination antagonism between the presidency of the council and the presidency of the Republic; but that this antagonism, begun as a muted struggle, continued as a political campaign, finally pursued as an almost open and sentimental battle, does not explain everything; that these kinds of external campaigns doubtless never explain everything in a collapse, in such a collapse; how the collapse of the Combist domination was perhaps above all an internal collapse, in which the principal complicity was doubtless the complicity of the government that was disappearing; of certain members at least of this government; not so much perhaps of that very important and united group of members of the government who within the ministry formed from the beginning a permanent counter-government, perfectly constituted, in opposition to the president of the council, but on the contrary of the president of the council himself and of the few members of his cabinet who accompanied his fortune; a meager company, despite certain appearances of strength and domination; how perhaps, at bottom, the cunning fellow was not displeased to disappear at that moment; how his departure was singular, precipitate, apparently voluntary, doubtless voluntary in another sense and more automatic, more willed than has generally been thought; than he himself showed; or let be seen; that the cunning little popular man felt the difficulties approaching, the impossibilities coming; that being after all head of the government he had reasons, unknown to us, to feel this storm rising that we have known since; and that he must finally have noticed that questions were arising that would be harder to resolve than simply annoying the priests; here, for the path must not be too direct either, here I would have made a return to the theory of governmental favors; I would have shown how the practice of governmental favors belonged to all governments and all parties; but how, in the order of public or private scandal, there is an abyss between practice and theory; how the official theorization of an old governmental procedure had deranged consciences unaccustomed to it; unaccustomed to resolving cases of conscience elsewhere than in manuals of morality or literature; here one had an admirably real case; with all the demands of the real, all the inconveniences, all the malversations, this perpetual refusal to fit into our preliminary frameworks; how, M. Combes having fallen, M. Rouvier remained the only possible president of the council; whether M. Rouvier had not already been the only possible Minister of Finance indicated for the formation of the preceding cabinet; whether in the formation of this preceding cabinet the unanimous designation of M. Rouvier for the Ministry of Finance had not truly had a capital, primordial importance; whether in this formation the unanimous attribution of the finance portfolio to M. Rouvier had not had much more importance, and above all much more real importance, than the attribution, half spontaneous, half calculated, half neglected, of the Interior portfolio and the presidency of the council to a senator, former minister of public instruction, vague, of poor memory, M. Justin-Louis-Émile Combes; I would have examined, more generally, and more lastingly, whether M. Rouvier’s financial policy had not commanded the whole government of the Republic since the very formation of the Combes ministry, whether it had not been, for a long time, the only brake, whether, for a long time, it alone had not constituted the lower limit of Combism; whether, more generally still, and more lastingly, all our politics had not been commanded, for several years already, by the greatest financial difficulties, by the most serious budgetary threats; made worse still by so many promises of so many costly reforms; democratic virtues overburdening financial vices, and democratic vices overburdening financial virtues, in such a way that in the final analysis virtues and vices, democracy and finance, everything falls back in weight on the taxpayer’s back; whence I would have returned to the internal dissensions of the cabinet so singularly constituted by M. Combes, and so singularly commanded; so rebellious, so ill-obeying, so badly in hand, so disobedient, and, at the same time, so obedient; I would have examined particularly the systematic opposition of M. Rouvier to Combism; finally passing to the ministry of M. Rouvier, somewhat fatigued, I would have marked the relaxation, the loosening, perhaps somewhat deceptive, that followed the departure of M. Combes; I would have rested in it like everyone else, wrongly, perhaps; wrongly doubtless, for a storm was rising that none of us saw coming; and during the year that remained to us before the end of the legislature I would have like everyone else made my separation of Church and State; I would have like everyone else noted that this separation had been made, at least in the Chamber, more or less honestly; that is to say that it had in no way been made as M. Combes had imagined it, and as he had taken care to announce it himself, that it had not been an exercise in persecution, an essay in persecution, in suppression of the Church by the State, an essay in oppression, in anti-Catholic domination, supposedly anticlerical, but that it had revealed a sincere effort at mutual liberation, that one had seen there what parliamentarians had almost unaccustomed us to seeing: work, parliamentary work; that it had resulted in a first serious program of organized mutual liberty; in a word that it had not been Combist, but much more republican.
After the separation what was there to do but, like everyone in the political parliamentary world, go on holiday; thus in the torpor that officially important events never fail to provoke, and during what we pleasantly call the leisures of vacation, I would have patiently written my cahier of recapitulation; I would have enumerated the events; I would have counted, measured in all tranquility the events present; I would have invoked the events absent; in an imperious voice, which is the proper voice of the historian; and when I did not find myself in agreement with the events, I would have declared, in that voice, that it was the events that were wrong; the docile events, present, absent, all equally serious, all equally important, all equally organized, all equally explained, would have formed one or several Indian files that I would have unrolled, rolled up again skillfully; of all these secular events, I would have made rosaries; beforehand I would have lined them up; at length, as was done in the old military army; event number three, step forward; event number twenty-five, step back, you’re sticking out too far; I would have fattened the lean events, slimmed down the facts too fat; through such individual observations one formerly obtained the fine alignments; through such straightenings I would have regularized the facts; and my facts being all put back on the same plane, as is proper, none exceeding the other, none exceeding its neighbor on the left or its neighbor on the right, enumerated in this perfectly democratic equality, we too would have formed chains, and the rosaries of events would have formed the chain of my discourse, and I was at peace, and I was becoming a serious historian, and my old comrade Ischarioth—I put two h’s so that his name may be more a scholarly name—my old comrade Ischarioth no longer said amiably to me that I, at least, was in the habit of speaking of subjects of which I did not know the first word.
It was a seizure; I would have written my cahier quite peacefully by my fireside, at least on the work side; we would all have done our trades quite peacefully; especially those who have none, and who are the most serene of men; and there would even have been nothing to do but write it, this cahier; to write is nothing, all our young people know it; it was made in advance; there was nothing to do but draft it; a holiday assignment, in short; naturally, and like any good Frenchman, I would have known nothing at all of foreign policy; but I would have spoken of it a little, out of international politeness; and because a good historian must leave untreated no part of the subject that his school masters or his masters the events have given him to treat; to maltreat is a hundred times better than not to treat at all: such is the great modern principle of international work.
It was a start; for a whole week, or almost, in short for a certain number of days that seemed to make more than a week, but that made a whole, an ensemble like a week, Paris, capital of the world, had received the King of Spain; an event at once glorious, solemn, and unnoticed; a king: under the Republic, we have seen so many of them, kings; a singular week, a habitual event, half-rejoicing, half-festivity, half fine weather, half work; without interrupting anything, because the year was not over, because there had been much work, and there was still much in progress, all the same one went to see the king pass by a little, just to have a look at him, as one of our good collaborators had said; half fine weather, half gray weather, half sunny weather; year half elapsed; work half fallen; half rest time, half work time, half leisure time, half sleep time; time of puns and rhymes, which are puns that have arrived; not at all a time of serious prose, of honest and serious prose, of ordered prose; not the end of a year, a completed end, a finished end, noted, correct, official, but an ending, a slow secret ending of a year that was not yet quite finished and yet was hollowing out from within; of a year that might still bring us what surprises, still, and what sorrows; work, sleep, and leisure, the three eights together and no longer end to end; no longer juxtaposed, jointed, but fused, functioning simultaneously, for the greatest confusion of the very mind and of images, for the greatest rest and maximum relaxation; fused like that fused weather of vapor and sun; of half-sun together; or finally one arranged, as if by chance, to find oneself on the path of certain itineraries that one knew vaguely to be the itineraries of the processions, and that some pretended not to know, but they found themselves there all the same, and that the newspapers gave every morning; one never read the newspapers; but one knew the itineraries all the same, one doesn’t know how; and then the king seemed to do it on purpose, that morning, not to leave the neighborhood; it was his fault; his; and not ours, who are neither royalists nor idlers; he never went away; the Panthéon, Notre-Dame, the Hôtel-de-Ville, circuits to occupy a whole morning, slownesses, stops, attentions, restraints, stages that would certainly not end by the stroke of noon, all the houses of ceremonies; the squares, the forecourts, the bridges; exhausted from an enormous series, which was the sixth, barely emerged from the Gobineau, which was considerable among all, my head heavy with worries, deranged by vexations, it was amusing to take the arm of a true friend—we know some of each other—and to go for a quarter of an hour to mingle as idlers with the old and good people of Paris; the quarter of an hour became half an hour, three quarters of an hour; infallibly one met some friend, who slyly was doing the same, and who without further ado reproached you for being a dreadful militarist.
Houses, old houses of ceremonies; houses of the ancient ceremonies and at the same time the same perpetual houses of the young ceremonies; houses of the ancients; houses of the glorious dead; imperishable monuments, which will fatally perish; the four cardinal points of the glory of Paris; and through this perpetual capital representation of Paris, through this eternally eminent representation, at the same time and inseparably the four cardinal points of all the glory of all France; memory of cut stone; living memory nonetheless, perfectly living, more living than so many men who today walk along the modern roads; French monumental memory; monarchical monuments and inseparably profoundly popular monuments; ancient monuments and perpetually new; monarchical monuments and perpetually democratic, and today properly republican, and tomorrow whatever one wishes, provided that they are, and in all the days to come whatever will be necessary, because they are, monuments that will be all days, until the day of their death, and that will not perish, like so many precarious modern monuments, long before the day of their natural death; monuments eternally monuments; always full of an eternal interior meaning, eternally manifested by the value of the stone, eternally drawn by the exterior eternity of the line; monarchical monuments, royal monuments, religious monuments, monuments of the old regime and of every new regime, imperial monument, everywhere and always not only popular monuments, but monuments that are themselves people; the four great Terminus gods of the glory of Paris; the Arc de Triomphe—a little more familiarly the Étoile for the drivers of the Thomson buses, a French company—the most considerable monument ever constructed in this genre, says the little Larousse, the Arc de Triomphe de l’Étoile, this perfect monument of French imperial glory; built under Louis-Philippe, approximately, or under the Restoration, older nevertheless than the Roman world; the Invalides, this pure masterpiece, this perfect monument of old royal France; the Panthéon, much more republican, having been built under Louis XV, the dynastic republican Panthéon, the deconsecrated Panthéon, which had never, by its very plans, been seriously consecrated, the Panthéon, which it is very elegant to mock, but which it would be better to learn to look at a little as this monument demands. Notre-Dame, finally, whose name says everything. New monuments.
[To know to what degree the Invalides is a perfectly perfect monument, one must look at it, for example, from the windows of the salon of the apartment situated on the fifth floor of number 2 avenue de Villars.]
It is true that one was watching the soldiers pass; since the Dreyfusist parliamentary political General Staff has done everything to reconcile us with the military General Staff, we have refused to reconcile ourselves with the military General Staff, but time has passed, we have become cowards, and we no longer believe ourselves obliged to look at simple second-class privates with a tragic gaze; half consenting we had gone to see the soldiers pass; the Republic excels at organizing for the pleasure of our eyes and for the satisfaction of our loyalism these great sun-drenched parades; so we were walking arm in arm, our heads heavy, our eyes occupied, our minds amused, our hearts half participating; his comrade was doing the same thing as he; and that could last a long time.
Singular people of Paris, people of kings, king-people; the only people of whom one can say that they are the king-people without cutting a shameful literary figure; profoundly and truly people, just as profoundly, just as truly king; in the same sense, in the same attitude and the same gesture people and king; of the same spirit people and king; people who receive kings between two times, between two works, between two pleasures, without preparation, without constraint, without impropriety and without any coarseness; people at once familiar and respectful, as true intimates are; people truly the only ones who without preparation know how to give kings an ancient and royal reception; truly the only ones who have made revolutions and who have remained not only traditional, but traditionalist to that degree; the only ones who are traditionalist in full consent of their good will; the only ones who are at ease and who know how to hold themselves and present themselves in history, having a long habit of it, having an inveterate habit of this form and this level of existence, and who are not insolent in it, improper, coarse, upstarts; the only people who do not slip on the waxed floors of glory; the only people who are revolutionary, and when events present themselves, that introduce kings to them, not only do they know how to receive them, but they find they have at hand, to receive them there, royal monuments such as no king in the world in any country in the world could produce in the same time, will ever be able to produce in any time from his country.
Nothing is as good for rest as these apparently fatiguing walks in the midst of the people of Paris; the mind is occupied just enough for rest to enter it and reign there, sovereign itself, without any contestation; complete vacancy would be tiring, at such moments; but this half-full half-empty is the most restful thing there is; and there is in this people, spoiled as it is by half a century of demagoguery, so much courage, so much good humor, so much endurance, so much joy; having gone out to see the king, one was watching the people, the old and already named king-people; it was above all he, the people, who was passing and parading, whom one was watching pass and parade, who was himself watching himself pass and parade; in this time of excessive mutuality, the mutual parade in the simple street, the mutual spectacle make an application of mutuality, the oldest and most lasting of applications; and it is a popular theater that buries all the laborious People’s Theaters of our bookish ones; at bottom it was all one; the people, the king; the king, the people; it was all one because it was all one same spectacle, and, together, in a sense, all one same spectator; and even this old king-people was more royal, more king, more accustomed to its trade than this young heir of a relatively young dynasty; the year had been heavy, painful, unhappy for everyone; I myself bore on the nape of my neck all the heaviness of this enormous sixth series; of which they have not finished hearing me say that it was enormous; I had eyes drowned from having read so many proofs; the enormous cahier on the Separation, whatever enormous work, and whatever devotion the author had himself brought to it, I mean work of fabrication, not counting the other, naturally, had left me stupefied, so it seemed to me, for the rest of my days; but what fatigue could resist the company of all this amused, valiant people, courageous with that courage which consists in perpetually beginning again every morning. The old three eights finally realized.
The only people who appear worthily as a king in the ancient monuments of its great ceremonies.
We too shall perpetually begin again every morning; all the mornings of all the swift days; and all the returns to work, which are the darkened mornings of the longer years; singular play of climates, antithetical distribution of dates, which makes the mornings of short days rise upon the growing day, upon the dawns and upon the growing auroras, and that the returns to work, on the contrary, which are nevertheless the mornings of years, false mornings, false mornings of false days, on the contrary rise upon the diminishings, upon the rains, upon the darkenings of autumns.
How not to imitate this people, of which we are, which we are; that is to say how not to imitate ourselves, how not to be of our own race; how not to prepare ourselves to perpetually begin again tomorrow morning; let us begin then by mingling with the amusements of our people, since after all these amusements are the secret of its strength, giving it the times of halt and the points of springing back; indispensable; let us watch the people pass who watch the king pass; ourselves let us watch the king pass; here is the procession; hubbub, murmurs, and almost immediately the impression that the whole procession has this in common, that it moves at the same extended trot, perfectly cadenced, like a very large mechanical toy; carriages that one senses; as much and more than one sees them; at the heart of the procession, one sees nothing anymore: it is the king, and the President of the Republic; here two moving hedges, on both sides, like two large flocks almost merging into one enormous moving flock; enormous rumps of horses; there are no longer anything but these rumps of horses parading and passing; one does not see the cuirassiers who ride these horses, because they are higher than the gaze; they were giant men on colossal horses; one was in the first row; it is over; but the general and dominant impression that alone remains is of an immense automatic rhythm, of an extended trot, easy, well articulated, lifted nevertheless, common to the whole procession, that lifted the whole procession along the ground and made it already passed; this common movement, this primary rhythm commanded the whole spectacle; all these people who paraded for our amusements and who formed a procession left in the memory only the memory of the common rhythm of this whole procession; in the memory carriages, president, king, whom one had not seen, prefect of police, whom one had seen at the head, horses, soldiers were soon no longer anything but apparatuses, half-phantoms rolling and marching at the same pace, at this singular trot, flowing, lifting, solemn and hurried.
Must I confess that there were many people in the streets? I must. Our democrat hearts will bleed for it, but I must. There were many people who passed in the streets, went and came, looked, let themselves be and had themselves looked at. I must say it: There were many more people pressing in the streets that day than we see rushing to the evening sessions of our useful People’s Universities. Singular people, who do not rush to the learned lessons of our scholarly People’s Universities, and who press to ceremonies more or less popular, truly, rather less than more, of contestable popularity, to royal festivals, to presidential processions; which nevertheless are not officially called popular. Ungrateful people. Singular people. Antithetical people. When one makes for them nice little People’s Universities very well-behaved, very tidy, wisely scientific, wisely boring, wisely anarchist if need be, and, if necessary, revolutionary, in the homely style, and, at the extreme limit, doctorally undoctored, one cannot say, between us, that they rush to them. There are no accidents because people are crushing at the doors. And on the contrary, do three horses merely pass in the street, than immediately there they are, already out, on their doorstep. As if three miserable horses, passing by, stamping their feet, the fools, formed a more interesting spectacle than that which so many honorable professors give us for free, who speak, seated, behind a little green-topped desk, some standing, some even walking and gesticulating on the platform with their long thin arms, their cuffs, and their false collars. A somewhat refined mind, such as ours, refuses even to conceive the thought of establishing, between three horses, passing by, and so many learned doctors, teaching, so coarse a comparison.
Antithetical people, already ready for Hugo.
Nothing is so propitious for work as these apparently frivolous amusements; at least from time to time; nothing chases away so rapidly, at least for a time, the worries, the vexations, the laborious fatigues, all these annoyances, all these sorrows, all these miseries of which are woven the threads of our ordinary lives; truly the memory of this rhythm alone remained in the memory; known humanity was divided in two; and in each of the two parts reigned a perfect equality; a standing humanity watched pass, perfectly equal among itself, being all immobile in conformity with the same vertical; a passing humanity let itself be watched passing, perfectly equal also, equal among itself, all equalized among itself, being all mobile in conformity with the same horizontal rhythm, all rolling and passing with one same sacred rhythm; the king was no longer a king, nor the soldiers soldiers, but together they were mobiles, as our mechanicians say, mobiles in movement, together they formed an indivisible procession, as the people formed an indivisible people of spectators; and the procession paraded for the pleasure and for the honor of the people, as the people watched for the accompaniment and for the honor of the procession; and as the most severe vertical equality reigned in the standing people, so the most exact and most convenient equality of movement reigned in the passing procession; the king was worth a soldier, a soldier was worth the king, since they were magnitudes passing at the same trot.
Ungrateful people, as Racine says. And truly singular people. Who having such spectacles, rushes to them. And who in the evening does not rush to lessons that are nevertheless made expressly for them. When one thinks that this people, every evening, from nine to eleven or from ten to twelve, after an exhausting day of work, could go into often well-lit rooms to be bored on benches like normaliens at lectures; listen to the latest verses of our little poets, the extreme hypotheses of our latest scientists; and they prefer to play hooky during the day to go in fine weather to see military horses parade.
[End of second batch - to be continued]
Truly. Nothing is so propitious for work as these apparently idle walks; decidedly I saw very well how I would write my cahier; the great abdication of Waldeck-Rousseau, announcement and presage and anticipated imitation of his great death, political death before natural death, death of his position before death of the body, death of the statesman before death of the man, gave me an excellent departure; to which I saw the means of making an equally excellent continuation; I had found how I would obtain an excellent continuity; without breaking at all the regular chain, without making some part stick out unevenly, I would insist all the same a little on this nonetheless:—and this would furnish me the unity of my cahier; for our masters ask us at once to have no idea, but to have a master idea, which makes the unity;—I would examine whether for several years political politics had not been covering up, masking a whole financial politics, and I would ask myself whether this financial politics did not present the most serious difficulties, the gravest dangers; Paris truly is unique for ceremonies of this kind; and how curiously all these royal pomps of republican manifestations recalled Hugo; through them how one obtained the true resonance and the true depth and the true unity of Hugo, his true inspiration; an inspiration, a taste, a sense, an idea of pomp, exterior, and of traditional ceremony; thereby were joined and still join in him, as they join in the programs of festivals, Notre-Dame and that Panthéon, of which he never spoke ill except out of coquetry, because from then on he had the secret certainty that, dead, he would be buried there; a ceremonial and ceremonious Hugo, the true Hugo at last; forgotten today, because he was a democrat toward the end of his days; but, in democracy itself, a senator and processional; manifestant of manifestations and manifestant of ceremonies; like the people, with the people, in the people, a Hugo who would go out of his way to watch horses pass, even if they were military, preferably military, and, upon these military horses, military men, with boots, and red trousers, and white gloves reaching to the shoulders, and dark tunics with dazzling red lapels, and metal helmets; like that immense helmet of bronze and gold that the Dome of the Invalides makes; a pacifist Hugo no doubt, like the people, in the people, but, like the people, pacifist of the great army; an old popular military Hugo; a Hugo of parades and processions…
When the regiment of halberdiers passes,…
another Hugo than the one our good masters have labored to represent to us, a new and an ancient Hugo, eminently and anciently Parisian, the very unity of the history of Paris, a whole other Hugo; a whole Hugo of processions, of pomps and pageantry, of ceremonies at Notre-Dame, even with these gentlemen of the clergy, commanded when needed, commanded preferably by His Eminence Monsignor the Cardinal-Archbishop of Paris, of parades passing over the bridges of the Seine, ecclesiastical, secular, military, civil, over the bridges of the Seine themselves framed quadrilaterally by the straight and perfect lines of the empty quays, empty today and reserved as they were empty and reserved for the festivals, for the parades of the last century, the Hugo of old memories and ancient ceremonies, who asked only to become the God of new ceremonies, half royalist, half imperialist, half legitimist half Orléanist, half popular half chamberlain, entirely poet, a Louis-Philippe Hugo and English alliance, finally the Hugo of the return of the ashes; what does it matter, provided there are alignments and there are masses; and that he could always remain faithful to his God, to his king, I mean to Hugo himself; and how easily Paris, on the forecourt and on the quays, on the bridges, found itself again the old Paris; how it found itself again, faithful to memories; same crowd, same ceremonies, same monuments; being the same people; same old Panthéon, same ancient Notre-Dame; same Seine, above all, and same quays, even if they were not the same; and even if there had not been any before; same bridges, even if they had been rebuilt since; and even if before they had not existed at all; same forecourt, even if it had been opened, created, raised, even if one day the feet of Notre-Dame had been buried under this horizontal equality of flat earth; and what joy, suddenly, joy of feeling and of intelligence, of memory and of history, together and inseparably of the spirit and the senses, and rapture of surprise of the historian soul, to understand suddenly, to seize, to seize again, to see, to know, to know again, abruptly, with a single glance,—and is it not rather with an interior glance,—to find suddenly in oneself and to understand at last a whole forgotten poet, a whole period one believed abolished, a whole city, a whole past of a whole city; and what city, Paris, city of stone, people of monuments, people of memories, people of ancient actions, Paris, capital of the world, capital city, a whole age one believed past.
To Paris, capital of peoples, as this Hugo says in his dedication of l’Année terrible.
Himself a singular Hugo, king of popular royal festivals, prince of processions, duke of great funerals, introducer of ambassadors, and grand organizer of national funerals, beginning with his own, friend of pomps, even funereal, friend of pomps, even republican, friend of orations, even funereal! which he excelled at giving in great sad verses, ordainer of sumptuous funerals; you would have seen him, weak folk who wear yourselves out trying to institute among us a new cult, you would have seen him, if he had lived: it is he who would have magnificently buried Zola for you; much less well than himself; but very well still, far below; it is not he who would have confused for you national funerals with official obsequies (Pierre Savorgnan de Brazza); dreaming thus, walking thus, strolling with the left foot, and watching as one could, what verses other than his, what verses other than Hugo’s verses could rise again in the memory; I defy you to see in passing forty republican guards on horseback ranged before the Panthéon on the Place du Panthéon, Rue Soufflot, in a semicircle, in a platoon, in a line, even if only to ensure the most banal of crowd-control services, without immediately Hugo’s verses rising imperiously from the depths to the surface of memory; at such moments, public moments, in these public solemnities, when a man is no longer himself, a man, a citizen, a conscience, a heart, but himself, he too a public man, at such moments what become of the greater poets, the more beloved, a Lamartine, even a Vigny, so great and perhaps unique in the world, even a Racine; only Corneille, perhaps, the greatest of all, only Corneille could have sustained the comparison, perhaps, if he had wished; but when he had Polyeucte in his belly, he would have had time to spare rather than amuse himself making military music; and when he no longer had Polyeucte in his belly, he had become quite incapable of making even military music.
Imperious Hugo; not verses that sing in the memory, but verses that imperiously, imperially sound, beat, resound, hammered, scanned, with such a rhythm and such a drum that they command the pace at which one marches, that they enter into the hamstrings, and that once they have entered the memory, read once, heard once, not only will they never leave the memory, never, but that when the moment comes, they will chase out, imperial brutes, unbearable regiments, all the other verses of all the other poets, and will force you to march in step, the same step, their step.
Not verses that sing in the memory, but verses that in the memory sound and resound like a fanfare, vibrant, quivering, sounding like a fanfare, sounding like a charge, eternal drum, and that will beat in French memories long after the regulation drums have ceased to beat at the front of the regiments.
Verses that sing, if you will, but like a marching song, brutal and rhythmed, not like a melody, verses that bellow, verses that declaim, verses that howl, like a road song, like a soldiers’ song; I will say more: like a song for soldiers, which is good, for an official pacifist; like a song of foot artillerymen, who at the first third of the march, make the hard ground of the road ring, scanning with their heavy boots an unfortunate refrain.
Singular Hugo. Singular like this people, in this people, that he eminently represents. Peer of France. Old fox. The glory of Notre-Dame, in his work, is not only, is not so much that poem and that novel, that poem in prose in the form of a novel of his half-youth, as the perpetual persistence, the eternal presence, in all his work, of these two towers standing, of the monument erect. In all his work, in his imagination, in his perpetual vision, in his very creation. In his perpetual vision of Paris, of his Paris always present. In all his work, to the end, to the last works, to that Châtiments, the most ardent of his works, the greatest perhaps and the strongest, perhaps the only sincere one, absolutely. For me the glory of Notre-Dame and the glory of Hugo is much less in that novel of half-youth in prose than in the eternal presence, apparent or implied, reappearing abruptly, in the abrupt reappearance in the unexpected profiling, in the sudden apparition of the two twin towers in poems like these, in works where they were not indicated, if they had not been eternally present; les Châtiments, book III, x, l’Empereur s’amuse, a song; the refrain of this song:
Ring today the knell, great bell of Notre-Dame, And tomorrow the tocsin!
O mourning! by a ferocious bandit The future lies stabbed to death! Today is the great wedding. The bridegroom mounts his carriage; It is he! Caesar the well-guarded! Peoples, sing the epithalamium! France weds the assassin.— Ring today the knell, great bell of Notre-Dame, And tomorrow the tocsin!
Jersey, December 1853.—What an admirable invention of rhythm; what rhythm of the great bell; and again this apparition of the bell towers in that night, same Châtiments, book I, v; and this sense and this vision of Paris, of all of ancient and new Paris, gathered, of all the history of Paris:
As all three came out of the Bancal house, Morny, Maupas the Greek, Saint-Arnaud the jackal. Seeing this oblique and taciturn group pass, The bell towers of Paris, ringing the nocturnal hour, Strove vainly to imitate the tocsin; The paving stones of July cried: Assassin! All the bloody specters of ancient carnages, Awakened, pointed at these personages; The Marseillaise, archangel of aerial songs, Murmured in the heavens: To arms, citizens!
Paris slept, alas! and soon, in the squares, On the quays, the soldiers, docile rabbles, Janissaries led by Reybell and Sauboul, Paid as in Byzantium, drunk as in Stamboul, Those of Dulac, and those of Korte and d’Espinasse, Cartridge box at hip and threat in eye, Came, regiment after regiment, And along the houses they passed slowly, With muffled steps, as one sees tigers in the jungles Who crawl on their bellies extending their claws; And the night was mournful, and Paris slumbered Like a sleeping eagle caught under a black net.
The chiefs awaited dawn smoking their cigars.
O cossacks! thieves! torturers! brigands! bulgars! O brigand generals! penal colony, I return them to you! The judges of old for lesser crimes Burned La Voisin and broke Desrues on the wheel! Lighting their infamous poster at street corners And the cowardly armament of these bold thieves, Day appeared. The night, accomplice of the bandits, Took flight, and, hastily trailing her veils, In the folds of her robe carried off the stars And the thousand suns sparkling in the shadow, Like the gold sequins carried off in leaving By a girl, accustomed to the kisses of crime, Who dresses again after having prostituted herself!
Brussels, January 1852.—When M. Fernand Gregh, Paris 1900, brings us verses like those that rose to memory at this beginning of June, I shall proclaim that he is, as we are made to say, the Hugo of this generation.
Still more present the great bell, and more resounding in the poems where it is not named, in the poems of rhythm, when it is the rhythm itself and the rhythm alone that rings today the knell, and tomorrow the tocsin; powerful and singular inventions of rhythms; houses of resonances, buildings of music, monuments of sounds, powerful and singular edifices, constructions he loved above all; same Châtiments; book II, ii; to the people:
Everywhere tears, sobs, funereal cries. Why do you sleep in the shadows? I do not want you to be dead. Why do you sleep in the shadows? This is not the moment when one sleeps. Pale Liberty lies bleeding at your door. You know it, you dead, she is dead. Here is the jackal on your threshold. Here are the rats and the weasels, Why have you let yourself be bound with bandages? They bite you in your coffin! Of all the peoples one prepares The cortège…— Lazarus! Lazarus! Lazarus! Rise!
What an exact reconstitution of bells, of the great bell, through rhythm, through rhyme, through assonances and consonances, through all the movement, through the whole stanza and the whole couplet; through the architecture, through the design of these very lines that are the verses. He himself knew it well, he the first, the great poet, the skillful man. And when he succeeded, that one, one can be assured that he himself, he the first, was ignorant of nothing of the how nor the why of his success. Let us pass over all these stanzas or all these couplets, all equally strong, all equally made, all equally beautiful. Let us end on the last, whose last words contain the confession:
But it seems one is waking! Is it you I have in my ear, Humming of the dark swarm? In the hive the bee stirs; I hear a vague tocsin welling up. The Caesars, forgetting there are Gemonies, Fall asleep in the symphonies, From the Baltic Sea to Mount Etna; The peoples are in black night; Sleep, kings; the bugle says to tyrants: Victory! And the organ sings to them: Hosanna! Who answers this fanfare? The belfry…— Lazarus! Lazarus! Lazarus! Rise!
Jersey, May 1853.—These last verses, these words tocsin, fanfare, belfry, are what I call the confession of the guilty, a precious confession of the craftsman; the mark and confession of the fabricator. It is indeed there he wanted to come, to the tocsin, to the great bell. It is indeed that which he was making, a fanfare. There what he was erecting, towers and belfry peals. It is always the towers, and, if you will, the bell tower of Notre-Dame. It is indeed that which he was representing to us, which he was giving us to hear, which he was forcing us to listen to, that his rhythm was representing to us. We did not need this explicit confession to know what his rhythm wanted from us, and what was his hidden image.
Together, inseparably, not analyzed, because he was a great poet, not unsoldered, visual image and auditory image. Together images of Town Hall belfries and cathedral towers.
He knew his craft, that one; and nothing of his craft remained foreign to him. He knew how to make a tocsin with nothing but words, a fanfare with rhymes, a great bell with nothing but rhythms. He was not ignorant. One has been able to make him many reproaches, well-founded: one will not reproach him with having been ignorant. The spoken and declaimed sounds, the poetic words gave him as much as sung sounds and instrumental words ever gave anyone. He was not ignorant of the effect of immense elongation, of boundless, absolute grandeur, that an isolated alexandrine gives, launched into a stanza of simple verses. And since it is a matter of hearing great bells, of listening to tocsins, he was not ignorant of the enormous swing that this alexandrine alone renders, sounded in a battery of lesser verses. And he knew, reciprocally he knew the effect that a tiny expiring verse gives at the end of a stanza, at the end of the same stanzas; and the redoubling of this little verse, the redoubling of this expiration; and the immediate succession of this little verse to major verses, or to a major verse.
He was right to know his craft. So many others do not know it, who do not have his genius. Ring today the knell, great bell of Notre-Dame, and tomorrow the tocsin,
when such verses, so imperious, so commanding, so powerful, rise to the surface, invade the memory, the path is all made for them to rise to the lips; one must therefore obey the inner push, military mechanical, of the memory; one must recite these verses that rise, these couplets that come, these stanzas that return, all this military, sumptuary, ceremonial and triumphal Hugo that rises.
Good verses, bad verses, platitudes or abundances, marquetries and padding, at least he knew how to design his rhythm, that one, he knew how to make his stanzas and construct his periods; he knew how to make his couplets.
One must therefore recite these verses that come back to you, one must therefore walk arm in arm, reciting Hugo, and when one stops, the other, who knows further, being a librarian and thus keeper of poems, the other continues. And it is the same poet in two memories, in two friendships, in two friendly memories.
Ring today the knell, great bell of Notre-Dame, And tomorrow the tocsin,
It is this same great bell that today sounds in the ears of this same people for the coming of this king. Today a bell of joy, of amusement and of festivity. Tomorrow, a bell of what? Bell that gives the same sound in successive ears, for what knell will it ever ring. Will it ever ring again, any tocsin.
What tocsin of civil war or of foreign war; what tocsin of social or religious war; as in ancient times; what tocsin of more than civil war; what tocsin of invasion; will it ever ring the knell of all this people?
What tocsin of riot and social uprising; what tocsin of mass rising and national uprising?
Peer of the realm. Peer of France. Old fox. Like this people, in this people, of which he is in this sense one of the most eminent representatives, he cheats, he tricks with war. When old he sees that decidedly it is pacifism that will succeed, at least officially and in verbal declarations, when he sees that it is pacifism that will make the glories and the universal popularities, the international circulations, when he sees that in the war of peace and war definitively it is peace that, formally at least and officially, has waged a victorious war against war, when the victory of peace is officially assured, he hesitates no longer: he makes himself the king, he becomes the god of pacifism: at least in congresses, in ceremonies, in speeches, in all that one can call the origins and beginnings of our modern and contemporary meetings; he establishes, he consolidates thus that formidable popularity in which he died, that undisputed glory in which he triumphed, he prepares that unheard-of apotheosis in which he survived himself several weeks. The military paid the cost. They are good people, all the same, these military, and very useful for these kinds of ceremonies. The military, who gave him such fine funerals, by order, it is true, but after all there had to be some of them to give them that order, for the government of the Republic to make them march,—and besides, they asked nothing better than to march, because they ask only to make parades,—the cuirassiers, who had watched over him so theatrically under this same Arc de Triomphe, with torches, served him for two purposes. As simple military, as soldiers, commanded for service, in full dress uniform, they served to give him, for his funerals, military parades such as had never been seen in any monarchical country; and on the contrary, as whipping boys, they had served him no less, having served him to carve out one of those popularities such as only pacifists can hope for one, now that war, which was the national industry of Prussia, has become the national industry of almost all peoples.
Admirable double utilization of war by a pacifist. I mean by a professional pacifist, and as such glorious. These same cannons, which make so much noise when they roll on the pavement of our streets, these same batteries, these same regiments, these same horses, which directly served him to make processions for him, to organize sumptuous parades for him, contrarily, as the objects of his eloquent maledictions, had already served him an incalculable number of times.
On one hand they had served to make him antitheses; on the other hand they served to make him parades.
And all these objects of malediction had above all served to make beautiful verses. Old fox, cunning like the people, in the people, and double like them, like this people he so eminently represented, when he wanted to make bad poems, or when he did not want to make poems at all, he took care to make them pacifist; and when on the contrary he wanted to make beautiful poems, the crafty one, as if by chance he ran to ask again of his enemy friends the military gentlemen.
One can take absolutely at random. The same Châtiments, book VI, stability is assured, I, Napoleon III. And at random among the verses:
It is for you that all this Iliad was made! It is for you that these unheard-of combats were fought! It is for you that Murat, to the dazzled Russians, Terrible, appeared, whipping their army! It is for you that through flame and smoke The pensive grenadiers advanced with slow steps!
We have here only a sketch, or, if you will, a first lesson. And again, same poem, a little further; always at random:
It is for monsieur Fialin and for monsieur Mocquart, That Lannes had his thigh cut off by a cannonball, That the brow of soldiers, split by the sword, Bled under the shako, the helmet and the colback, That Lasalle at Wagram, Duroc at Reichenbach, Expired struck in the midst of their course, That Caulaincourt fell in the great redoubt, And that the old guard died at Waterloo!
Here again we have only a first lesson; and already one cannot say that these verses are precisely pacific verses; still less are they pacifist verses. But the definitive lesson:
The anxious man Felt that the battle was bending in his hands. Behind a hillock the guard was massed, The guard, supreme hope and supreme thought! —Come! send in the guard, he cried,— And lancers, grenadiers in canvas gaiters, Dragoons whom Rome would have taken for legionnaires, Cuirassiers, gunners who dragged thunders, Wearing the black colback or the polished helmet, All, those of Friedland and those of Rivoli, Understanding that they were going to die in this festivity, Saluted their god, standing in the tempest. Their mouths, with a single cry, said: long live the emperor! Then, with slow steps, music at the head, without fury, Tranquil, smiling at the English grapeshot, The imperial guard entered the furnace.
I ask, these unforgettable verses, these military verses, culmination of war and glory, these verses that are successful, are they pacifist verses?
Alas! Napoleon, leaning over his guard, Watched; and, as soon as they had emerged Under the dark cannons spitting jets of sulfur, Saw, one after another, in this horrible gulf, Melt these regiments of granite and steel, As wax melts at the breath of a brazier. They went, weapon on arm, head high, grave, stoic. Not one retreated. Sleep, heroic dead! The rest of the army hesitated on their bodies And watched the guard die.—It is then…
O Waterloo! I weep and I stop, alas! For these last soldiers of the last war Were great; they had vanquished the whole earth, Chased twenty kings, crossed the Alps and the Rhine, And their soul sang in the brazen bugles!
These verses are so well made, imprint themselves in the memory so sovereignly, that afterwards they present themselves all together, on a single vast plane of representation, and it no longer matters by which end one begins to retell the poem:
In the wink of an eye, As a flaming straw flies in the wind, Vanished this noise that was the great army, And this plain, alas! where one dreams today, Saw those flee before whom the universe had fled! Forty years have passed, and this corner of earth, Waterloo, this funereal and solitary plateau, This sinister field where God mixed so many nothings, Still trembles at having seen the flight of giants!
Napoleon saw them flow away like a river;
[Singular effects of optics in our singular memories: forty years have passed, less than forty years, thirty-seven years and some months, from Waterloo to these Châtiments, Jersey, November 25-30, 1852; and in our memories, it seems to us that there is an enormous space, a century, between Waterloo and les Châtiments, and, on the contrary, that we are touching les Châtiments. And yet there are more than fifty years, today almost fifty-three years, from these Châtiments to us. The ninety years, almost the century, that there are between Waterloo and us, we see them between Waterloo and les Châtiments, as much, so to speak, truly as much as between Waterloo and us; and between les Châtiments and us, we see nothing; this is perhaps due in part to the astonishing longevity of Hugo: we have seen his death; we see so to speak on the same plane, I mean on the same plane of date, on the plane of the date of this death, all his work, at least since the beginning of his duel against Napoleon III; since the beginning of his republican representation; this is perhaps also due in part to the fact that les Châtiments made or strongly contributed to making our primary republican education, and that we have a tendency to consider all the recent past on the plane of the date of our first childhood, where we began to know.]
[End of third batch - to be continued]
There is not a single successful poem of peace in all the work of Victor Hugo; I mean a poem of military, social, national or international peace; of pacific peace; and still less of pacifist peace; the only successful poem of peace there is in all the work of Victor Hugo, but one can say that it is successful, that one, is a poem of biblical, patriarchal, nocturnal peace, since it is Booz endormi.
To ask of war, of the military, first processions such as they alone can give, second objects of malediction such as they alone can furnish, third and above all subjects of inspiration such as he could not ask of peace: there is in that an undeniable, an insufferable duplicity, a particular triplicity. It is truly to make them serve three ends, far too contradictory. These soldiers form the escort; they form the reprobation; and they form the inspiration. Truly it is too much, all at once.
One can be for or against war, for or against the military; Hugo, like the people, in the people, is together and at once for and against war, for and against the military; he thus draws from them a triple utilization, a maximal utilization.
This is exactly what the people do also, of whom Hugo is in this, as in many other respects, the eminent representative; like Hugo, his master and his God, the people, like popular Hugo the popular people utilize war and the military for at least three contradictory ends; they ask of the military parades such as they alone can furnish, reviews of July 14th and all other pageants, all other demonstrations; they ask of war and the military an exercise of malediction, of moral, sentimental, public, oratorical, official, philanthropic, scientific, eloquent, scholarly, socialist, historical materialist, revolutionary syndicalist reprobation; third they ask of war and the military a subject of inspiration, an exercise of imagination when, going back into the past, when, interpreting the present, when, anticipating the future, they want to make themselves believe that they have not lost the taste for adventures; when, finally, they are weary of boring themselves with images of peace.
There is in that, toward war and soldiers, an insufferable duplicity, almost universally widespread. It is so convenient. These military serve as amusement, as foil, as inspiration. Through them one can procure: sumptuous festivals; a good reputation by showing zeal, pacifist, antimilitarist virtue; supposedly adventurous, almost hazardous imaginings.
There is commonly today, in this consumption of the modern world, an insufferable duplicity toward war and the military. One must be for or against war. Loyally. Every double situation is a false situation. Every double situation is a disloyal situation.
One must be for or against war, for or against the military. Our collaborator M. Charles Richet is against war, against the military. At least, with him, one knows where one stands.
Our collaborator M. Charles Richet is against. One sees it from the first word of his cahier. So he has no tenderness, no weakness, no secret affection for military pomps or grandeurs. His situation is perfectly loyal, being perfectly simple. For my part, foreseeing that we too would have to speak this year of war and peace, of fatherland and humanity, and of the relation of the fatherland to humanity, I expressly wanted the thesis of the purest pacifism to be presented in these cahiers at the beginning of this series; that it should so to speak make its opening, or, to speak a nobler language, being more contemporary, its introduction; without abusing a word that has been irredeemably cheapened for thirty years, I expressly wanted the thesis of integral pacifism to be integrally also the thesis that would appear here at the beginning of this new year of work. I was therefore particularly happy to find, to present here the thesis of pure pacifism, a pure pacifist, to present the thesis of integral pacifism, an integral pacifist.
Quite other is the situation of the people, a false situation, double, triple, like most modern popular situations; the people want: to amuse themselves with the army; to insult, to abuse the army, which is indeed still, if you will, a way of amusing themselves with it; to dream of wars.
The people want to insult, to abuse the army, because today that is very much the fashion; it looks extremely well in meetings and all other glorious public orations. It has become indispensable in all political manifestations and operations. Otherwise, you do not look advanced enough.
One will never know all the cowardice that the fear of not seeming advanced enough has made our French commit.
There is a popular coquetry, a worldliness of the people, as imperious as the worldliness of society, as undisputed; moreover made in the image and likeness of the worldliness of society; for the moment and for a long time, this worldliness of the people demands that one be advanced.
Peer of the realm. Peer of France. Old fox. Senator of the Republic. Senator of the department of the Seine. Senator of Paris. The people too is senator of Paris, because not everyone can be deputies.
At the same time the people want to dream of wars; they delight as much as ever in the narrations of past wars; they love wars as much as ever, provided they are made by others, by other peoples; remember only how, only a few weeks ago, the people devoured in the newspapers the accounts of the Asian war. The people are much more cowardly than before, when it comes to making war. But they are always as violent as before. They still love war just as much. All they ask is that their precious skin stay out of the debate. They only ask that it be others who make it, who make it for them for their daily amusement. And all they have retained from the class struggle, tirelessly taught them by the intellectuals of socialism, is that it was, or would be a war, more precisely a military war.
For whoever wants to represent to themselves the recent adventures of socialism realistically, without illusion, it is evident that all the people have retained from the old intellectual class struggle is that it would be a war, military.
From the fact that they do not like, or that they no longer like, to make war, from the fact that they no longer want to make war, one must not hasten to conclude that they no longer love war. That would be rash. They love nothing so much as war, today as much as ever, provided that it be others who make it. And in the old days, when one loved war, one made it oneself.
There is in that a perfectly insufferable pacifist hypocrisy. One curses war openly, formally, officially, to give oneself merit and virtue, to acquire pacifist renown, leading to humanitarian glory. And secretly, slyly, let us say the shameful word, clandestinely, one asks of war, of the military, first the pageants of external pomps, second the enjoyments, the excitations of interior imaginings. Triple benefit. Occult diversion.
All this pacifist hypocrisy, so eminently represented in Hugo, for reasons and causes of which we have only been able to indicate far too briefly some, was bound to culminate on the name of Napoleon, who is considered, doubtless with much reason, as the very genius of modern war, perhaps even as the genius of war of all times. Nothing is therefore as interesting, nothing is as representative, significant, as the attitude taken by modern peoples, in particular by the French people, toward the memory of Napoleon. No memory, officially, was ever so proscribed, so cursed, so solemnly, as the memory of Napoleon has been since the beginning of the pacifist domination. And the French have cursed him more than anyone, by a kind of national exaggeration, by a boastfulness, and, at bottom, a national pride, because he was ours, one could almost say by a kind of pacifist nationalist coquetry. But in the depths of hearts, and perhaps above all of imaginations, he received cults. Occult admirations, which easily became adorations. And during those five long weeks of last June past, today we know, through subsequent infiltrations, that a certain number of French said to themselves that if finally the imminent event was going to happen, it would all the same have been more pleasant to have for commander-in-chief a certain General Napoleon Bonaparte, and to be commanded by him, than to have for commander-in-chief an excellent general of republican defense, the honorable Monsieur General Brugère. There are moments, in the life of a people, when instinct takes over so shamelessly that one would be capable of preferring a commander-in-chief of military defense to a commander-in-chief of republican defense.
All this popular pacifist hypocrisy, so eminently represented in Hugo, and moreover culminating on the name of Napoleon, was bound to culminate eminently in the personal situation of Hugo toward Napoleon. And indeed nothing is, in this order, so eminently and uniquely representative as this situation. Nothing is as curious. Nothing is as gripping. Let us say the word, for old Hugo did not bore himself every day like a burgrave, nothing is as amusing. There is not a man in the world, there has never been a man in all the history of the world, who has rendered as many services to Victor Hugo as Napoleon Bonaparte, unless it be Napoleon the First, no man, not even God, of whom nevertheless he made much use, not even Hugo himself. Admirable, unique furnisher of inspirations. And if only that admirable antithesis between the grandeurs of Napoleon the Great and the pettiness of Napoleon the Little.
Reread with a little critical attention les Châtiments; that is to say, reading them in the book or in your memory, in the text, struggle a little, if you can, against the formidable pull of image and rhythm: and then, under the furious apparent and real, sincere anger against Napoleon III and against the Second Empire, as official arithmetic simultaneously names them, easily you will feel a secret fullness, the intimate satisfaction of the fabricator, the contentment of the poet, that this old Napoleon the First permitted this unique Victor Hugo to bring forth such verses.
Officially then it was necessary, like any good popular man, to proscribe, exterminate, curse Napoleon. But inside the poet, one profited to make verses like no one else. In reality Victor Hugo the poet—and what is Victor Hugo outside of Victor Hugo the poet—Victor Hugo the poet never left the Napoleonic cult. The true Napoleon is the Napoleon where one rhythms. And in les Châtiments itself, in les Châtiments as much and more than anywhere, one feels running a vein of interior contentment, at having made Napoleon the First serve so much and so well.
This Napoleon the First who doubtless in himself boasted of never serving. And who had spent his life making such use of others.
Not only, like his people, naively nationalist and pretentiously internationalist, but more particularly pretentious militarist and equally pretentious pacifist: but that goes together very well.
Not only in the works where it was so to speak his job to make use of him, in the public, political, social, military, historical, polemical works, but in the private works, in the works where one did not expect him, in the works where he was not indicated—implied in the second Contemplations, Today, which were contemporary with les Châtiments—but clearly heard in les Voix intérieures, in les Rayons et les Ombres. He is indeed of this people so profoundly traditionalist, not traditionalist through heaviness and impotence to make revolution, but traditionalist on the contrary through a certain taste for tradition itself and for good bearing, he is of this people who easily receive kings between two trains, who vanquished are never servile, and above all who victorious are never insolent. He does not leave the figured monuments of the commemoration of this people. He does not leave the Arc de Triomphe. He descends from the column only to parade under the said Arc de Triomphe. This is in les Chants du Crépuscule; II, to the column. Several petitioners had asked that the Chamber intervene to have Napoleon’s remains transported under the column of the Place Vendôme.
After a brief deliberation, the Chamber had passed to the order of the day.
(Chamber of Deputies, session of October 7, 1830)
I pass over the odes and lyrical rhythms of the first six parts of this poem. Here too, one must come to the Alexandrines (it is indeed a pity that the competition of the ancient Alexandrians forbids us from writing Victor Hugo’s alexandrines as Alexandrines; those of others, one could with impunity continue to call them alexandrines; but for Hugo’s, it is not grand enough; reverence, honor would require that one be officially authorized to title them Alexandrines): VII:
Sleep, we shall come to fetch you! this day will come perhaps! For we have you for god without having had you for master! For our eye has moistened at your fatal destiny, And, under the three colors as under the oriflamme, We do not hang ourselves from that infamous rope That tears you from your pedestal!
Oh! go, we shall give you beautiful funerals! We too shall have perhaps our battles; We shall shade your respected coffin with them! We shall invite to it everyone, Europe, Africa, Asia! And we shall bring you young Poetry Singing young Liberty!
Whatever repugnance I have for underlining words in a text, as the barbarous Germans do, who with their dreadful typographical spacing end up underlining so many words in their texts that there end up being more underlined words than non-underlined words, which naturally draws attention to the non-underlined words, which would only be very witty if it were done on purpose, I could not help underlining this verse that I did not make him say:
Oh! go, we shall give you beautiful funerals! We too shall have perhaps our battles;
October 9, 1830.—If one wanted to refer to the poems of legend and history, to the poems of war and peace properly speaking, to the polemical poems, to the professional poems of war and peace, I would triumph too easily myself; Eviradnus, the little king of Galicia, which are successful, so many others, are these poems of peace? But let us leave la Légende des Siècles; in that cloud of old poems, private, more or less intimate, ignored today, forgotten, lost, some wrongly, one need only leaf through his work; les Rayons et les Ombres; IV; gaze cast into a garret; I; II; III:
The corner of the cell shelters a peaceful bed. On the table is that book where God makes himself visible, The legend of the saints, sole and true pantheon. And in a dark corner, near the chimney, Between the good Virgin and the boxwood of the year, Four pins on the wall fix Napoleon.
This eagle in this cage!—and why not? in the shadow Of this narrow and calm room, where nothing is dark, Where sleeps the beautiful child, sweet as her lily, Where so much peace, grace and joy is poured, I do not hate to hear in the depths of my thought The noise of heavy cannons rolling toward Austerlitz.
And near the emperor before whom all bow, —O legitimate pride of the poor orphan girl!— Shines a cross of honor, humble and triumphant sign, Cross of a soldier fallen as every hero falls, And who, sleeping father, from the depths of his tomb Makes a little glory watch over his child.
IV
Cross of Napoleon! warlike jewel! thought! Laurel crown traversed by rays! When he led his knights to fierce combats, He let it, in order to conquer the earth, Hang on every brow throughout the war, Then, the great work done, he said to them: Come!
Then he gave his cross to these stoic men. And tears flowed from their heroic eyes. Mute, they adored their victorious demigod. One would have said that lighting their soul with his soul, And touching their breast with his finger of flame, He made this star spring from their heart!
And again:
IX
Oh! your father’s cross is there watching you! The cross of the old soldier who died in the old guard! Let yourself be counseled by it, tempted angel, Let yourself be counseled…
[It is a matter of defending her from Voltaire;]
Voltaire, the serpent, doubt, irony, Voltaire is in a corner of your blessed room! With his eye of flame he spies on you and laughs.
Oh! tremble! this sophist has plumbed many a mire! Oh! tremble! this false sage has lost many angels! This demon, black kite, swoops on pious hearts, And breaks them, and often, under his cruel claws, Feather by feather I have seen fall these white wings That make a soul fly and flee into the heavens!
He counts the numberless beats of your breast. The slightest movement of your spirit in the shadow, If it leans a little toward him, makes his eye shine. And, like a prowling wolf, like a watching tiger, At moments, of Satan, visible to the poet alone, The monstrous head appears at your threshold!
VIII
Alas! if your chaste hand opened this infamous book, You would suddenly feel God dying in your soul. This evening you would lean…
Et caetera. One would never believe, today, one no longer remembers that Hugo could ever have written verses so bad. They are there, however. They are in his work, on the same basis as the rest. On the same basis as the rest, they entered our childhood memories. Thus on the same basis as the rest they will remain eternally in our memories as men.
There was the Victor Hugo of the coronation.
It is one of Hugo’s strengths, perhaps his principal strength, one can say it was Hugo’s strength, this tranquil impudence. More than this impudence of serenity, this immodesty. To write bad verses was perfectly indifferent to him, provided that every morning he wrote, he had his quota of verses. He thought it was better to write bad verses than not to write any at all. He was like a great river. He thought that above all, one must assure, maintain the current. He was like a great river, which does not refuse, does not refuse itself to roll dirty and yellow waters, on certain days, because above all one must roll waters, and one must roll dirty and yellow waters, on certain days, so that on certain other days may come the lucid waters, the transparent waters, the clear and blue waters. All weaknesses seemed to him better than odious sterility. And who knows moreover if these waters that from the bank we judge yellowish, brackish, dirty, he himself, father river, did not love them just as much.
And in these flows of weaknesses, what unforeseen awakenings. What a beautiful verse, suddenly, what an announcement, what a promise, what an anticipation.
The noise of heavy cannons rolling toward Austerlitz,
or what a memory of the beautiful poems to come; what a rising up, from the future; a workman above all, in this sense, a workman of writing in verse, he had his reward at last, and this reward was literally a wage; a workman of every morning, one forgets too much today how many times he had tried, made the poems he definitively succeeded in. The imperious memory we have kept of these definitive poems, and which has imposed itself, which imposes itself on us today, which commands us today, which will always command us, has much effaced, sometimes totally, has violently chased from our memories so many earlier attempts. One has easily recognized here the sketches, the first executions of so many poems that remained alone famous. Afterward. One will never know how many times he made certain poems, before making them, before that time was the good time. One will always forget by what ascents he climbed daily, until the day, alone known today, alone commemorated, when finally this climb officially became an ascension.
All along this climb, the thought of Napoleon pursued him; and it did not leave him during his ascension itself. For me this perpetual presence of Napoleon, manifested in the very poems where he has no business, is for me the sign of an incontestable haunting.
June 1839.—There had already been an ode to the column of the Place Vendôme, parva magnis, book III, seventh ode, in the Odes et Ballades; February 1827:
Beware, foreigners:—we know not what to do! Peace cradles us in vain in its idle sphere. The arena of war has such attraction for us! We crumple in our hands, alas! unoccupied, Lyres for want of swords! We sing as one would fight!
Same Odes et Ballades, my childhood, Behold, all that is past… my childhood is no more; it is dead, so to speak, although I am still alive. Saint Augustine, Confessions. Book V. Ninth ode; I; 1823:
I have dreams of war in my restless soul: I would have been a soldier, if I were not a poet. Do not be surprised that I love warriors! Often, weeping over them, in my mute sorrow, I have found their cypress more beautiful than our laurels.
A child, on a drum my cradle was placed. In a helmet for me holy water was drawn. A soldier, shading me with a warlike bundle, Of some old scrap of a worn banner Made the swaddling clothes of my cradle.
Among the dusty chariots, the gleaming weapons, A muse of the camps carried me off under the tents; I slept on the carriage of murderous cannons; I loved the proud coursers, with floating manes, And the spur clanking against the harsh stirrups.
I loved the thundering forts, with difficult approaches; The naked sword of chiefs guiding the docile ranks, The sentinel lost in an isolated wood, And the old battalions passing through the towns, With a mutilated flag.
My envy admired both the swift hussar, Adorning with golden sheaves his intrepid breast, And the white plume of the agile lancers, And the dragoons, mixing on their Gepid helmet The spotted hide of the tiger with the black manes of coursers.
And I accused my age:—“Ah! in dark shadow, “To grow, to live! to let cool without a murmur “All this young and pure blood, boiling in my peers, “Which in a black combat, on the steel of armor, “Would flow in such vermilion floods!”
And I invoked war, with its frightful scenes; I saw, in hope, in the noisy plains, With a thousand rumors of men and horses, Shaking at once their thundering wings, Two rival camps swoop on each other with great cries.
I heard the clear sound of the trembling cymbals, The rolling of the chariots, the whistling of balls, And, sowing their bloody steps with heaps of dead, I saw clash, in the distance, at intervals, The glittering squadrons!
II
With our victorious camps, in enslaved Europe I wandered, I traveled the earth before life; And, still a child,…
There, I saw the fires of the military halts Blacken the crumbling walls of solitary towns; The tent invaded the threshold of the church; The laughter of soldiers, in the holy monasteries, Repeated by the echo, seemed like cries of mourning.
What pain, eh; what labors; what work; what grating of files; what searching for words, which do not come, for all the words, for the epithets, which are lacking, which infallibly miss. Sacristy and metaphor. How all that was musty, rotten with literature. 1823, he was twenty-one. He has improved since. He did not steal his glory, that one.
But let us wash our faces. Everything has an end. Before going back up, among this people dispersing, before going back up across the bridges to the Boulevard Saint-Michel and to the Rue de la Sorbonne, where the neglected work awaits us, let us wash our faces of all these attempts, let us wash our memory of all these bad verses. Before parting, let us recite to each other some of those definitive verses, definitively successful. Let us take them from among the successful poems corresponding. I mean corresponding to the trial poems we have endured.
Napoleon held him so well. He was so haunted by this name and this image of Napoleon that Napoleon serves him as a calendar. And what a calendar. For what a date. For the most important date in universal history, which is the date of the birth of Victor Hugo: les Feuilles d’automne, I, Data fata secutus, motto of the Saint-Johns, [what are the Saint-Johns?]
This century was two years old! Rome replaced Sparta, Already Napoleon was showing through Bonaparte, And of the first consul already, in many a place, The emperor’s brow was breaking the narrow mask. Then in Besançon,…
June 1830. And Chants du Crépuscule, V, Napoleon II, I:
What his eye sought in the profound past,…
It was not Madrid, the Kremlin and the Lighthouse, The reveille in the morning humming its fanfare, The bivouac slumbering in the starry fires, The long-haired dragoons, the epic grenadiers, And the red lancers swarming in the pikes, Like purple flowers in the thickness of the wheat;
August 1832.—This successful poem, this gay poem, in this stanza, and under a covering of sadness, are these pacific verses. And this poem where he himself gathered, from les Orientales, from 1828, his whole ensemble of Napoleon; Him.
As epigraph:
I was a giant then, and a hundred cubits tall.
BUONAPARTE
I
Always him! him everywhere!—Whether burning or frozen, His image ceaselessly shakes my thought. He pours into my spirit the creative breath. I tremble, and in my mouth words abound When his gigantic name, surrounded by aureoles, Stands in my verse at its full height.
There, I see him, guiding the swift-rushing shell; There, massacring the people in the name of regicides; There, soldier, wresting from the tribunes their powers; There, consul young and proud, thinned by vigils That dreams of empire filled with marvels, Pale under his long black hair.
Then, powerful emperor whose head bows, Governing a battle from the top of the hill, Promising a star to his joyful soldiers, Signaling to the cannons that vomit flames, With his soul arming six hundred thousand souls for war, Grave and serene, with a lightning flash in his eyes.
Then, poor prisoner, mocked and tormented, Crossing his idle arms on his fermenting breast, Prey to vile jailers like a vile criminal, Vanquished, bald, bending his brow black with clouds, Walking on a rock where storms pass His thought, eternal storm.
How great he is, there above all! when, broken power, Miserable laughingstock of English turnkeys, At the coronation of misfortune he retempers his rights, Holds two worlds in suspense with the sound of his steps, And dying of exile, cramped in Saint Helena, Lacks air in the cage where kings display him!
How great he is at that hour when, ready to see God himself, His dying eye rolls a supreme tear! He evokes at his death his old army in dreams, Complains to his warriors of expiring solitary, And, taking for shroud his military cloak, From the camp bed passes to the coffin!
II
In Rome, where the conclave inherits from the senate, On Elba, on mountains white with snow or black with lava, At the menacing Kremlin, at the smiling Alhambra, He is everywhere!—On the Nile I find him again. Egypt resplends with the fires of his dawn; His imperial star rises in the east.
Victor, enthusiast, blazing with prestige, Prodigy, he astonished the land of prodigies. The old sheiks venerated the young and prudent emir; The people dreaded his unheard-of weapons; Sublime, he appeared to the dazzled tribes Like a Mahomet of the West.
Their fairy tale has already claimed his history. The tent of the Arab is full of his glory. Every free Bedouin was his bold companion; The little children, eyes turned toward our shores, On a French drum regulate their savage steps, And the ardent horses neigh at his name.
It is difficult to verify this geographic and historical information. And natural history. But there, this time, is his entire Napoleon.
Sometimes he comes, carried on the Numidian hurricane, Taking for pedestal the great pyramid, To contemplate the deserts, sandy oceans; There, his shadow, awakening the sonorous sepulcher, As if for battle resurrects there again The forty giant centuries.
He says: “Rise!” Suddenly each century rises, These bearing the scepter and those girt with the sword, Satraps, pharaohs, mages, frozen people. Immobile, dusty, mute, his voice counts them; All seem, adoring his brow that towers above them, To form for this king of times a court of the past.
Thus everything, under the steps of the indelible man, Everything becomes monument; he passes on the sand; But what matter that Assur be covered by his waves, That the North Wind ceaselessly weary its wing there? His colossal foot leaves an eternal trace On the moving brow of the desert.
III
History, poetry, he joins your summits with his foot. Bewildered, I cannot in these sublime worlds Stir anything great without touching his name; Yes, when you appear to me, for worship or for blame, Songs fly pressed upon my lips of flame, Napoleon! sun of which I am the Memnon!
You dominate our age; angel or demon, what matter? Your eagle, in its flight, carries us breathless. The very eye that flees you finds you everywhere. Always in our pictures you cast your great shadow; Always Napoleon, dazzling and dark, On the threshold of the century stands.
Thus when exploring the domain of Vesuvius, From Naples to Portici the stranger strolls.
When he troubles, dreamer, with his importunate steps, Ischia, perfuming with its flowers the happy wave, Whose sound, like a song of an amorous sultana, Seems a voice that flies amid the perfumes;
Let him haunt the august colonnade of Paestum, Let him listen at Pozzuoli to the lively serenade Singing the tarantella at the foot of a Tuscan wall; Let him awaken in passing that mummy city, Pompeii, recumbent body of a sleeping town, Seized one day by the volcano;
Let him wander at Posilipo with the agile bark From which the brown boatman sings Tasso to Virgil; Always, under the green tree, on the beds of turf, Always he sees, from the bosom of seas and meadows, From the heights of capes, from the edge of flowered peninsulas, Always the black giant smoking on the horizon!
December 1828.—Les Orientales, XL, for the scientists. And finally, before returning to our houses, since it is a matter of a God, let us hear the prayer. Let us hear the prayer of the young Arab Hugo. This Him, Orientales XL, follows naturally an Orientale XXXIX, and this Orientale XXXIX is none other than Bounaberdi.
This Bounaberdi means nothing to you. But a shrewd sociologist would easily discover in this word an alteration of the word Bonaparte, especially if you write it Buonaparte and if you pronounce it Bouonaparté. A Philolog would certainly discover the laws of this alteration. Before sitting down again to sort through the mail of this day, let us hear the prayer to Bounaberdi; great as the world:
Often Bounaberdi, sultan of the Franks of Europe, Whom, like a black cloak, the simoom envelops, Climbs, himself a giant, to the brow of a giant mountain, From where his gaze, wandering over sand and wave, Embraces at a glance the two halves of the world Lying at his feet in the gaping abyss.
He is alone and standing on his sublime summit. Lying to his right, the desert that fêtes him Importunes his eyes with a cloud of dust: To his left the sea, whose guest once he was, Raises to him its deep and high voice, Like a joyful dog barking at the feet of its master.
And the old Emperor, whom in turn awakens This cloud to his eyes, this noise to his ear, Dreams, and, as one sees the lover muse on his beloved, Believes it is an army, invisible and numberless, That makes this dust and this noise for his shadow, And passes eternally under the gray horizon!
PRAYER
Oh! when you return to dream on the mountain, Bounaberdi! look a little in the countryside At my tent whitening in the rumbling sands; For I am free and poor, an Arab of Cairo, And when I have said: Allah! my good war horse Flies, and under its eyelid has two burning coals!
November 1828.—Decidedly my cahier would be a very wise cahier, which would please everyone, even my friends, and which would earn me compliments from my comrades; a good cahier of recapitulation; without any master idea: facts, nothing but facts; events well equalized, carefully passed under the roller; enumeration; tiering; nothing more; historical idealism would receive a discreet adoration there, because we must revere the old gods; historical materialism would receive a more marked homage there, because we must keep in with the new gods; the one and the other adoration however would be skillfully combined, dosed, because one never knows who will be the god of tomorrow; and neither the one nor the other homage would make me fail in the sacred rule of the pure fact; for this idealism and this materialism resemble each other in this at least, that they are in no way ideas, since they are systems.
Having become wise in this time of wisdom, one would forgive me much of our past misdeeds; the historians would no longer reject me; the philosophers would no longer reject me…
This seizure took place one morning; perhaps a Monday; perhaps a Tuesday morning; in any case one had the impression that it made a beginning of the week, and a serious beginning of the week; through an effect of return backward, one had immediately the impression that the King of Spain’s visit had also lasted exactly a week, that it had made a week, halted, that this week had been the week of the King of Spain, that it was finished, that it was no longer a question of speaking of it, that one had other things to do; this week itself had ended badly; an attack, the most stupid and the most criminal of attacks, breaking the universal security, had broken the joy, having broken the spell; even before the arrival of the sovereign, well-informed people had indeed said that the police were extremely worried, that it was known that there was a plot being prepared; that an attack was feared; no one would believe it; first because these prognostications came from the perpetual well-informed people; then because this sinister information disturbed the idea one had formed, the idea one wanted to have; one morning, one learned from the newspapers that the attack had occurred; it was like a first darkening, and a first derangement; an irruption of rebellious reality; but someone had disturbed the party; one had the impression that people who were not invited were entering into the course of events; the arrangements so well made were collapsing; not only was this attack criminal and odious, but above all it was not fair play; it broke a contractual security commonly consented to; with it and through it returned for everyone the common worries, the vexations, the troubles, the nuisances of our ordinary lives.
There is something singularly ferocious in the immutability of official programs; one evening death, which was not foreseen, appearing itself inscribed itself in the program; and everyone is officially forced to act as if it had not inscribed itself there; these first two bombs could introduce others; it was known that there were others somewhere unknown; and yet the festivities had to continue, the program had to be followed exactly as if nothing had happened; on pain of hesitation, panic, bewilderment, official cowardice; thus the two sovereigns had to continue to play the two characters of the festivals and ceremonies arranged; they had to immutably continue to be popular and smiling characters of national and popular festivals; under the threat of death, for the protections of the police, as had been well seen, never procure hermetic security. Thus understood, the trade of king becomes the most difficult of trades, the most dangerous, and that which requires the most of the most exact courage; no trade perhaps demands to this degree that the threatened one act exactly as if the threat did not exist; neither the worker in dangerous trades, nor the wretch in his wretchedness, nor the sailor nor the officer on his ship, nor the soldier nor the officer under fire are required to act exactly as if there were no threat of any danger; without being afraid, they have the right to show, or to let show, that they know; generally they apply themselves to letting nothing show, or by a natural or obtained courage indeed they let nothing show; but it is already much not to be required to; on the contrary the king is required to conduct himself exactly as if there had never been anything done.
This odious, this criminal attack had not only darkened the end of these festivals, it had not only revealed a permanent danger, but, what was more serious, it had broken the truce; the word must be repeated, it had broken the spell; one had immediately the impression that this abrupt intervention had broken a whole enchantment, that it was the attack that was real, and that it was the festivals that were imaginary, feigned, that the chain of this painful year had not been broken, that the week that was going to begin again would resemble the preceding weeks of the same life, that one would have to take up the harness again, that nothing new had come, that these walks had had no meaning, that these dissipations had been vain, that life was always the same; this attack was not only an attack; it was the reappearance of the daily annoyances that one had omitted to invite.
It was above all the abrupt reappearance of reality itself; the joys and relaxations had been imaginary; the attack alone was real, not factitious, not benevolent and voluntary; how anxiously one waited, breath cut short, for all these festivals to be over, oppressed, for the king to have left, finally discharging us of the care of his guard and the honor of his security; how one waited for him to have left at last, and for him to have arrived somewhere that was not our place; that was not of our domain, for immediately, at once, everyone had felt that we had a domain, where we were responsible; how one waited for everything to be removed, the king, the threat, the misfortune, the perpetual annoyance.
One had to return to Paris in order to begin the week again; an old French song, which no one today knows anymore, which would be the despair of our modern anti-alcoholists, itself begins with the following teachings:
Let us begin the week By drinking good wine;
These old teachings are forever lost; we generally begin our weeks by drinking our fill of annoyances, of work, of presence; and we continue them, and we finish them as we began them; we were therefore returning to Paris this morning at the beginning of the week—was it a Monday, was it a Tuesday, was it another day, no one today knows—but what everyone knows, and what no one henceforth will forget, is the beginning of the week that this unforgettable day made of itself.
Like everyone I had returned to Paris at nine in the morning; like everyone, that is to say like approximately eight or nine hundred persons, I knew by half past eleven that in the space of those two hours a new period had begun in the history of my own life, in the history of this country, and assuredly in the history of the world.
If these cahiers were not the cahiers, that is to say if they were a review like all reviews, and if I proposed to write an article as one writes for all reviews, touching at the end of this first cahier that I have been able to make, this would be the place to begin lying; having to speak of such a capital event, I would borrow the noble language, the grand style, I would work myself up; but we have precisely established ourselves to give, as much as we could, exact, scrupulous, patient notations.
We had therefore come to Paris freed all the same a little from the previous worries; the king had left, in good condition; it was one large worry less; there remained only a known world, the explored world of daily worries, the enemy and kindred world of familiar worries.
How in the space of a morning everyone, I mean everyone thus numbered, knew that France was under threat of an imminent German invasion, is what I want first to note.
We had arrived thinking of something else entirely; one has so much to do at the beginning of a week, especially after a slight interruption; life is so full; we are not among those great geniuses who always had one eye on the tsar and the other on the mikado; the destinies of empires interest us enormously; but we are required to earn our poor living; we work from morning to night; we put in days of much more than eight hours; we have, like all honest people and simple citizens, many personal worries; one cannot always think of the revolutions of Babylon; one must live honestly the life of every day; it is gray and woven of common threads.
The life of one who does not want to dominate is generally of homespun cloth.
Everyone, thus counted, everyone at the same time knew that the threat of a German invasion was present, that it was there, that the imminence was real.
It was not news that was communicated from mouth to mouth, that one communicated, laterally, like ordinary news; what people who met communicated to each other was not the news, it was only the confirmation, for each of them, of news come from within; the knowledge of this reality spread well from one to the next; but it spread from one to another like a contagion of interior life, of interior knowledge, of recognition, almost of Platonic reminiscence, of anterior certitude, not like an ordinary verbal communication; in reality it was in himself that each of us found, received, found again the total, immediate, ready, muffled, immobile and ready-made knowledge of the threat that was present.
The widening, the blossoming of this knowledge that spread from one to the next was not the dusty discontinuous dissemination of ordinary news through verbal communications; it was rather a common interior recognition, a muffled, deep knowledge, a common reverberation of the same sound; at the first trigger, at the first intonation, every man heard in himself, found again, listened to, as familiar and known, this profound resonance, this voice that was not a voice from without, this voice of memory engulfed there and as if heaped up one knew not since when nor for what.