Vies parallèles

A Family of Fourierist Republicans, IV: Parallel Lives of a Soldier and a Scholar

The Milliet Family

1858-1861

I

1858-1859

SECOND STAY AT GENEVA

The College. — Mea culpa. — The choice of a future.

1

We were growing up, and our parents keenly wished to return to Geneva for our studies. Friends let M. Milliet know that the government of James Fazy saw no obstacle to his return. The Empire was henceforth too solidly established to be afraid of a little songwriter. We left Bonneville. My mother chose, in the rue du Rhône, an apartment from which we enjoyed the marvelous view of the lake.

More than one of our old friends had already disappeared. The good Colonel Humbert was dead. The Freemasons of Geneva were then divided into rival coteries; my father did not wish to mix in these petty quarrels, and it was thus that my brother and I lost the chance of being admitted into that Society, whose aim remains very fine, despite what is a little antiquated in some of its rites.

Paul was thirteen years old. Having always been, at Bonneville, at the head of his class, he hoped to be able to enter at Geneva in the first Latin form; but he soon perceived the considerable difference of level that existed between the two colleges. (1) At Bonneville, he had had for teachers very young French graduates; at Geneva, the masters were true scholars.

The method then in use for the study of Latin and Greek resembled a little the one employed for teaching the living languages; the aim was the same: to arrive at reading the authors easily. For that, without neglecting grammar, care was taken to furnish the memory with words and expressions. At the end of one’s studies, the examinations bore on texts that the programs did not designate in advance; (2) these tests therefore demanded a fairly serious knowledge of the ancient languages.

I had grown too quickly and was far from robust. At the moment of the admission examination, the suffocating heat and perhaps emotion aiding, I lost consciousness. This fainting fit, without gravity, prevented me from finishing my translation; I was admitted only to the second form. This delay was fortunate for me; it obliged me to review those first elements, so essential in the study of the sciences or of letters, and which I have never well possessed.

(1) At Bonneville he was first in his class; at Geneva, in the second form, he was fifteenth.

(2) The translations were done without a dictionary.

SECOND STAY AT GENEVA

Paul to his mother

Geneva, 29 April 1858.

Dear Bonti,

If you knew how sad everything is when you are no longer here, how deserted the house seems. We always lack something, we are no longer cheerful and we become stupid. Louise asks for you every moment; we have to tell her what you are doing. She always thinks it is you when someone rings, and she wants to go to the station to see you arrive.

All day long, I wonder where you are and what you are doing; when I close my eyes, I see you on the railway or else at the hotel, and it seems to me that if I were alone and looked hard, I would be like Madame Gil-Blas (in a novel) and would really see what you are doing. I shall say no more, because Louise is tormenting me to go to the little Sillys’. Keep well and come back quickly.

Paul to M. de Tucé

July 1858.

My dear uncle,

Where are you? What are you doing? What is becoming of you? Where are you going? How are you?… As for us, we are very happy at Geneva, where we are very well received. Papa has taken up painting again; he is doing my portrait. I am taking advantage of my holidays, which last the whole month of July, to draw a great deal. As I am a little anemic, mama has rented a room for me in a little village three-quarters of a league from here. I go there to sleep, I drink morning and evening a good cup of milk just drawn, I get up at four in the morning, I draw from nature on the path whose tree you gave me as a gift and for which I cannot thank you enough, then I come back to Geneva for noon. This little outing is very salutary for me.

Mama went to Valence and she stayed only three days on her journey, thanks to the railway we now have. Fernand is still at the bank. Alix continues her drawing lessons; as for me, I have had a prize in literature and an honorable mention in arithmetic. The distribution of prizes is here a national festival; the whole town takes part in the pleasure of the schoolchildren. The great hall of the Electoral Building is decorated for the ceremony. It is not books or crowns that are given as prizes, but silver medals. No long and tedious speeches; everything is done with simplicity, without pretension. The festival has something dignified about it, no pedantry, a grandeur at once simple and imposing. In the afternoon the college boys gather on the plain of Plainpalais, a vast meadow surrounded by an avenue of centuries-old trees. There, ropes form an enclosure, into which the pupils and their parents alone have the right to enter. A snack is served to the schoolboys, who do it ample honor; then games of every kind are placed at their disposal. In the evening they are taken to the circus and a firework display is set off. As for the greasy poles, the races, the shooting matches, I have little taste for all that; noisy pleasures, games where one must give oneself movement, are not my strong point. I am a stay-at-home; what I like is to remain in the house to read or draw.

Louise too already draws; she makes houses, trees, antediluvian little men, but with which she is delighted. She is very talkative and very nice; she obeys only mama, who spoils her a little more than all the rest of us. I should very much like to begin painting with Alix, but as long as I am at college I lack the time. I console myself for it by sometimes making verses.

M. de Tucé to Paul

July 1858.

… The prizes you obtained at the distribution show me that you know how to advance the sciences and letters abreast… I am now very busy; we are in general inspection. It is the examination passed before a division general of all the parts of the service, instruction, administration, etc… Only there is no distribution of prizes nor any holidays. As soon as the general has left, one does not have even a single day’s leave; one begins again all the more keenly. Although there is no distribution of prizes, there are nevertheless rewards, and the most deserving are proposed for a higher post. I am very glad to share my successes with you as well. I am proposed for the post of squadron leader, and it is probable that I shall be appointed within eighteen months or two years, according to the vacancies that present themselves. It is a rank one ambitions much, not that I have a thirst for grandeurs and honors, but the post of squadron leader consists in doing exactly nothing. One would say it had been created expressly for me. Add to that that one is very well paid, and judge whether I am eager to reach it. What spoils this prospect a little for me is that I shall have to go into another regiment, where I shall know no one, and leave the 5th Lancers, where I have very good comrades, with whom I have lived for nearly twenty years.

2

It is only in novels that one finds perfect heroes; real men have moments of weakness, and I propose here to make likenesses; I shall therefore flatter neither others nor myself.

We slept, Fernand and I, in a little room giving onto an interior courtyard. Often my brother spent the evening with his comrades. I went to bed early and, while waiting for him, I delighted in reading some poet. One evening it was late, Fernand was not coming home; my mother, anxious, was not sleeping. The young apprentice banker had let himself be drawn into a little orgy. He arrived at last, pale, undone, and scarcely in bed, was seized with vomiting. My mother nursed him with her habitual gentleness; the experience of life makes one indulgent. I was not so then; I felt a dull anger boiling up in me, mingled with a profound disgust. The Spartans made their slaves drunk by force, to give them as a spectacle to their sons and inspire in them a horror of drunkenness. I understood then the efficacy of that odious object-lesson, and I remembered it.

I was ordinarily a conscientious pupil; nevertheless I had to reproach myself with a fault that I wish to confess.

Memory has always failed me, and more than once M. Oltramare, master of the first Latin form, wrote on my report book: “weak memorization.” One day, a friend of my parents was lunching with us; his interesting conversation made me forget the Latin verses we were to learn by heart. I then had the idea, more ingenious than honest, of writing on my fingernails a few words that would help me to remember the others. We recited in writing — an excellent method, adopted by the masters who are willing to devote their late hours to the tedious correction of papers. Little expert in the art of deceiving, I was caught, and the gravity of my fault appeared to me at once. It was premeditated; I might be taking a prize away from a comrade at the end of the year. To steal a place is no finer than to steal money.

M. Oltramare looked at me with a severe air, but no sermon! My heart was beating, I assure you, when he handed me back my marks. The report book burned my fingers; I read in it these simple words: “Milliet has forgotten what one owes to oneself.”

This had to be signed by my mother, by her who had so good an opinion of my honesty! I was overwhelmed with shame. My mother saw the sincerity of my repentance and spared me the reproaches. One of those black looks that I so dreaded, and that was all.

I have kept for M. Oltramare a grateful memory for his noble manner of punishing. With that tact which true teachers alone possess, he had seen with whom he was dealing; in addressing himself to my conscience, to my dignity, he hoped to awaken and fortify them. It was, I believe, the first and the last indelicacy that I have committed.

Later, for example at the École des Beaux-Arts, in the sketch competitions for the Prix de Rome, most of my comrades brought in as contraband a few sketches of weapons or of antique costumes; I never cheated, never did I forget “what one owes to oneself.” A little victory won over bad instincts moreover procures a livelier pleasure than the false vanity of an honor unjustly acquired. (1)

(1) The good M. Oltramare bore me no grudge, and I am proud of the report he gave me at the end of the school year 1858-59:

“Milliet is among the number of pupils who make a master’s task sweet and from whom he is sorry to part. I have only to praise his good will and his excellent spirit. As for the state of his instruction, I exhort him to set seriously to work to fill regrettable gaps in history, in geography, and above all in Greek and Latin. He has succeeded very well in recitation and in French composition.

“A. OLTRAMARE, master.”

We made Latin verses then, which is a very amusing little game. Another excellent exercise consisted in putting into prose a few French verses of celebrated authors, and I observed that the difficulties of classical versification were truly excessive, since they have forced the best poets to use a regrettable quantity of padding and improper words. M. Oltramare combated, with reason, my untimely lyricism, and, thanks to the study of the Greek authors, I began to glimpse what is superior in simplicity.

We often translated a few beautiful passages of the ancient moralists. These pieces of an admirable elevation of thought were little appreciated by the majority of my comrades, but they made on me a lasting impression. — Abstine et sustine, say the Stoics; in my sad old age, this manly motto has more than once sustained me amid the hard trials of life.

Paul to his sister Alix

Bonneville (1) 1859.

I have just witnessed, with Michel Rey, something terrible. M. Dumont, the pharmacist, has received from the tribunal of Thonon a jar containing the heart and intestines of a child poisoned by its mother. He had to determine whether or not the body contained arsenic. M. Dumont first made an experiment on the heart and a part of the intestines. He burned them, made them pass through a host of retorts and alembics; finally we saw appear on the porcelain the terrible stains that establish the presence of the poison; these stains are brown and metallic, or rather metalloid. This made on me a singular impression. I thought I saw that mother poisoning her child, then her remorse, her condemnation, her execution… all that in that stain! M. Dumont is going to make a second experiment on the rest of the intestines; he is to find arsenic again in a tube and form what is called the ring. Michel was stirring the child’s heart while it was being cooked. Is it not a scene from Macbeth?

(1) I had gone to spend a part of my holidays at Bonneville with my friend Michel Rey.

3

It is a very grave moment, that in which the young man chooses the path he wishes to enter. On his decision may depend the happiness or the unhappiness of his whole life. Madame Milliet, while leaving Fernand complete liberty in the choice of a career, strove to make him reflect maturely, and asked him to weigh well the advantages and the disadvantages of each profession.

Fernand therefore addressed to his father his Reflections on the choice of a future. — Here is the substance of it:

He thinks first of the military estate, then of the navy, but he is repelled by passive obedience: “In time of peace, a soldier is an idle and useless being. We no longer have invasions of barbarians to dread, and we no longer wish to make conquests. Most often, wars have no other motive than puerile quarrels of monarch with monarch. Soon all frontiers will be effaced; the peoples will know how to employ their forces, their intelligence and their riches better than for destruction. Permanent armies are destined to disappear.”

A lawyer? “The quibbles of the bar seem to me very petty, and the ridiculous get-ups are not to my taste. (1) Then this human justice which punishes crime does not know how to prevent it, and never rewards virtue.”

A civil servant? “One would have to know how to flatter power and place at its disposal one’s honor and one’s conscience.”

A priest? “I have no faith in the practices of religion. I know that, for persons who consider only their interest, this is no reason; but if one has heart, one will never accept a mission that one cannot fulfill conscientiously.”

A doctor? “It is an admirable career, a life all of devotion; but I love travel too much to inhabit constantly the same town.”

A professor? “One needs a particular vocation to resign oneself to a monotonous and regular life, regulated like a clock.”

An artist? “Nature has been very stingy toward me in the matter of art: for music, she endowed me with a false voice; for painting, with a clumsy hand; and for poetry, with a soul very little poetic.”

“What then remains? — Commerce. But what kind of commerce shall I choose? Naturally it is not that which is restricted to a shop, where the merchant, if he wishes to enrich himself, is forced to become a thief. (2) What I want is to be a merchant on a large scale. First, one needs activity and intelligence; the body and the mind are always occupied; the merchant is free, he depends only on his honesty. This career requires varied knowledge; the more instructed the merchant is, the more chances he will have of succeeding; it is through him that the nations exchange their products, and that the less favored climates enjoy the benefits granted to other countries. He imports not only products but also ideas, manners, customs, and contributes more than anyone to efface the hatreds of nationalities. He serves as a bond to the nations, and it is the strongest bond, because it holds them by their interest. It is the merchant who will establish unity of language and unity of measures; it is he who has the most need of them. We admire those steamboats that furrow the seas, but they are only the instruments, the bodies; the merchant is the soul that sets them moving. Revolutions may follow one another; commerce will subsist; the peoples will always need to exchange their products; it is commerce that pushes men to make the conquest of our planet through industry.

“I have just laid out for you, dear father, the reasons that decide me for commerce. You know my character; it is for you to judge whether I have seen things from their true point of view. I shall always rely on your watchful affection. Be convinced that, when you have traced the path for me, I shall do all that depends on me to reach the goal you will have indicated to me.”

(1) The consideration of costume holds an often excessive place in the minds of young people at the moment of choosing a profession.

(2) Fernand had cited this anecdote recounted by Ch. Fourier: “I remarked, from the age of six, the contrast that existed between commerce and truth. I was taught at the catechism and at school that one must never lie; then I was taken to the shop to be shaped early in the noble trade of lying, or the art of selling. Shocked by the cheating and impostures that I saw, I would take the merchants aside and reveal them to them. One of them, in his complaint, had the clumsiness to denounce me, which brought upon me an ample spanking. My parents, seeing that I had a taste for truth, exclaimed in a tone of reproach: ‘This child will never be worth anything for commerce.’” — La Phalange, January 1858.

When he showed himself so reasonable, Fernand was undergoing the happy influence of his mother. But, as will be seen — and it is sad to observe it — the best education very often remains without force when it finds itself directed in a sense contrary to the suggestions of atavism. To begin his commercial studies, Fernand had entered as an apprentice into a banking house, with MM. Ferrier. It was against his heart that he accepted these sedentary occupations, so little in conformity with his tastes. He was not to resign himself to them for long, and his conduct proved once more that “attractions are proportional to destinies.” One fine day, without warning anyone, Fernand disappeared. He had set out for Turin, in order to enlist as a volunteer in the army of Garibaldi.

II

FERNAND IN GARIBALDI’S ARMY

1859

Separation. — Magenta. — Revolt in the Regiment. — Solferino. — Armistice. — Monte Tonale. — Bear Hunt. — The Return.

1

Fernand to his friend Baptiste Rey (1)

Chambéry, 29 May 1859.

Dear Baptiste,

I write you in haste these few lines to beg you to set my parents’ minds at rest. I left yesterday evening at eight o’clock by the stagecoach; tomorrow morning I shall be at Turin and immediately enlisted. It is therefore completely useless to make any step to bring me back; it would be too late.

I shall write from Turin to my parents to give them my reasons for having acted thus; in the meantime, let them be calm and forgive the sorrow I cause them. I embrace them a thousand and a thousand times. How hard it was for me to hold back my tears when I left, alone, without a friend, but it had to be. Forgive too the joke I told you; if I had told you the truth, you would have held me back, and I did not want that. Tell the office too what the matter is. My friendships to all my friends. Yours from the heart.

(1) I give here a few letters of my brother, but it is his history alone that they recount. He who should seek in the following pages a narrative of the war of Italy would be entirely disappointed. Fernand took part in none of the great battles; he naively tells the impressions of a child who, pampered until then by his parents, abandons them for the first time. His letters are overflowing with a profound affection. I admit it, the sincerity of the emotion is their sole interest. Such is my view. It is only regrettable that the young soldier did not keep his mother’s letters.

It has been seen, Fernand had just expressed his disdain for the military estate in time of peace. But there is not, so far, any contradiction between his ideas and his acts: if he enlisted, it was in the service of a noble cause. What had enthused him was the courage, the absolute disinterestedness, the improbable victories of Garibaldi, the first to enter Lombardy, victor at Varese, victor at San Fermo, victor at Como, and everywhere drawing the populations along in his wake.

Beside this politics of enthusiasm, there was the politics of interest and of dissimulation.

Orsini’s bomb had recalled to Napoleon III the powerful organization of the carbonari, his former brothers. This attempt, although it had failed, produced on the mind of the despot a lively impression and, putting an end to his hesitations, decided him to throw the sword of France on the side of Victor Emmanuel. The carbonari wanted Italy one and republican. To appease them, Napoleon came to an understanding with Cavour, the cunning diplomat; he would ask Piedmont for the Lombard-Venetian kingdom, claiming in exchange Nice and Savoy. The populations would be pretended to be consulted by a plebiscite. Upper Savoy would have liked to become a Swiss canton, but its choice was strictly limited between union with Piedmont and annexation to France.

Garibaldi did not enter into these shameful traffickings in peoples; he had only one aim, the unity of Italy, delivered at last from the yoke of Austria. The whole nation, intoxicated by the hope of a resurrection, accompanied him with its ardent vows.

Dear parents,

Turin, 30 May 1859.

Here I am enlisted. This very morning I passed the medical visit and was accepted. (1) I do not know into what corps they will send me; as soon as I know it, I shall write to you so that you may address your letters to me. If you knew the good it will do me to receive news of you! My God, why did I leave you? Here it is: I have already spoken to you of the newspaper; I had taken this sedentary life in horror, then I should have liked to contribute to the deliverance of the Italian people. Having sounded you on this matter, I saw that you would never want it; it was then that I took the resolution I have just carried out. Until now I have been too happy; I absolutely must eat a little hard fare. This trade of paper-scratcher was no good to me; I am good only to make a soldier. It is all by myself that I took this resolution; no one drew me into it; I spoke of it to none of my friends — they would have held me back.

Now, dear father and dear mother, it remains for me to ask your pardon for the torment and the sorrow I cause you. If you knew what I have suffered to separate myself thus from you, without saying farewell to you! But my resolution was taken, and now that all is done, I do not repent of it. If it were not for the memory of you that saddens me. Ah! believe me, I cannot think of you without weeping. What care, what attentions you have always had for me! How you love me! I too love you with all the forces of my soul; with what happiness shall I see you again — when then shall I be able to clasp you to my heart! My mother, I beg you, calm yourself; I shall advance, I shall make my way; fear nothing; remember our conversation of Saturday at dinner — war is not so terrible as one imagines. And you, my dear father, why could I not at least shake your hand before leaving and receive your recommendations. Paul, Alix, write to me often, keep me informed of all your life; and reading you, I shall believe myself to be still near you. Poor Louison, when I see you again, you will be a big girl, Alix will be married. My God, when I think that I shall have to remain so long far from you, my head is lost. Oh, in your letter, encourage me! Yet in my soul and conscience, I believe I have done well.

This war finished, I shall come back to you, I shall have a settled position. See everything in a fair light. What good is it to despair? — I am young, in good health, the future is all rosy before me; if there are a few thorns, I shall bend them aside cheerfully.

I want to recount to you a little of my journey: I left Saturday evening at eight o’clock by the stagecoach, not being able to take the railway without a passport. I carried in my coat one shirt, two pairs of stockings and four handkerchiefs for all my baggage. In money, I had six francs of my savings, plus some thirty francs from my clothing allowance. The coach as far as Chambéry cost me 5 francs, and from Chambéry to Turin, 14 francs. When I crossed Mont Cenis, I saw nothing, since it was night. All along the road there were innumerable carts, full of biscuits and provisions for the French army. Arrived at Turin, I went immediately to the Municipality. Everything is finished. Despite these two nights and a day passed in the coach, I am not tired and am very well.

Those gentlemen of the office must be very displeased; I am sorry for them, but that is how it is!

I am with Michel (Rey), who has not yet finished his law examinations. He told me that Émile (Reynaud) was not with Garibaldi at Como, but that his Legion was going to join him; he has made masses of conquests at Turin. (1)

I should very much like to join Garibaldi too; I shall very probably be part of the Chasseurs of the Apennines.

Farewell, dear father, farewell my good mother, farewell Paul, Alix, Louise, all of you whom I love so much and whom I have been ungrateful enough to leave. I embrace you very tenderly with all my heart.

Once more farewell and till we meet again, my father and my mother.

Your son who will love you always.

Fernand M.

Dear mother, above all I implore you, do not create for yourself vain anxieties.

Your beloved child, (2)

Fernand

(1) The major and the captain inspector could not refrain from complimenting him on the lads of Le Mans. Fernand was, in fact, of proportions so elegant that a sculptor would gladly have taken him for a model; but the lads of Le Mans are not all so well built.

(2) This touching letter marks the emotional relaxation that necessarily follows a great effort of will. The child had the courage to break the bonds, so sweet, that attached him to his family, but here he is henceforth all alone, without guide and without support.

Dear father,

Turin, 2 June 1859.

I find at last a little free moment to write to you. I am at the citadel, where one is not at all badly off. I do the drill all day long. Yesterday I saw enter here five hundred Austrian prisoners, taken very recently in a victory that we (3) won. Many of them were Italians and quite content to be prisoners. I chatted in German with several; they told me that they had not fought ten minutes, having been cut off and taken immediately. They all complain of the manner in which they are treated in Austria. There were officers, taken also. They were big handsome men. They almost alone, of all the prisoners, had a sad air. Their costumes are atrocious and of a horrible dirtiness. The whole army has blue trousers and white tunics. They are distinguished only by the color of the facings.

I should much like, dear father, that, to regularize my position and to make myself well regarded by my chiefs, you send me an extract of birth, your consent for me to enlist, and a certificate of good conduct from the French consul or the mayor of Geneva. If I present that to the chiefs, they will have more regard for me… (1) My good dear mother has nothing to fear; I shall not be sent into the fire for some time…

Farewell, dear father, your son who loves and cherishes you.

(3) It is a matter of the victory of Palestro, on the 31st of May. One will remark with what rapidity the esprit de corps is born.

(1) He had not been able to enlist in a definitive manner without papers.

M. A. de Tucé to his sister

Saint-Mihiel, June ‘59.

My dear friend,

I was very surprised on learning of Fernand’s rash act, and I take great part in your anguish. Nevertheless, while blaming him for the sorrow he causes you, I cannot help being moved on seeing the enthusiasm of this young man, who runs to danger to support a cause whose triumph will give satisfaction to his generous instincts, without bringing him any material compensation for the sacrifices he imposes on himself. My comrades, to whom I have recounted what he has just done, admire him and take a lively interest in him; so give me news of him, I pray you, for everyone here takes him into friendship, accompanies him with their vows and vows him a lively sympathy. Fortunately, he is of a good temperament, fairly robust and without bad habits; he will make war in a country where the populations are friendly, the privations will be less hard; he will form himself and develop further in this agitated life.

His resolution makes me almost ashamed of the useless life I lead here, I who have worn a saber for more than twenty years, and who have gone neither to Africa nor to the Crimea, and perhaps shall not go to Italy.

The 7th Lancers is part of the army of Paris… my squadron is at the depot, which makes me desire still more keenly my epaulette of squadron leader; it is the only way to get out of Saint-Mihiel…

Farewell, my dear Louise, take courage to bear this difficult ordeal. I hope this time will not be long, to judge by the manner in which the Austrians are being pushed. Farewell, I embrace you all.

Your brother, Adrien

Dear father,

Acqui, 4 June 1859.

I am now in the provisional company of the Chasseurs of the Apennines. My captain begs you to send me the papers I asked you for; to reach a rank, one must be known. With that I shall advance much more quickly… Our uniform is not very pretty: (1) a dark blue kepi with red piping, a great blue greatcoat, gray or black trousers, with a green band and tucked into light blue gaiters; the belt of the bayonet is black. The officers are dressed like us, except that they carry a saber.

(1) Soldiers are almost as coquettish as pretty women.

2

On the 2nd of June, Garibaldi, at the head of his Chasseurs of the Alps, had beaten the Austrians a second time before Varese. It was a great regret for Fernand not to have taken part in that battle, nor in that of Como.

On the 4th of June 1859, the French army had won at Magenta a great victory. Napoleon III was in command; his plan, which had Milan for objective, failed completely. The grenadiers and the zouaves, whose dash was irresistible, succeeded in seizing the Ponte-Nuovo. But the enemy having resumed the offensive, the battle seemed lost, and the Austrian general had already telegraphed his victory, when, toward six o’clock, Mac-Mahon arrived. He carried the village of Magenta and pursued the Austrians into the houses where they had taken refuge.

When, at eight o’clock, this great victory was announced to the Emperor, he was profoundly astonished; and indeed his famous plan had had nothing to do with it. He did not even know how to pursue the enemy.

On the 8th of June, Garibaldi had seized Bergamo. He then came to inspect the Chasseurs of the Apennines, and Fernand took part in the enthusiastic ovations that everywhere greeted the hero of Italian independence. The charm of his eloquence partook of the prodigious; a few words sufficed him to inflame courage, and entire populations, electrified, took up arms. Garibaldi possessed in the highest degree the qualities that were totally lacking in d’Aurelles and in Trochu: audacity and confidence. (1)

(1) Later, during a long stay at Rome, I often had the chance to see Garibaldi at close quarters, and each time his presence raised the same passionate acclamations. He no longer wore the red shirt; his costume was arranged with art: an elegant cap, a muffler thrown like a scarf, a cloak of gray cloth, draped in the antique manner. At first sight, this seemed to us to lack simplicity and recalled a little too much the theatrical taste of the Italians; but when one contemplated that beautiful head, with regular features, that great intelligent brow, one saw shining there the calm of true bravery, the serenity of an upright conscience, with an expression of frankness and of goodness so powerful that it irresistibly drew sympathy and respect.

Dear mother,

Alessandria, 9 June 1859.

The rumor runs that we leave Saturday for Milan and to rejoin Garibaldi. We are here, at Alessandria, to be equipped. I shall send you my portrait when I am harnessed from head to foot; you will not recognize me, so much am I browned by the sun; I have completely changed complexion. For the moment I am worn out with fatigue. The body must be broken in; in a few days it will be done. What saves me is that, although lying on the tiles, I sleep all the same. Our drill is very tiring; it is the maneuver of the Chasseurs. I watch how the others do it and I imitate them. Once before the enemy, I shall manage well. One must hope that everything will change too, for we are badly fed, we have only three sous a day, and severe officers. At Acqui I was on fatigue duty for the bread. They put twenty-eight loaves of three pounds in a sack on my back, and there was twenty minutes’ walk. Going up the stairs, I was obliged to let the bread fall, so tired was I. There are unavoidable fatigues, but I escape some of them, here is how: the Italians are all lazy as dormice, and, as soon as they have a free moment, they lie down on their straw. I and the other Frenchmen, we always go strolling about on one side or another, so that, when someone is needed for an extraordinary fatigue, they go into the rooms and take those who are there.

I do not need linen; they will give us some. Since you want to send me money, you can send it to me by letter or otherwise, if you find some more suitable means. You will understand that, when one is from five in the morning until half past eight at drill, and one has nothing in one’s belly, one is glad to treat oneself to a little glass during a rest. During the day, if I did not take something at the canteen, I should quickly fall ill; our soup is rice, and always rice, with a little piece of beef; I have enough bread, but it is not too good to eat dry, especially this kind, which is devilishly so.

Tell papa well that if I had for an instant the intention of entering the French army, it was on seeing it so fine; but I knew how much that would have displeased papa, and I myself, on reflecting on it, did not want it…

Our captain speaks French very well; he wants his company to be the first, and that is what we strive to do. It is incredible the mixture of people there is in our regiment: Italians of every country, Swiss, Frenchmen, Austrian deserters, the Pope’s soldiers. Among the Frenchmen who are here, several have already served in the Crimea. I am not well bound to any of them; there are too many ill-bred ones. I am always on the qui-vive; one must always have one’s bayonet at one’s side, but as I am quite resolved to nail down the first one who annoys me, no one says anything to me. Yesterday two Italians who were fighting with their bayonets were disarmed, and they were put in irons. Everyone is robbed. From me they have already taken a pair of shoes. If we had knapsacks, we could stow away our things, but now it is impossible. There is much enthusiasm among us. All desire to leave and to find themselves facing the Austrians. It is a pity that the ranks have been so badly given. Many of our officers make us do the drill with the theory book in hand. As for me, I would just as soon be a simple soldier; if one has more trouble, at least one has no responsibility. Later, when I know enough, I would not say no… The Frenchmen are scattered through all the companies and do not form a single one, as I believed.

Farewell, dear and good mother, I ask your pardon a thousand times for the grief I caused you; that is my only regret, to have caused pain to you, my dear parents, always so good to me. I wept too on reading what you tell me of Louise. Poor little rag! I embrace her with all my heart. I was able to embrace only her and you at my departure, and even then not as I should have wished; I hide myself each time I read your letters in order to weep, and now that I write to you, the tears come to my eyes.

But come, no sadness, we shall see one another all again. What joy! oh, what a day of festival for me when I shall be able to clasp you to my heart…

Your affectionate son, Fernand

Dear mother,

Piacenza, 27 June 1859.

Having arrived at San Giovanni, in the evening we danced to the sound of our band and of that of the country, which were playing before the colonel’s house. The next day we left at two in the morning and arrived at Piacenza at half past nine, all that without eating. Magnificent reception, bravos, bouquets, etc., etc… The town paid us a double ration of wine, salted meat — in short, we have been admirably well treated…

The day before yesterday, there was a revolt in the regiment. The rumor had run that we were staying in garrison at Piacenza. After the roll call, all began to shout: Long live Garibaldi! Long live the war! We want to leave! The officers arrive and say: You will leave when you have received orders from your superiors. — A soldier replies: We shall leave without you. — The officers advance to know who said that. The soldiers surround them shouting: All! all! we want to leave! — The officers draw their sabers. — To the muskets! shout the soldiers. The guard arrives. At last the tumult subsides. A few men are arrested, and the next day the council of war assembles. Fortunately they were acquitted. After that I do not think we shall be kept here long. I shall not be sorry to leave Piacenza, although it is a charming town, very large and well fortified. On leaving, the Austrians destroyed almost all the fortifications. Our vanguard arrived at Piacenza six hours after the departure of the Austrians, who left in the town more than six millions’ worth of war material, convoys of clothing and all their sick. A host of things were drowned in the Po. We have re-established the bridge of boats, which they had burned. I can say that I have… bathed in the Po. It is a great fine river; the water is troubled like that of the Arve and fairly cold. There is here a frightful heat, so everyone goes out only in the evening. One sees superb toilettes, worn by women who well deserve this luxury. I have never seen a country where there are so many beautiful women! It is now that I regret not knowing Italian; I should have given French lessons to some of them.

25 June.

You must have heard tell of the great battle that took place yesterday.

The allies had thirty thousand men put out of combat and the Austrians nearly double. This I have from an employee of the French Commissariat. Here one avoids the hospital. The sick are directed to Alessandria, to make room for the wounded who are awaited. I have seen the 3rd Zouaves; it is not so battered as had been said at Palestro. One notices that all the French and Piedmontese wounded have wounds from bullets, and the Austrians from bayonets or from saber. Very few of the wounded recover, so bad are the wounds; almost all necessitate amputation.

We have just been given knapsacks taken from the Austrians. There have also been created in our regiment first-class soldiers who carry the saber; they are all those who have already served before. They have a sou more. You may well think that I have not been…

3

The battle of Solferino began at four in the morning. On one side 170,000 Austrians and 500 pieces of artillery; on the other, 150,000 men and 400 pieces. The struggle lasted for sixteen hours. The French had had to cross fields surrounded by mulberry trees; and the garlands of climbing vines, which linked the trees to one another, formed so many obstacles to the dash of the cavalry. The Austrians occupied the heights, from which they rained shells and cannonballs. The heat was torrid and the thirst so burning that one drank “in muddy and sometimes bloody ponds.” (R. Kemp.) The aspect of the field of battle was frightful. The ambulances did not suffice for the appalling number of the wounded. The shells had massacred doctors and stretcher-bearers.

A Swiss, M. Henri Dunant, (1) then wrote a pamphlet entitled Souvenir de Solférino, in which he described that horrible spectacle. This pamphlet, translated into all languages, contributed much to the organization of aid to the wounded. The plenipotentiaries of twelve great powers signed, on the 2nd of August 1864, the ten articles of the Geneva Convention, and the Red Cross on the white flag thenceforth protected the ambulances.

(1) Uncle of one of the sons-in-law of my friend Doret. He pursued a long old age in retirement at Saint-Gall.

Vezza, 25 July 1859.

A few days after writing to you, we left Piacenza and came here into the Tyrol. All along the road we have been admirably received, at Milan above all; but we have made frightful forced marches. At Milan, on arriving, two soldiers fell dead from fatigue and heat. At Como, they made us leave our knapsacks; we have only the bread-bag, which contains a shirt and a brush, for all baggage. All along the road, we shall sleep under the open sky, without tents, without anything. Now we are face to face with the Austrians; our sentries can speak with theirs. It is a deserted country, without any resources; the inhabitants are true savages. We have frightful food, bad polenta or rye bread, and with that marauding is very severely punished. You could not imagine the trouble I had to procure this paper; having no pen, I write to you with a bit of wood. The bad food has set dysentery among us; fortunately it has passed off for me, and now I am well. I received only yesterday at the same time the two letters, the one of the 11th of June containing 30 francs, and that of the 12th of July. My lieutenant paid me the 30 francs and I endorsed the draft to him. It was high time it arrived, for I was flying on more than one wing.

We are under the orders of Garibaldi, and form his 1st regiment. Moreover, we are soon to be disbanded, and I hope to see you again in some time. At this idea alone, I cannot contain my joy, I become as if mad. What happiness when I shall be able to embrace you all and see all my friends again. There is talk of disbanding all those who are not Lombards or Piedmontese. My food is no longer enough for me; I am always hungry. I should come back very thin, but not very burned by the sun, for here in the mountains it is already very cold; the snow and the bears are not far from us. To sustain ourselves, we make coffee every day and we have full mess-tins of it. It is that which has cured me and prevents me from being ill now.

Do not be anxious about my health. I learned with pleasure that Louise was in marvelous health. Tell her to joke less at my expense, for, apart from a thrust of the bayonet that I gave in a duel to an Italian of my company, I have not done great feats of prowess. (1)

(1) Michel Rey to Paul M.

Bonneville, the 2nd of August 1859.

”… Fernand is at Edolo; he has written to me again very curtly about his return, but he gives me details about his famous duel, I copy: ‘For some days already we had been looking askance at each other; one day the dispute broke out and we quarreled about not much of anything; I gave him a slap. Then my man, without saying anything, takes his musket and signs to me. I understand; one does the rest; I take mine and, each accompanied by two friends, we went to a quarter of an hour from the village, and there we fought with the bayonet. The combat did not last five minutes. I ran him through the left shoulder.’” — How much he will have to tell us on his return! If he had been a braggart, he would have boasted of some brilliant deed and we should have believed him. But his letters are a faithful image of war: much more fatigue than battles; forced marches, bad food, the inclemency of the weather — there is what kills a greater number of men than bullets or shells. A few letters, the most interesting perhaps, have disappeared, but they would not have appreciably changed the general impression that the narrative leaves.

Assuredly it is very fine to give one’s life to deliver a great nation from servitude, and to prepare its unity.

Will it not nevertheless be permitted to add that, in the single battle of Magenta, the French lost 4,500 men, the Austrians 10,000 prisoners and killed. Today, the Tribunal of The Hague could obtain the deliverance of a conquered country without making it be paid for so dearly. Such is, I believe, the lesson that the grandfather ought to draw from these tragic events, when he recounts them to his grandchildren.

Dear mother,

Edolo, 10 August 1859.

After having written my letter to Alix with bilberries, (1) I received yours of the 30th of July. We left this cursed mountain this morning and, after eight hours’ march, without the least crust of bread in our bellies, we arrived at Edolo, a country a little more civilized. Our disbanding is decided; they make fifty men leave each day from each battalion. The other day I was advanced sentry on Monte Tonale; four Austrian deserters presented themselves before me and I led them away. I shall long remember the miseries we have undergone. You could not imagine the number of the sick and of those dead from fatigue. Out of a hundred and fifty men, the company was reduced at Monte Tonale to ninety-seven. As for me, I am well, except that my feet are crushed to a pulp, because I have bad shoes and no stockings, nor any foot-cloths to put inside them…

In a short time, then, I shall be able to embrace you all. Never shall I have my fill of it, dear mother. If you knew how I thought of you, above all when I was on sentry duty. I always imagined myself to be in the midst of you, then all at once I heard footsteps and was forced to call out: Halt! Who goes there? and to ask for the parola d’ordine. I must tell you that I have made frightful progress in Maltese, that is to say in Italian.

Come, farewell, dear mother, I embrace you all, papa, Paul, Alix, Louison. How happy one is to know that there is always someone dear to you, who thinks of you, and that one is not alone in life!

Your son who adores you, Fernand

(1) Little berries of a shrub.

Edolo, 16 August 1859.

Here I am in despair. Imagine that they are making us go back. My company leaves tomorrow for Vezza. The disbanding does not advance at all. In my impatience to see you again, I am like a madman. Another fortnight or so and I hope to reach you in good health; but I shall have to do the whole journey on foot — it is about a month’s march.

Lovera, the 19th of September 1859.

Dear father,

Since my last letter, we have gone back up to Monte Tonale, where I assure you we were not warm. We fought with snowballs, and we went bear-hunting. The first time, we did not see it, but we found a sheep that it had just strangled and that the shepherds had forced it to abandon. Then, in the evening, we returned there, seven men with the lieutenant, and we set ourselves on the lookout. We passed there a part of the night. At last, master Martin came and we killed him. You could not believe what a feast we made with it. The whole company licked its fingers; nevertheless I do not find it anything wonderful…

Dear mother,

8 October 1859.

At last, at last I am going to see you again! Tomorrow or the day after I shall have my discharge. It is time for me to reach Turin to have some money, for it is a long time since I had any, which is not at all agreeable in this country of savages. … It seems they are going to give us medals, but I am not sure of that…

Dear mother,

Turin, 10 October 1859.

Imagine that they kept us another ten days at Bergamo for our discharges. Now I have it, none too soon! They send us back without any assistance or travel allowance; they scarcely wanted to pay our railway fare; so I was very glad to find the good letter here and to draw the 60 francs to buy myself a coat. I had been obliged to sell my greatcoat in order to eat, and I was quite simply in a cloth jacket, an attire that was hardly suitable for crossing Mont Cenis. I am here with two friends of my company, both Frenchmen. They will come as far as Geneva with me. We shall be obliged to do the three stages of Mont Cenis on foot, the coach costing too much. Then, from Chambéry to Geneva, I hope we shall be able to take the coach. It will be only in four or five days… I am burning with impatience to embrace you, my good mother, you, papa, Paul, Alix and my little Louison, whom I shall find grown, I am sure.

Your son who loves you more tenderly than ever.

Fernand

Escaped from the Austrian bullets, Fernand, after long fatigues and a thousand dangers, had come back to us, but in what a state! Jaundice first, then typhoid fever, were the reward of his courageous escapade. I occupied the same room as he, and I was witness to the assiduous care that a mother alone knows how to give to a beloved son. It is indeed thanks to her that he was saved.

Appendix to Chapter II. — In 1860, the prodigious expedition of the Thousand delivered Sicily and the Kingdom of Naples to Garibaldi. It was a triumphal promenade; the Red Shirts seized Calabria without combat, and the royal troops fled successively from the Volturno and from Capua. Acclaimed by the Neapolitans, Garibaldi was received as dictator of the Two Sicilies, but, his destinies having ceased their bravura, he hastened to hand over power to Victor Emmanuel.

In 1866, a new campaign of Garibaldi: “Rome or death!” Such was his war cry. Then he saw rise up against him that same government which had so well profited from his victories, but which did not dare resist the demands of diplomacy. Beaten near Bergamo, Garibaldi was surrounded at Aspromonte and gravely wounded in the right foot by a bullet. After long sufferings, the bullet was at last extracted, on the indications of Nélaton. The king understood what was odious in his conduct toward his benefactor; he made him a gift of the little islet of Caprera, near the coasts of Sardinia. Garibaldi withdrew there; “the liberator of ten million Italians, accompanied by his sons and three friends, carried away from his conquests only a few tree saplings.”

In 1865, he was named grand master of Freemasonry.

Named a French deputy, he went to sit in the Assembly of Bordeaux, “elected on a day of panic,” but he was insulted there by the monarchists and tendered his resignation. Withdrawn to Caprera, he died there in 1882.

III

1860-1861

FERNAND A CHASSEUR OF AFRICA. — PAUL A STUDENT. — THE SOCIETY OF BELLES-LETTRES. — STUDIES OF PAINTING. — “A MONK,” PICTURE PAINTED BY LUGARDON. — J. NICOLE’S BEGINNINGS IN TEACHING. — SIXTEEN YEARS OLD. — VERSES AGAINST MOCKERY. — A LITERARY MYSTIFICATION. — VACQUERIE AND ROMANTICISM. — “CARPE DIEM.” — ASCETICISM. — REJECTED.

1

FERNAND A CHASSEUR OF AFRICA

The privations, the fatigues, the dangers, nothing had been able to disgust Fernand with the military life. As soon as his health was a little restored, he enlisted at Lyon in the French army and obtained to be sent to Algeria, where he went to rejoin his uncle.

M. de Montal (1) to M. Milliet

Valence, the 9th of February 1860.

My dear friend,

Yesterday, toward two in the afternoon, a tall and handsome young man entered my office; I greeted him and asked him to whom I had the honor of speaking. He had to give the name of Fernand to set me on the way; then the acquaintance was soon renewed… At Madame Marquet’s, (1) one did better; one said: “But I think it is Fernand!” A lady who was on a visit, Madame Gérin, said: “Here is a young man who very much resembles Madame Milliet; could it not be her son?”… Fernand is fresh and lusty, delighted with the career in which he has enlisted…

We dined all together and passed the evening until eleven o’clock very gaily, because Fernand was very gay, very talkative, very agreeable. I led him as far as the railway carriage, and he must have arrived this morning at Marseille.

We were very enchanted with the good manners, the bearing, the affability of this young man; he is altogether nice, and I am happy to compliment his father and his mother on it.

(1) Notary at Valence, a childhood friend of M. Milliet.

(1) Another childhood friend.

This brave and excellent boy was unfortunately of an extreme weakness when it was a matter of struggling against the attraction of pleasure. He let himself too easily be drawn along by his comrades.

Fernand to his mother

Marseille, 12 February 1860.

Dear mother,

You are going to be very astonished to receive yet another letter from Marseille; I am going to explain to you how that comes about. Scarcely arrived here, I had my route-sheet visaed at the Commissariat; but the next morning, the day of embarkation, a frightful storm! Despite that, I went to the boat, where I paid for my second-class place, and there the captain told me that they would not leave before the next morning, at eight o’clock; so much so that I went out, accompanied by more than half the passengers, to eat and sleep in the town, and the next morning, at six o’clock, I arrived just as the wheels of the boat were beginning to move. So here I am nailed here until next Friday. I am with a young brigadier of my regiment who is coming out of the school of Saumur and who is also going to rejoin. You may think what a vexation I have felt: first I lose my second-class place, and then I eat up all the money I was bringing to entrust to my uncle. What is more, my sack has left with the boat, so that I am without effects…

My good mother,

Marseille, 22 February 1860.

You must have received my first letter, which told you that I had missed the boat. Something even more disagreeable has just happened to me. When I wanted to re-embark last Friday, the captain told me that I ought to have gone to the fort and not spent eight days in the town. He had me led away with about ten others who were in the same case as I, and we are condemned to remain [a number of] days at Fort Saint-Nicolas. I swear to you that when this was announced to me, I would gladly have blown out my brains. It is a fine beginning! There is, however, no fault of mine, for I was absolutely unaware that it was not permitted to remain in the town. How is my uncle going to take this?

Marseille, 15 March 1860.

… Here I am soon at the end of my time, which seems very long to me. To distract ourselves, we set traps to catch the rats, we make candles with the fat of our portions of meat, in order to be able to keep watch a little. Beside us there are others who make tow; well, one plays cards as much as one can. It will not be too soon that I find my sack again to have shoes, for my boots laugh on every side with all their might, and I do not know what I have done to the heels — it seems they are angry with me, for they absolutely want to leave me.

I forgot to tell you that on Sundays we go to mass and that we sing canticles.

Friday. Great news, I leave today.

M. de Tucé to his sister

Constantine, 31 March 1860.

Fernand has at last arrived at Constantine in fine weather and in good health… At Philippeville, they refused him authorization to take the stagecoach; he was therefore obliged to do the stages on foot. He arrived not too tired from his three days’ march.

He was not able to find his sack, so it is well lost; only he had kept his pocketbook containing his discharge from the Italian Legion, and the letter from Félix (his father) for M. Franq. As he could not have lost them in the prison of Marseille, he lost them immediately on disembarking at Philippeville. I was sorry about it, for his discharge might one day have been useful to him, and Félix’s letter would have given pleasure to M. Franq. The latter received Fernand in the most amiable manner and took him to lunch with him… At the barracks, there was a review by the general. Fernand made a little acquaintance with his new comrades and came to rejoin me. I showed him the Arab town, which he does not much appreciate. On Monday he is presented at the doctor’s visit and underwent the various exercises of the day. This morning he came to see me; he finds himself perfectly well lodged, well fed (he is not difficult) and, on coming back from a ride on horseback, I caught sight of him in uniform carrying the soup to the prisoners. He had borrowed a jacket, for he is not yet clothed; he will be so only tomorrow. He seems in very good dispositions and very little frightened by the hard moments he will sometimes have to pass.

“He arrived here without a sou. I gave him enough to pay his welcome to the comrades of the barrack-room; but I think it will be good to settle his budget for him. I shall give him his week every Sunday; 2 fr. 50 or 3 francs will be quite sufficient while he is a simple chasseur; when he is more advanced in rank, you will increase it a little.

He is placed in the first platoon of the 5th squadron, bed-comrade of the trumpeter, an old trooper who is to teach him the details of the trade…

We leave for Bône any day now. A revolt has just broken out in the South; it seems there has been a very hot affair.

Fernand to his mother

Bône, 17 August 1860.

You hope, you write to me, that we shall not go to Syria, and it is precisely the day your letter reached me that my uncle received the order to hold himself ready to leave with a squadron of ours and another of the 6th Chasseurs of Africa. Naturally I asked him to leave with him, and he consented. It is the 3rd squadron that leaves; it has been formed of the old soldiers of all the squadrons. I have also changed and taken the green pompom instead of the yellow; so that I am surrounded only by old veterans. We are a hundred and fifty men on horseback and fifty on foot; all the best horses of the regiment have been taken; I kept my Polenta.

… Here is the composition of my new tribe: First the trumpeter Casson, my bed-comrade; he is a Béarnais, an excellent fellow, making no noise or fuss. Céleste, a soldier since his childhood; he is a foundling; he has nearly twenty years’ service, is decorated with a medal; he is a fairly good comrade, only he is always grumbling. Rocher, the chief’s orderly, a good fellow, very obliging and already an old trooper. Finally, Gamé, a Provençal, an old soldier but a hothead; he has already two courts-martial on his back for fights, the first against some Arabs who said of him that he was “kif-kif a lion,” that is to say like a lion; and the second for having eaten the nose off a remount cavalryman; for the rest very obliging, cooking very well and knowing his trade thoroughly… I was forgetting the brigadier Lobret, a great strapping fellow of nearly seven feet tall, having received some instruction, speaking English very well, ex-sub-officer of carabineers; he is the funniest and most jovial individual in the world, always having the word for a laugh and mocking everyone.

While awaiting departure, we are encamped at Bône; it is a very nice little town, especially for an African town. Everything there is very cheap, the fruits above all: melons, watermelons, cucumbers, eggplants, etc., are for next to nothing.

We go in the evening to bathe the horses in the sea; it is an amusement rather than a fatigue. I put the bridles of my two horses in my mouth, and I amuse myself by swimming, making them follow me. Despite all the beauty of Bône, I should like to be already embarked, so much do I want to go and see Syria!

I should have liked to paint this little picture so unexpected and so original: my brother swimming and making his two horses follow him, holding their snaffle-bridles in his mouth; but I was as astonished as a chick watching a duck dabble in the water. I could not arrive at understanding how a life so little intellectual and a milieu so coarse could please Fernand. Thus two brothers, occupied until then with the same studies, launched themselves into two opposed paths, and each of them, under the influence of different milieus, was to undergo in his manner of thinking and of acting profound modifications.

Assuredly, in our universities, not enough place is given to physical exercises. The Greeks of former times had better principles of education, and the English follow their example in this. But, on the other hand, is it not regrettable to observe to what point the intellectual culture of soldiers is neglected. The material existence being assured, the man no longer has the care of the future; passive obedience obliterates in him the sentiment of responsibility; there remains for him only one fixed idea: advancement. His aim, his ideal, his dream, is war. War becomes for him a need. He must fight, against no matter whom, about no matter what, and this prolonged state of soul is going to create in his descendants unfortunate hereditary tendencies.

2

PAUL A STUDENT. — THE SOCIETY OF BELLES-LETTRES

Between the College and the higher teaching of the University, there was then, at Geneva, a transition: the Gymnase. Paul was fifteen years old when he entered it in 1859. This organization, which makes the student’s life begin too early, succeeds in Switzerland, where the young people are in general of a serious character; it would not be without danger for little Parisians.

In that time, the Geneva students were of a rare wisdom and of an improbable virtue. I am not aware that any of us ever abused the confidence of his parents, nor the complete liberty that was granted him. Our “flight,” as one says at Geneva, was composed of distinguished students, several of whom have made a name for themselves in the sciences, in letters or in politics. (1) I bound myself to a few of them with that good friendship which lasted all our lives, because it is founded on a reciprocal esteem. Jules Nicole, to whom Greek philology owes such fine discoveries, entered at the same time as I into the Society of Belles-Lettres, where we passed the happiest years of our lives.

(1) I shall cite: MM. Jules Nicole, the learned Hellenist; Édouard Naville, the illustrious Egyptologist; G. Favon, who in some sort made the young Genevan; the two Dorets; Strahelin, who taught at the Sorbonne; Ed. Sarasin; W. Favre; Louis Ferrière; Gouy, who became an architect; L. Doppe, who made excellent translations of German works; the witty E. Richard, who became a very fashionable lawyer and who played an important political role as Councillor of State. A little more advanced in their studies were our friends of the Society of Belles-Lettres, Roehrich, Balavoine and Doret, who are eloquent pastors.

There exist at Geneva several Societies of students and, each of them being not numerous, intimacy establishes itself naturally among comrades who all know one another well. There is the usefulness and the charm of these gatherings; one finds there a favorable ground for making lasting sympathies germinate and flower. After the fortuitous and passing relations of childhood, before the impassioned joys and torments of love, adolescence is the happy age when friendship reigns almost without sharing.

Scarcely do a few beings of the same species find themselves in contact, when one sees at once manifest themselves the two opposed forces that govern the Universe, attraction and repulsion. The like unite, but very quickly too the contrary enter into struggle. Emulation and the diversity of tastes bring about the division of each group into adverse parties, all equally animated by the “Will to Power.”

Among us, the electoral campaign was ardent when it was a matter of choosing a President, a Secretary, a Treasurer (his treasure was never very heavy), and even a Censor, whose beardless little face responded ill to his grave functions. He fulfilled them, moreover, with conscience and with a lively sentiment of corporate responsibility.

Each week a literary session brought us together. The Committee had fixed in advance the program of the works: translations, dissertations, literary or philosophical criticisms, recitations, (1) etc…

(1) I remember that we had the boldness to play, without costumes, almost the whole of Othello. The principal role was held with conviction by the future preacher Balavoine. I had accepted that of Iago, which no one wanted, but how was a Desdemona to be found? A man dressed as a woman would have been ridiculous; the role was, without ceremony, suppressed. The unconsciousness of youth alone has such audacities.

We had a musical section, and I have always admired how much the habit of singing in chorus is an excellent exercise at once moral and social. There, each seeks, not to shine individually, but to fulfill his part well in a harmonious whole. It is on this model that all collective organizations ought to regulate themselves.

Each literary session was followed by a joyous gathering, where songs alternated with friendly chats, but where, in imitation of the German thunes, much was smoked, and where one ingurgitated, at common expense, a great quantity of mugs of beer.

The good Aubin, our wise minister of Finances, had more than one occasion to manifest his anger and his despair in the face of a cash-box that emptied itself before having been filled. His pathetic allocutions, full of bitterness, ended ordinarily, like those of M. Thiers, with this terrible threat: “I tender my resignation!” He was implored to keep his charge, which he greatly wanted to do, and he ended by yielding to our entreaties. This little comedy was renewed so often that it amused us much.

A few disorders having just drawn upon us the ill will of our professors: broken windows, a smashed gate — all that had nothing very grave about it, but a new Society, the Pédagogia, had been founded in rivalry with ours. The thunes were totally forbidden there, and our professors recommended it to the parents, in preference to that turbulent Society of Belles-Lettres.

Desirous of re-establishing our good renown, the sober students were sorry to favor with their money the intemperance of a few comrades. They asked that each pay for his personal consumptions. Hence indignant protestations, in the name of good comradeship and of solidarity.

For my beginnings at the Society of Belles-Lettres, I wrote, in a little humorous collection entitled the Caméléon, a sort of burlesque minutes of our stormy discussions on the official thunes:

The scene took place in China; castor oil replaced the beer, and the names of the orators were easily recognizable: Empaytaz, Roehrich, Balavoine, Zurlinden, Léchet had become the mandarins Empé-Ko, Ri-Ko, Bala-Tchlou, Zur-Lao, Ourma-Létché, etc… Long and eloquent speeches were pronounced: Zur-Lao celebrated with enthusiasm the truth and the frankness whose blossoming only a savory beverage can favor. Then, turning toward his personal adversaries, our honest students of theology, the virulent and anticlerical lawyer attacked them with a superb but unfortunately very unjust energy: “Hypocrisy! hypocrisy!! hypocrisy!!!” he cried; and it was under the blackest colors — for, alas! passion blinds — that he depicted the priests of Buddha, “preaching virtue and practicing vice, lying to everyone, lying to their enemies, lying to their friends, lying to themselves, lying to God! lying, lying, lying!” At last, supposing the triumph of temperance, I added this peroration: “And now, windows, sleep in peace! Rejoice, gates, and creak with joy on your hinges!”

In his turn, the president Ourma-Létché vaunted, he too, the sweet bonds of friendship, which can only be drawn tighter in the bosom of fraternal feasts.

But, while I parodied the speeches of our adversaries, I cited textually the moved words of our dear Roehrich:

“It is true,” he said, “I have seen more than once people who, during drunkenness, embraced one another after the orgy. But is that really friendship? No, you do not know what friendship is, you who believe you find it at the bottom of a glass. Friendship is something purer and nobler; it is born of the similitude of ideas and of sympathy. It is an interior voice that cries to you from the depths of the soul: There is the one you dreamed of! When you hear translated by speech or by writing a great thought, a generous sentiment, an intimate and profound emotion, when you feel your heart beat and vibrate in unison, then, in shaking the hand of him who has touched you, you show him that you have understood him.”

Alas, these fine words were powerless to uproot old and deplorable traditions.

Already at that period, I observed in myself the germs of two tendencies whose development has followed that of my reason and my conscience: the horror of alcoholism and the desire for conciliation.

When an idea is wise, reasonable, advantageous, one might believe that all minds are going to rally to it on the spot. It is not so. The passions are there, which, though they be neither wise, nor reasonable, nor advantageous, none the less determine most of our actions. A naïve deputy who, in the French Chamber, should have the preposterous idea of proposing an alliance with Germany, would not be more badly received than I was when, on the occasion of a great cantonal festival (the Escalade), I proposed to the Society of Belles-Lettres to be reconciled with Zofingue, a rival Society. In vain did I observe that we, the new Bellettrians, were totally unaware of the antique grievances that might formerly have divided the students, that the word Union shone in our motto and that of Friendship in Zofingue’s. It seems that these words were empty of meaning. The hatred of the Big-Buttons will perpetuate itself eternally among the Little-Buttons; the two Societies will know how to remain hostile, without anyone being able to say clearly why. (1)

(1) Fourier has given the name of zohaists to that party spirit, which often does not draw back before intrigue. He claims that this reflective ardor is an abstract passion, that it will be able to be regulated and used in a rational social regime. In the meantime, it exercises its ravages in present society. (See Theory of Universal Unity, I, page 126.)

3

My parents dreamed of having me enter the École Centrale, but my passion for painting was beginning to prevail over my taste for mathematics. I took drawing lessons with an artist of very great talent, M. Léonard Lugardon, an admirer of David, although a former pupil of Gros. He had me copy the beautiful engravings of Marc-Antoine and a few drawings of Ingres, whom he had known at Rome. His enthusiasm for the Italian masters of the Renaissance, and principally for Raphael, had a decisive influence on the evolution of my thought. I became, like my master, a rabid and exclusive classicist. The colorists appeared to me as dangerous tempters whose honesty was not well demonstrated. I learned that Delacroix painted “with a drunken broom”; M. Ingres said that he would not be reassured if he met him at the corner of a wood. The study of the antique was the unique plank of salvation in an epoch of decadence, where the healthy traditions were submerged by bad taste. That has not changed, and I have remained somewhat of my master’s opinion.

Lugardon had just painted a very beautiful picture whose tender and melancholy feeling seemed to me, and still seems to me, worthy of Lesueur. I dedicated to my master the following verses:

A MONK

Picture painted by Lugardon

It was in Italy, in a convent, at evening, The sun was setting… At the edge of the terrace, A solitary monk had come to sit, Far from the noise, and pensive, his gaze into space

Was losing itself… The bitter regrets and the sorrows Could be read upon his brow all laden with thoughts. He, he contemplated the last hours of the day, In silence he dreamed… His hands were laid, The one upon the old wall, the other upon his knees, Holding, half closed, his book of prayer. The sun lit with a vivid light His brow at once grave and gentle.

Youth, he was thinking, youth, thou takest flight, Leaving behind thee grief, And my days, consumed in frivolous practices, Already draw near to their end. Lord, what wilt Thou say at the supreme judgment, When Thou shalt see me all trembling before Thee, When Thy angels, pushing the monk, frightened, pale, Shall cast him at Thy knees!

And yet I could have worked like another, Made the wheat grow in the furrows of the fields, Instead of reciting the vain paternoster, Protected the orphan, fought the wicked. I would have mingled my blood with yours, noble brothers, Dead for liberty.

What have I done, what have I done, Italy, O my mother, To wrest thee from captivity? Nothing, nothing! I have left thee a slave. Lord, if I had had the true faith, I could have served Thee in dying like a brave man, I could have… I could have… Lord, pardon me!

The day was waning, the sky was deep, immense; An artist was then passing on the path, He saw the monk seated, who wept in silence, And held out his hand to him. Understanding his regrets, his bitter thoughts, He kept the memory of them, With his moved brushes he has retraced them, Less for us than for the future.

(Geneva, August 1860.)

4

M. Morizot had inspired in me the taste for mathematics. Geometry and algebra pleased me about as much as the game of chess, and I have regretted more than once having abandoned too early those fine studies. I also loved music much, “that unconscious exercise of arithmetic,” as Leibniz says. My friend Gouy, who became an architect, was a good musician; his father permitted him to go to the theater and I accompanied him, but, too conscientious to neglect our lessons, we brought the book of Legendre, and, during the intervals, while most of the spectators, like good thirsty Swiss, left the hall to go and refresh themselves, we bravely dug away at some theorem.

Geometry and the opera seemed to us to go together very well. Gouy had a somewhat slow mind and I had mine much too quick. I believed I could guess, and it often happened to me to take a wrong route. It is, however, an excellent method, when one wishes to learn a science, to try to teach it. More than once I have let myself go into that mania of explaining to those who know nothing what I myself knew only by halves.

Among all our comrades, there was one who already distinguished himself by his lively intelligence, his precocious erudition and the fineness of his mocking spirit. Jules Nicole has remained my best friend; he sustained me in painful trials and he occupies in my life a place too great for me not to make him at least a little one in these memoirs.

As I had gone to spend my holidays at Samoëns, he wrote to me:

3 August 1860.

Dear Milliet,

Here are many words, dear Paul; it is to tell you… (1) that you must pack up your paintings as quickly as possible and leave that society, gay, witty and without mockery, where you are so well in your element (if I do not fear to offend your modesty). As for me, it is almost with pleasure that I see the holidays end, having beside me neither Raphael, nor anything that resembles him; I am bored enough. However I have tasted a pleasure very piquant for its novelty, the giving of eight hours of lessons a day. Picture the pupil Nicole explaining the rule of tout and of même, to pupils who do not want to understand: “You are conjugating the verb; je conducts itself in an improper manner.” — The pupil weeps. Come, courage, take your dictation notebook; we left off in the Indian Chandelier, at the place where the doctor enters the temple of Brahma: continue: “His words were corrected of sense mingled with cow dung…” (trembling in the master’s voice). The pupil wants to laugh, he carries the mouthful, he looks at the master, who bursts out, and there is master and pupil laughing in a most familiar manner. The master strives to recover his seriousness: “Continue …of sense mingled with cow dung, so brilliant and so polished that one could mirror oneself in it (reciprocal laughter). — Come, finish: what are you laughing at? — At this cow dung. — Well! have you never seen any?” — And the master who scolds and who laughs. — And then, my dear, the parents! those frightful parents, more fatal to young masters and to their dignity than the wild laughter. These parents come at the moment of a magnificent: “Quelque should one write a verb in two words, quoi and que, quel an adjective agrees in gender and in number with its substantive and que remains invariable.” — Mama, I am very thirsty. — Well, my Ernest, monsieur permits you to go and drink. — Ring of the bell. — Who has come? — Madame So-and-so. — My Albert, go and greet her while your brother goes to drink. — And as the pupil Nicole has only two pupils, his class finds itself much diminished by these evolutions… I hope that you will permit me to see the canvases there. I hope too that it will not be necessary to wait several years, as is the case for those of the great masters of the Louvre, for the merit of them to let itself be seen by me, for I shall renounce observation, in view of the proximity of the baccalaureate examination, of which Bétant has given me a horrible fright.

As for Belles-Lettres, it is something pitiable. The premises of the Society have been transferred into one of the most ill-famed quarters of the town. We shall have to, you and I, and all the anti-thunists, and all the honest students, change the face of affairs or decamp. Till soon. (1)

J. Nicole

(1) The verse my friend mocks had been written in my album by M. Fleury.

(1) My friend, who has kept an excellent memory, gives me new and amusing details about his beginnings in teaching.

“I remember very well the dictation taken from the Indian Cottage. My victim was Alfred Vincent, aged ten. I was seventeen, and I drew twenty francs a month for one lesson a day. The lesson was to last an hour; there were races with the mama, but, in my first fervor, I forgot the duration despite the moanings of the pupil. In winter, the room where the lessons were given was not heated. My zeal had not cooled for that; yet I ended by asking Madame Vincent’s authorization to teach in my own room, an attic where there was a little stove, which I lit at the beginning of the lesson. One day when I was late, I found my pupil in the act of lighting it himself, to make me a surprise. The maid having forgotten the kindling, he was cutting some from a log with my razor. It was the first time that instrument had served for anything and it has never served since. Thirty years later, I recounted this adventure to M. Alfred Vincent, Councillor of State, President of the Department of Public Instruction. He no longer remembered it, the wretch!…”

My friend knew, moreover, very well how to pass on occasion from the pleasant to the severe. More than once, he brought us verses full of breath and of vigor. I asked him to copy in my album his Romans in Helvetia, of which here are a few fragments:

Why did the cries of the bear in the depths of its lair Trouble the sad majesty of the forests? Why does the bird of prey, abandoning its eyrie, Flee terrified far from our mountains?

The Roman eagle, which feels the lion of Africa Writhe in agony beneath its claw of steel, Wishes to rend also the Helvetic vulture And to soar as master above the glacier.

The various episodes of the struggle are recounted in detail:

Long was the fighting, the valley was black, When beneath the pensive sky nothing more was heard Than the crash of the waters and the song of victory Of the Helvetian.

It is with a savagery of a barbarous realism that the young poet described the carnage and all its ferocious horrors.

And the sky smiled. He who avenges his fatherland In the eyes of the Almighty is never too cruel. The bloody vapor that soiled the meadow Rose like an incense to the Eternal.

One no longer saw, when dawn lit the valley, The soldiers of the consul lower their standards To salute the day; the immaculate snow Drank the blood of the scattered corpses.

One does not spare time, one gives it life, Provided that, hard by, those famous conquerors, Defying them one by one, bend their infamy Beneath the ox-yoke.

An old herdsman holds the eagle, withered and bloody, And drives it impatiently into the flank of the vanquished, To hasten beneath the yoke the too-slow gait Of the children of Brutus.

Let them pass, those conquerors of earth and of wave Who rejoiced at the death-rattle of the humans Crushed around them; pass, masters of the world, Pass, Roman herds! (1)

J. Nicole

May 1860.

(1) It is the subject that Gleyre treated in his fine picture in the Museum of Lausanne.

5

I was beginning to paint, and I loved above all to make numerous and vast projects of pictures and of poems. To celebrate the anniversary of my birth, my father wrote a few verses in my album:

I love poetry and I love painting, Those two charming sisters who give each other the hand. Heaven made a gift of them to the poor human race So that it might understand, admire nature.

Uniting color to the great art of drawing, The painter makes her be seen in all her adornment, The poet sings her and transfigures her for us, When of his golden dreams he makes the swarm fly.

Happy is the mortal, great painter or holy poet, Who can, of beauty the very faithful interpreter, Translate a page of it and show us heaven!

To intoxicate oneself at will with art and with poetry, To feel oneself at once Virgil and Raphael, That would be to equal the drinkers of Ambrosia.

6 March 1860.

SIXTEEN YEARS OLD

Sixteen years old! It is the happy age when, come out of childhood, The young man, suddenly, with a bold step springs forth Toward the vast horizon that beams before his eyes. He contemplates at once both the earth and the heavens, With a clear gaze, as on coming out of a dream; And life rises to his heart like a sap. Everything seems new to him: the mountains, the woods, the meadows, And the golden clouds, and the azure waves; He listens, enraptured, to the murmuring brook, The sighing breeze, and all of nature Speaks to him… And he, dreamer and joyful at once, Is astonished to understand at last all these voices.

Sixteen years old! He is going to leave the roof that protects him And shake off gaily the dust of the college; In the great human drama, weary of being a spectator, He wishes to play his role and become an actor. Life is a combat, the world is a theater: He will have to, by turns, both play and fight. Come! Prepare thyself, young man with the boiling heart, Victory is not always to the most valiant, It is true; the skillful man can conquer by surprise; No matter! Go without fear, and take for thy device These words: Courage and Faith, Honor and Liberty, Holy love of Progress and of Humanity.

6 March 1860.

6

Like the peasants of Virgil, the student does not know his happiness. I was surrounded by excellent friends, who have since proved to me on many an occasion the unshakable fidelity of their affection, and that did not suffice me! As they teased me, very gently nonetheless, on my melancholy, I dreamed of an ideal friend, sentimental like myself. At the age when the child becomes a man, he often passes through a painful crisis, and his sickly sensibility exhales itself in complaints without reason. A precocious misanthropy — one ought perhaps to say a liver complaint — dictated to me tearful verses that make me smile today. I shall cite them nonetheless, for two reasons: first because they seem to me to characterize fairly well that state of soul which unsatisfied aspirations produce in the adolescent, then because they show the dangers of idealism and of spiritualism when they are ill understood. The slope of life leads to mystical asceticism, then to the most discouraging pessimism.

A ridiculous little Alceste, I cried out with bitterness:

Jesters, leave me! With your frivolous wit Do not pursue me! You stop at every step With a mocking laugh my soul that takes flight.

I have need of the peace of the silent woods, I have need to be alone. Your gaiety weighs upon me. Leave me to weep at my ease And to contemplate long the stars of the heavens.

Oh, why do you laugh thus at everything, Seeking the ridiculous and parodying all? You make wit everywhere, You mock heaven, the spring, the rose…

Never does enthusiasm with kisses full of fire Lay upon your brows its inspired lips, Nor on its empurpled wings Carry you to heaven, in ecstasy, toward God!…

Laugh then, mock! What does it matter to me!… And yet I should like to pour out my soul into a soul. Shall I find thee, friend, thou whom I should love so much? For the Good, both of us, we shall have the same flame.

Often, when I am alone, I dream of thee, at evening, And on my brow I feel my thoughts flit… The playful little fairies On their wings of azure dart forth to see thee.

The one says to thee softly: It is of thee that I think; The other closes thy eyes with a kiss, and thou, Thou must then think of me… Oh, all that, my God, would it be only a dream?

I should like upon my heart to feel another heart, I should like in my hand to clasp the hand of a brother; The friend I have dreamed of is not of this earth, No more than is happiness.

If it had lasted, this exaltation would have become a sort of neurosis. Fortunately, joyous reality often tore me away from that imaginary life. One had to set oneself to howling with the wolves. People had mocked me; in my turn I mocked others a little. Jules Nicole has always had much wit; his gaiety had on me the happiest influence; it preserved me from that lamentable misanthropy into which I was about to fall. We then made, in collaboration, a few literary mystifications. We wished to give a lesson to young pedants who had the pretension of knowing everything. Nicole has recounted this anecdote much better than I should know how to do, (1) I leave him the floor:

(1) Revue des Études grecques, volume 18, number 80.

One can fabricate from whole cloth a poem or a treatise in prose and clothe it with the title of a work followed by an author’s name. That is what two students of my acquaintance had imagined in their time, for the profit of French literature (let this souvenir of youth be pardoned me): little content with the reception given by the Society of which they were members to the works that bore their signature, they had the idea of offering it a tragedy of Coriolanus, due to the pen of Pierre Delong, a great forgotten poet, who lived in the first half of the seventeenth century. A complete biography served as an Introduction to the analysis of the drama, which was illustrated with tirades and even with entire scenes, the text conforming to that of the first and only edition. I still remember this Cornelian verse, drawn from a portrait of Coriolanus the Volscian, traced by a certain Tullus Aufidius:

His arm rises: one trembles; it lowers: one is dead.

a verse whose sublime energy one was invited to savor. A few judgments of the most celebrated contemporaries, of Boileau and of Racine among others, and also of the critics of the eighteenth century, of whom Voltaire in person, showed that, before plunging into the abyss of an unjust obscurity, Pierre Delong had had competent admirers.

This mystification was crowned with a full success. Everything was swallowed: the tragedy, the author and his critics. Among the members of the said Society, several considered that the two friends had not sufficiently brought out the classical beauty of such or such passage.

The Bellettrians gave each year one or two musical and literary evenings for the benefit of a charitable work. We therefore needed costumes, and the students’ sisters occupied themselves with this with zeal. They took as much interest as we in the success of our representations. My mother also organized at our house a little comedy followed by a ball. An old amateur of the theater, whom I shall name Népomucène, lavished on us advice of which we would gladly have dispensed him. Despite his real talent as a stage manager, he professed a detestable method, which consists in “making the most of” the least word, which is the very negation of all naturalness. He had a failing very frequent in the men of his generation, that of studding his conversation with learned quotations; our little mockers had made of them veritable catchphrases: “Nothing in excess! as the count of Ségur says.” And the count of Ségur shouldered all our nonsense. Were we asked whether we had slept well? the answer was: “Life is but a bitter plant… a narcotic!” Taking a few Latin words at random, we fabricated of them learned mottoes, of which we proposed the interpretation to the strongest Latinists of the society:

Ingenuis corda graviter simul alba vixerint.

Always “as the count of Ségur said.” After having well tortured their minds, our Latinists ended sometimes by discovering a mysterious sense in these enigmas. Assuredly, this little game was very puerile. It is not, however, altogether useless to mock pretentious pedants. Soon, alas, all these follies of youth were about to end.

7

The great writers who had made their debut or flourished toward 1830 were not dead, and the style they had created prolonged itself, but it was about to be transformed. Realism, with Courbet and Zola, marked a certain weariness with overstrained effects, with systematic contrasts and with phrases sporting plumes.

My parents were subscribers to the Rappel, a newspaper where Vacquerie published every day articles all sparkling with the shock of antitheses. We read also his curious volume entitled Profils et Grimaces, in which he sets forth with an insolent verve his hatred of the classical style; Racine is treated there in fine fashion — he is none the worse for it. Today these antique quarrels are appeased, and many people believe they can admire at the same time Victor Hugo and Racine, despite the diversity of their geniuses.

Here, according to Vacquerie, is the theory and the code of the romantic drama:

Life is the perpetual encounter of the sad and the gay, of the serious and the ridiculous, of the beautiful and the hideous, of the great and the mediocre, of the epic and the trivial, of the infinite and the material. Tragedy separates life into two lots: in one, the heroisms, the catastrophes, the crimes; in the other, the vices, the absurdities, the infirmities, the appetites. It adjudges itself the first lot and throws the second to comedy. One can no more abstract a passion from the soul than one can draw from the Ocean a glass of Seine water… Louis XIV was never seen without a wig: nor was tragedy either. The tragic verse is a pompous, magnificent verse, dressed in its Sunday best, starched, never rumpled, which takes everything seriously, which a jest dismays, which would believe itself dishonored if it happened to laugh. It carries its rhyme as a church beadle carries his halberd in a procession.

It is with the mind as with the body; new boots cramp the foot; new ideas cramp the intelligence. The drama is all new, Racine is an old boot. We understand, without imitating them, those who shoe themselves with worn-down tragedies…

We read in a report made by M. Saint-Marc-Girardin in the name of a commission charged with judging the candidates for chairs of history:

“The board has remarked with pain that bad taste had introduced itself into some of the compositions. The candidates believe they express an idea when they have found an image, and they do not choose their images with enough taste, for they are sometimes pompous and sometimes trivial, which makes a shocking contrast, and which is essentially repugnant to the grave simplicity of the historical style.”

We suppose a commission of asses charged with judging a competition of Arab horses.

“O bad taste!” the report would cry, “instead of walking sedately and doctorally, these horses prance, rear, throw their manes to the wind, strike sparks from their feet and then go at a walk, bolt and stop, gallop and lie down, ‘which makes a shocking contrast and which is repugnant to the grave simplicity of the style’” of the asses.

The study of the Greek authors and of the great writers of our admirable seventeenth century was beginning to inspire in me a few reserves in the admiration without limits that I had professed until then for the literature of 1830. On this subject, my father did not take jesting kindly. One was not to touch his idols. Remembering, no doubt, the fine time when Alexandre Dumas wrote Kean, or Disorder and Genius, he was not far from considering a bohemian life, carefree and mad, as the manifestation of a true artist’s temperament and as a condition almost necessary to the creation of a masterpiece. The wise Ponsard, with his honest and moderate talent, was his bête noire, and it is he, I believe, who is aimed at in this virulent protest against the neo-classicists:

SALLY

Down with the pedestals of our little great men, Gorged, the aquiline ones, with vanity; To the devil with the satiated, cretins sleeping their slumbers On the pillow of prejudices!

A fig for the sad mannered ranters, the doctrinaires, The wheezy economists, The chaste grocers and the perfect notaries, For all the positive men!

Away, those wise rhymesters whose discreet muse, The verses aligned to the cord, Without passion, without life, in their correct form, Would once have ravished Boileau.

Have no fear that, carried away, they should leap the barrier, They are prudent horsemen, Their Pegasus is wheezy, it paws in the rut, But does not take the bit in its teeth.

Speak to me of the lost children of Bohemia! In this century of miscreants, These pursuers of the Beautiful, these seekers of the problem Are the only true believers.

It is not they whom one sees stop up their ears Like the prudent Ulysseses; When the forbidden fruit hangs in vermilion clusters, They bite into it heartily.

They intoxicate themselves with the songs of the perfidious sirens; These adventurous passengers Fly heedless toward those charming queens To drink death in their kisses.

Possessors of châteaux in all the Spains, Rich with the maddest dreams, They have, in every country, villas, country houses, Ruins in every Peru.

O my fine lovers of mad poesies, Flout the school of good sense; Court boldly the blond fantasies, Intoxicate them with your incense!

To you the air and space and the lyric impulses! No yoke upon your untamed brows! You bridled classicists, draw out tragic verses, Cloistered in the three unities!

Stay, foundered horses, at the bottom of your stables, Ears low, eyes downcast, While there shall bound, making the sands fly, The noble coursers with manes all flowing.

8

In the presence of the Geneva youth, so studious and so puritan, my father was more astonished than charmed. Brought up in a milieu still penetrated with the ideas of Diderot and of Voltaire, he had made himself an ideal less severe, more human, and he expressed it in very harmonious verses:

CARPE DIEM

Springtime of life, O beautiful youth Whom hope carries off to the blue horizons, The present pours out to you in long streams the intoxication In the bosom of pleasures, to the noise of songs.

The swarm of loves, an enchanting troop, Light butterflies, chattering finches, Near your twenty years flutters without cease, Like the zephyr about the bushes.

See, jealous time, with a hasty wing, Comes running, do not wait! The hour is fugitive, And tomorrow, alas! may vanish.

Go, gather the days, flowers scarcely opened; Too often one sees the rosebuds Fall sadly without blooming.

Later, I saw, among my comrades in study, young artists and young poets whose brilliant beginnings were full of promise, die or at least wither and languish in an impotent mediocrity, in consequence of precocious or immoderate loves. And I was led, on the contrary, to maintain the thesis of continence:

THE LOVE THAT KILLS

When, daughter of the Morning, the rosy-fingered Dawn Appeared, fair children, lyre in hand, the brow pure, Spread their flight toward the limpid azure. They had the freshness of flowers scarcely opened.

And their song rose, joyous and grandiose, To the splendid lights, far from the obscure pit Where the human cattle drag their impure mourning; Higher! ever higher, without one ever resting!

The poets soared and rose without effort… But beside them behold blond betrothed maidens Tenderly entwined with their amorous arms.

At once was broken their magnificent soaring. Before the evening came, harassed cohorts, The winged poets descended toward death. (1)

(1) It is again the same idea that I have sought to express in the following sonnet:

THE SIRENS

Powerful Voluptuousness, sovereign of mortals, Dazzle no more my eyes with a splendid mirage! It is thy fatal call, thy poisoned breath, That drives our skiff to the inhuman rock.

Cradled on the blue waves to the charming murmur, When the golden Illusion sings with its serene voice, Without effort we sail in the serene splendor Toward the troubling harmonies of a slumbering pleasure.

Friend, dread the eternal languor of those voices, Fragile thresholds, the wall of its burning chains; Flee the fields of Circe, with their thickets of Hyenas!

Flee!… But the love of reason remains victor. Thou succumbest. Already I hear a mocking sound, The pitiless laughter of the treacherous Sirens.

Where is one to find the truth? Must one rally to the Epicurean thesis, or to that of the ascetics? Evidently wisdom is in the middle way, but who will tell us the just measure between use and abuse? The needs of the body must be satisfied; that is necessary for the conservation of the individual as for that of the species. Most young people have, it is true, need above all to learn to contain their instincts, in order to become masters of themselves; but, for certain loving natures, total abstinence is not without danger. Hygiene, like morality, counsels the moderation of desires and of pleasures, but not absolute renunciation. The Protestant pastors, whose fine and numerous families I admire, have found in early marriages an excellent solution of the problem. In the Middle Ages and among the Catholic priests, the contempt of the body appears as the logical consequence of erroneous doctrines, of that sickly mysticism which makes of life “an apprenticeship and an anticipation of death.” (1) But the contemplative life suits only a very small number of superior minds. Too long has reigned an excessive spiritualism which took for ideal a soul without body. A dangerous and fatal doctrine. A more exact knowledge of human nature makes us today seek wisdom in the harmony of our acts with the laws that govern the universality of beings in the perpetuation of the living species. Sanctity could not be the violation of these laws.

(1) Phaedo.

Become old, I often attend at the Sorbonne a few of those brilliant agrégation lectures where, under the direction of eminent masters, very young philosophers, already astonishingly erudite, agitate with passion the gravest and most abstruse questions of metaphysics. I shall avow it, on coming out of these learned discussions on an obscure passage of Aristotle or of Kant, I am tempted to return a little to my father’s sentiment; I almost pity these adolescents bent over their grimoire, and I want to say to them: Do you not see that April has come? Go then, my children, go and gather the new flowers, run, frolic in the meadow, dance and play, pay court to the beautiful girls, compose for them bouquets and verses, read to them the old poets who were young like you, who loved, and who sang with so much charm the springtimes of former days. Later, the latest possible, when the ardor of the blood shall be cooled, when the vital current shall circulate less rapidly in your nerves, it will be time to plunge yourselves into metaphysics. Primum vivere, deinde philosophari.

But I forget, alas, that one must earn one’s living, and that for most of you the high speculations cannot remain disinterested; philosophy has become a trade.

9

M. de Tucé to his sister

Saint-Mihiel, 23 August 1859.

… I do not too well see what change the amnesty can bring into your existence, except the faculty of coming to France to attend to your affairs. I think that your interests of every kind will retain you yet some time in Switzerland, where you are so well installed.

What are your projects? Oh, you will hear from me, if I can absent myself from here for a fortnight. I should like to take advantage of the fine season and see a little of Switzerland, which it was impossible for me to do last year.

The amnesty permitted, in fact, my father to accompany me to Lyon when, desirous of obtaining a French diploma, I presented myself for the examination of the baccalaureate. I failed from the very first test. We had to write in Latin a speech addressed by the dying Louis XIV to his grandson. (1) Now, for the past week or so, by one of those coincidences that well prove the miraculous power of Saint Anthony of Padua, and on which my neighbor congratulated himself, the pupils of the Jesuits had translated into Latin selected passages from the sermons of Massillon on the duties of a prince toward his subjects, and, the eve of the examination, the text of their composition had been drawn from the speech that Joinville puts into the mouth of the dying Saint Louis. As for me, deprived of the protection of the saints, I expressed in a passable Latin pacifist and humanitarian ideas which, I avow it, were somewhat premature in the mouth of the Great King. Under the Empire, such an anachronism could not be pardoned in me. I therefore had to set myself again to work, at Geneva first, then at Versailles, where my former professor, M. Fleury, had founded an institution.

(1) Ludovici Magni morientis ad parvum puerum, regni heredem et suorum funeri solum superstitem, ultima verba.

IV

1860-1861

IN SYRIA

ADRIEN DE TUCÉ AND HIS NEPHEW. — BAALBEK, JERUSALEM, DAMASCUS.

1

The Turkish government had named a Kaimakam, or Druze lieutenant, (1) for the districts of southern Syria where the Druzes and the Christian Maronites were mixed together. The latter, much richer than the Muslims, excited their envy. On the other hand, the Druzes felt themselves favored by the government. (1)

(1) The Druzes. — To the south of the Maronites, from Beirut as far as Sur and as far as Damascus, on the western slope of Lebanon, the Druzes formed a population almost independent. Their religion is a bizarre mixture of Judaism, Islamism and Christianity. Celebrated formerly for the austerity of their morals, their hospitality, their fidelity to the given word and their jealousy for their women, the Druzes are divided into the initiated (okals) and the ignorant (djahels). The first, who are in very small number, keep the great mystery of their beliefs.

Lamartine believed he found a physical resemblance between the Druzes and the Jewish race. The adoration of the calf leads him to suppose that they are of Samaritan origin.

“The Druzes cultivate the vine and the olive, tobacco and the silkworm, but as they know neither how to read nor to write, they have had to abandon commerce and business to the Maronites.”

(1) The Maronites, or Christians of the East, probably take their name from a monk named Maron who lived toward the year 400. A few Christians, persecuted by the Arabs, are said to have founded with him a monastery in the solitudes of Lebanon; the Maronite priests are married.

“This people seems a European colony thrown by chance into the midst of the tribes of the desert; its physiognomy, however, is Arab; the men there are tall, handsome, a frank and proud gaze, a witty and gentle smile, blue eyes, the aquiline nose, the blond beard, the noble gesture, the voice grave and guttural, the manners polite without baseness, the costume splendid and the weapons resplendent.” (Lamartine, Voyage en Orient.)

It was in the month of August 1859 that the isolated assassinations and the fires began. The Maronites tried in vain to defend themselves by arms; they were beaten in May 1860. The Druzes, with the aid of the Kurds and of the Bedouins, attacked the towns of Hasbeya and of Rascheya. Their chief, Osman-Bey, had promised the Christians his protection if they delivered up their arms to him; then, when they had done so, using a cowardly treason, he let them be massacred without defense. The fugitives who had sought an asylum at Saida were slaughtered. The Christians of the principal towns of Lebanon were no better protected by the governor of Beirut, Kourchid-Pasha, who himself presided over the massacres. Already 80 villages were burned, 4,000 Christians killed, and 20,000 fugitives, when, on the 9th of July, the Muslims of Damascus attacked the Christians. The massacre lasted six days. “The governor Ahmed-Pasha, letting bashi-bazouks take part in it and shutting himself up with his other troops in the citadel, nearly 6,000 persons were slaughtered, and the whole Christian population would have perished, without the generous intervention of Abd-el-Kader, who, aided by his Algerians, gathered into his palace and fed those whom he was able to snatch from the fury of the assassins. The European consulates and all the religious establishments were given over to the flames.”

The indulgence of the Porte for the authors of these crimes excited the indignation of the European powers, which signed a convention to stop the massacres: 8,000 Frenchmen, commanded by General Beaufort d’Hautpoul, disembarked at Beirut on the 16th of August. Then at last the Turkish tribunals decided to condemn a few of the guilty, some to death, the others to detention. But “Fuad let escape into the mountains the most compromised Druzes and brought back to Beirut only a few hundreds of the least guilty.”

A European commission had obtained for the Christians an indemnity of 15 million francs, but these unfortunates would have died of hunger, without a subscription opened in France, which brought in 2,500,000 francs.

The soldiers of the French army were received by the Maronites with the liveliest testimonies of affection and of gratitude, at once as coreligionists and as powerful protectors.

2

M. de Tucé (1) to his sister

Kab-Elias, 16 October 1860.

Since the 25th of September, the day of our disembarkation, I have not caught sight of Fernand; he left the vessel to enter the hospital, and I to go to the camp, where we received the order to mount on horseback during the night, and we were still riding. Fernand did not remain at the ambulance the time necessary to recover; he claims that he was bored there and that there were no medicaments, which is a frightful joke. It is the only thing that is well organized, the ambulances.

(1) M. Chauvin, mayor of Montoire, wrote, in 1883, the following notice:

Louis-Adrien de Tucé was born at Montoire (Loir-et-Cher), on the 8th of May 1827. He descended through his father from one of the most ancient and most notable families of the Maine, and, through his mother, from the Hue de Montaigu family, one member of which, M. Gabriel-Nicolas-Adrien, became a major in the Royal-Champagne. Son of the field-marshal Hue de Montaigu and forebear of M. Adrien de Tucé, he allied himself, in 1792, to the Feydereaux de Villerceaux family, one of the most honorable of the Lower Vendômois. — Having come out, in 1848, of the Military School of Saint-Cyr, he was, in the capacity of sub-lieutenant, incorporated at Saumur, where he acquired the rank of lieutenant and of captain. In 1856, he passed, with the rank of squadron leader, into the 7th regiment of Chasseurs of Africa, and, scarcely arrived at Constantine, he was called to the campaign of Syria. The title of knight of the Legion of Honor was the reward of the distinction with which he had taken part in that mission.

Having received the order to go and rejoin the column that was operating in Lebanon, we crossed that mountain by passing through places of an extreme difficulty. We there lost a few horses and quite a number of mules, tumbled down into the precipices; we ourselves were of the number…

We crossed many towns, market-towns, etc.; everything is ravaged, burned, pillaged. It is impossible to carry out a work of destruction in a more complete fashion. In the streets, the corpses of the inhabitants kept the posture of the torment that had been inflicted on them. There were of every kind, crucified, impaled, and a host of refinements of cruelty of which one could not form an idea. The newspapers that have recounted these horrors have all remained below the truth. Only they accuse none but the Druzes of these atrocities; they did their share of them, but those who best aided them are the Turkish troops. The massacres took place only there where there were Turks; it was a kind of Saint Bartholomew’s organized by the particular authorities. You may think, from that, that the Turkish army charged with marching in the first line to chastise the Druzes cannot have done them much harm. They let them pass quietly to the other side of Damascus, into the country of Haurann, so that we did not see a single one of them and that we did not have the least action of war. At present everything is over. The Turkish government gives indemnities to the destroyed towns, for them to rebuild themselves, and everyone returns home.

The houses are soon built, with pebbles and mud; the framework is composed of a few poplars laid crosswise, on which one puts a bed of reeds and a layer of mud; that forms the terrace. For the rest, no window nor dormer; the furniture is composed of a kind of partitions, made with mud, chopped straw and cow dung. That forms also compartments into which one puts the maize, the barley, etc… The household utensils are everything one can imagine of the most elementary; it is to such a point that I had all the trouble in the world to find here an earthenware dish for the service of my tent.

We are established to pass the winter at Kab-Elias (tomb of Elias); it is a village of the strength of Saint-Himay (1) and of just as many resources; so we are obliged to have everything brought from Beirut, situated at two days’ march. There are administration stores, ovens, ambulances, etc… As for us, we are encamped under the tent, at the foot of the mountain, with a prospect not very gay for the winter, for the mountain paths are impracticable. We are established there to guard the road from Damascus to Beirut and all the plain from Baalbek to seven or eight leagues lower down below us. We have not much to do: one goes hunting, to kill quails and snipe in the marshes; one builds oneself shelters with walls like those of the dwellings of the country, of reeds. Until now we are not too badly off; we have been given large tents, mats and blankets; the provisioning is done well; the inhabitants bring hens, calves, fruits in quantity: the grapes are the most beautiful and the best in the world; those of Fontainebleau would not come anywhere near them; we have pomegranates, oranges and lemons; the country also furnishes wine, which would be as good as the wine of Madeira or of Lunel, if it were better made; but they keep it and transport it in tarred goatskins, which give it a detestable taste.

(1) Village near Flourigny.

Fernand to his mother

Beirut, 19 October 1860.

… I am momentarily separated from my uncle; he is a dozen leagues away in the mountains, and I have remained at the Camp of the Pines, a league from Beirut, with the depot. We are very well installed; Gamé and the brigadier Salurt have remained also, and, with three others, we form a good tribe. We have built a magnificent gourbi with reeds. There, we are sheltered from the sun and from the rain. We have made a battery of cooking utensils, a rack for the arms; each has his post for taking his effects. We have sufficient room to sleep all of us. In the evening, to give ourselves light, we light a candle stuck into an old crust of bread by way of a candlestick. Everyone comes to see and admire our gourbi, even officers. At the entrance there is a sign with this inscription: Tchor beni afaalou, and above it floats the tricolor flag.

I very often go to Beirut; an omnibus carries us there for six sous. It is for me a great pleasure to walk in all those bazaars, of whose animation one can form no idea; it is worse than in the streets of Paris. I went also to visit a camp where there are four thousand Turkish women whose husbands have been assassinated. The government gives them, as well as their children, twenty-eight centimes a day. We live very well here; the administration furnishes us with good meat; we receive neither bread nor biscuit. The oranges, the limes, the lemons are for next to nothing; the milk is very cheap. I have eaten Turkish pastry; it is excellent, but much too sweet, because they put honey and sugar in it. Each time we go to make our provisions of coffee, tobacco, potatoes, etc., there are interminable disputes; all these Turks are thieves as it is not possible to be; then there are coins of every country — it is a tangle in which one understands nothing. Fortunately, we have sometimes the luck to meet Christians of the country who know French and who prevent us from being too much robbed. We lead for the moment a very happy and very tranquil life. The day passes in walking about the countryside, in reading; most often I go to Beirut. Every two days there are the distributions of victuals, of wood, of fodder, of barley, etc.; but all that is not far; then a few police and escort guards which are not painful at all; so that we are not overwhelmed with work.

Fernand to Paul

Beirut, 28 November 1860.

… When M. Duchesne (the banker) is here, I shall go and see him often, to speak with him of you and of Geneva; it will be for me a very agreeable acquaintance, for we live here like bears. The weather is magnificent; we are obliged to be always dressed in linen, so hot is it still. Now we are no longer in our gourbi; we have been given large tents, under which the rain falls as outside.

I have made the acquaintance of several Maronite families in the surroundings, and each time I go there, I am admirably well received: the mothers all take an interest in me, because I am a soldier so young; so the figs, the raisins, the oranges, the milk, the carobs, etc., etc… all that rains down. The young girls are very beautiful and very amiable (they say here sephati and amachkoura). They adore the French, and there are many who would be very disposed to come to France. As for me, I go there only to learn Arabic; my mistress of language is called Basseia; she is a beautiful brunette, with superb eyes and hair trailing to the ground. I reproach her with only two things: it is walking barefoot and not wearing a corset. My comrades also do their utmost to learn Arabic with the demoiselles Gandoura, Mansoura, Sophia, Jasmine, etc., etc… and I assure you that it is a pretty spectacle to see on Sunday all these young ladies at mass in their fantasia clothes. There is also a theater set up by the zouaves; I have already been there several times and have amused myself much. I should very much like, like Louise and like you, to know how to draw; I would send you a sketch of the camp and of many other very curious points of view.

3

M. de Tucé to his sister

… We had all the hope of going to make a journey to Damascus, from which we are only two little days’ march, but it seems that politics opposes itself to it. The general has permitted us an excursion to Baalbek, and we set out, some twenty officers. The aspect of those destroyed temples is one of the most beautiful spectacles one can see; one is dazzled by the enormity of their proportions and by the chaos of columns and of sculptures heaped one upon another. A long examination is needed to arrive at finding one’s bearings and at fixing the limit of each temple. All the ornaments of those enormous masses are of a finish and of a perfection of workmanship that are surprising.

BAALBEK

Of Baalbek, the ancient Heliopolis or City of the Sun, there remain to us only ruins, but, with those of Palmyra, they are the most imposing in the world: temples of colossal dimensions; that of Jupiter, built by Septimius Severus; that of the Sun, by Hadrian and Antoninus. This marvelous flowering of art, the product of the Roman Peace, was mown down by Theodosius, then by Tamerlane, who sacked the town in 1400. In the eighteenth century, an earthquake completed the overthrowing of these edifices.

“From afar, the modern town appears ‘behind a curtain of trees whose verdure it crowns with a whitish band of domes and minarets.’” (1) These trees are very beautiful walnut trees… After having crossed the rubble, one arrives at a kind of terrace; at the end of a hexagonal court extends a vast perspective of magnificent ruins. “To enjoy it, one must climb a slope and one finds oneself at the entrance of a square court, much more spacious than the first. There, six enormous columns, jutting majestically against the horizon, form a truly picturesque tableau… One cannot help remarking the singular effect that results from the mixture of the garlands, of the foliage of the capitals, and of the tufts of wild grasses that hang on all sides… At last one arrives at the foot of the six columns: it is then that one conceives all the boldness of their elevation. Their shaft has more than seven meters of circumference. The total height (including the entablature) is twenty-four meters. A second temple, situated a little lower, is also of the Corinthian order. The walls are richly ornamented; one remarks a frieze of garlands supported, from space to space, by heads of satyr, of horse, of bull, etc…” In lozenge-shaped frames, bas-reliefs represent “Jupiter seated on his eagle, Leda caressed by the swan, Diana bearing the bow and the crescent, and various busts that appear to be figures of emperors and of empresses.”

“Nothing is so perfect as the cutting of these stones; they are joined by no cement and, nevertheless, the blade of a knife does not enter into their interstices.”

“These columns are of white granite, with great shining facets. In the quarry that runs beneath the whole town, one still sees a stone cut on three faces which is twenty-three meters long. How did the Ancients handle such masses? It is a curious problem of mechanics to resolve. The inhabitants of Baalbek explain it conveniently by supposing that this edifice was built by the Djnouns, or Genies, under the orders of King Solomon; they add that the motive of so many labors was to hide in the underground passages immense treasures that are still there.”

Today, apart from two façades of the temple of the Sun and a few fragments left standing, it is no more than a confused heap of palaces, of triumphal arches and of collapsed porticos: “The earth is strewn with broken entablatures, with chipped capitals, with mutilated friezes, with bas-reliefs, with sculptures half effaced, with altars soiled with dust.” (1)

(1) Some details of this description are borrowed from the Voyage en Syrie, of Volney (1787).

(1) For me, who know these monuments only through photographs, their grandeur, which astonishes, does not blind me to appreciating, from the point of view of style, a few restrictions to the admiration which would otherwise be so unreserved. Assuredly the enormous Corinthian capitals of Baalbek are not without beauty; their acanthus leaves are still of a broad and firm execution; all the ornamentation of these temples is much superior to that of the arch of Septimius Severus, built at Rome in the same epoch. The Greek traditions had no doubt been better preserved in the East. Nevertheless the decadence manifests itself by the taste for colossal constructions. “The architects,” says Duruy with reason, “no longer had the calm serenity of the ancient masters. Their imagination too had become wild, and they tormented the stone as the philosophers tormented ideas. That time, which made the colossal, no longer knew how to make the simple, because it had lost the sentiment of true grandeur. But, seen at a distance, when the imagination magnified them, those gigantic constructions of Heliopolis, whose mere ruins oppose to the immense majesty of the desert the image of the prodigious activity of the men who once filled those solitudes with movement, with noise and with riches.” (Histoire Romaine, VI, 128.)

Continuation of M. de Tucé’s letter

I am the sole squadron leader for the four squadrons that compose the cavalry of the expedition. He who commands it in chief is M. du Preuil, lieutenant-colonel of the 1st Chasseurs of Africa; he is at Beirut with a squadron of the 1st hussars and one of spahis, and I here with two squadrons of Chasseurs of Africa. I am under the orders of Colonel Caubert, of the 3rd of the line, who commands the camp. He is a charming man, with whom I am very bound. I live with him and the officers of his staff, as well as with a chaplain with whom we have been gratified. He is a Lazarist father who has inhabited the country for some fifteen years and to whom Abd-el-Kader saved the life at Damascus in those last troubles, as well as to about ten sisters of Saint-Vincent-de-Paul. He says us the military mass every Sunday on an altar made with ammunition cases and biscuit cases, in the middle of the camp.

There is here a great confusion of coins, Turkish, Austrian, Arab, etc., very few French ones. The inhabitants speak an Arabic analogous to that of Algeria. A few pupils of the Jesuits and of the Lazarists speak French very well. These two congregations had establishments in almost all the towns.

The costume of the inhabitants is very picturesque. They have on the head the red fez or a foulard arranged in a particular fashion, a jacket and great trousers in the Mameluke style; over the jacket, they have a little overcoat whose sleeves hang down behind, of a kind of white cloth, covered with embroideries; then a belt garnished with all possible weapons, from the dagger to the blunderbuss, a Turkish saber and a musket: they have the air of frightful rogues.

The women show themselves little; they are not beautiful and are tricked out in garments that do not set them off. (1)

Farewell, all yours.

Adrien

(1) The Arabs, everywhere I have seen them, are of a height rather tall than short. Their gait is proud. They are well made and light. They have an oval head, the brow high and arched, the nose aquiline, the eyes [almond-]shaped, the gaze humble and singularly gentle. Nothing would announce in them the savage, if they had not always the mouth closed; but, as soon as they come to speak, one hears a noisy and strongly aspirated language; one perceives long teeth dazzling with whiteness, like those of jackals and of ounces.

“The Arab women are taller in proportion than the men. Their bearing is noble and, by the regularity of their features, the beauty of their forms and the disposition of their veils, they recall a little the statues of the Priestesses and of the Muses. This must be understood with restriction: the beautiful figures are often draped with rags; the air of misery, of dirtiness and of suffering degrades those forms so pure; a coppery complexion hides the regularity of the features; in a word, to see these women such as I have just painted them, one must contemplate them from a little distance, content oneself with the ensemble, and not enter into the details.” (Chateaubriand.)

Fernand to his father

Beirut, 19 December 1860.

I have received your letter and that of my mother, announcing to me that I had the medal of Italy. This news gave me a sensible pleasure, and I thank with all my heart my good mother for the trouble she has taken to obtain it for me.

I have at last seen M. Duchesne, who was very amiable to me, as well as his wife. He handed me the parcel; I left at his house the pharmacy [supplies] that my mother is sending to my uncle, and took away the flannel shirt, the two foulards and the magnificent box containing preserves. The day after next I went to dine at M. Duchesne’s; all the children set themselves to playing with me, one dragged my saber, another put my shako on his head, all were happy to have a soldier with them. You could not believe the pleasure I felt at finding myself thus in the midst of a family that recalled my own. I suddenly lost my regimental manners, and it did not happen to me to let out a single coarse or trivial expression, which I greatly feared.

My uncle has received the letter containing my medal of Italy; while waiting to have it, I wear the ribbon on my jacket. The day I received your letter, dear father, my uncle had just sent me money, so I “watered” the medal with my comrades…

What a sad new year! It is the first I shall not pass with you; think of me a little on that day, while you amuse yourselves; try to pass it gaily; I shall try on my side with my comrades, but my thought will always be in the midst of you, my good parents.

Fernand to his mother

Zahlé, 9 February 1861.

… The weather has much changed since my last letter. Imagine that at Kab-Elias there has fallen at least five feet of snow. Judge of our position under the tents, of which most were torn. Obliged to pass the nights sweeping the snow around the horses and from off the roofs. One of the stables fell and four horses were killed. So we regaled ourselves with horse-steaks for a few days, and I assure you that I had never yet eaten meat so tender and so good. The cold was horrible; two of our men had their feet entirely frozen; another died buried in the snow a few steps from the camp. With that, few victuals; we were on the point of running short of bread and of biscuit. In short, all those who have been in the Crimea say that they did not suffer so much as here.

As for me, I have got off fairly well: I went to install myself in my uncle’s tent with his orderlies, and as one can make a fire there, I was a little less cold. My uncle must be back from his journey to Jerusalem, and he cannot yet come from Beirut here; there is too much snow on the mountain. I am now at Zahlé, a little town three leagues from Kab-Elias; we are four men and a brigadier detached to escort the infantry officers in their outings, and as those gentlemen do not move often, we are as tranquil as can be. We sleep with our horses in a large stable, where at least we are not cold at night, and there is no danger of the tent pegs being torn out. The town is all Christian, there is a very fine church, and one finds many more resources than at Kab-Elias, which is only a wretched village. One drinks excellent wine of the country at eight sous the liter; it is a very sweet wine, like cider, but very heady. We had a frightful trouble in coming from Kab-Elias here; the paths were not traced; our horses fell into holes; we did a part of the route on foot, dragging them by the face. They have always had great confidence in my Polenta; it is an excellent little horse, full of instinct; with horses of France we should never have been able to do the route. I do not know what we are going to do in the spring, whether we shall have to go forward or return to Africa. The Druzes are good fellows, much less thievish than the Maronites.

I passed a very sad New Year’s Day, dear mother; I thought of you all day long, and I said to myself that, on your side, you do not forget me. Tell Paul that I wish him every kind of success in his examinations; he well deserves it, for he works enough for that.

I am going to try to make the acquaintance of the curé here, so that he may give me chaplets and medals, blessed on the tomb of Jesus Christ. Apropos of medals, when the Maronites see mine, they ask me if it is Napoleone who is on it; I tell them yes, and then they kiss it with transport.

Once more farewell, dear mother; I hope to be able soon to announce to you that I am a brigadier. All the nominations are made in the month of May, at the birth of the little prince. You must know that my uncle has been decorated since the first of the year…

4

M. de Tucé to his sister

15 February 1861.

My dear friend, I came back on the 10th of this month from a journey I have just made into Palestine and to Jerusalem; it is that which has prevented me from informing you of my nomination as knight of the Legion of Honor, which I have obtained, not for my exploits in this country, but rather because I have done nothing in order not to have it, like everyone, after twenty-three years of service.

We set out, a caravan of twenty officers of all arms of which I was the chief, to make our excursion; we went by sea as far as Jaffa, and from there in two days by land to Jerusalem, by means of horses, mules, little donkeys of the country. We were admirably received at Jerusalem at the convent of the Franciscans and at the house of M. de Barrère, consul of France, who placed himself at our disposal with a good grace and a complaisance by which we were confused.

Do not expect that I shall make for you the description of all I have seen. I shall tell you only that I have seen all that one can see, and what many travelers do not see, that is to say the celebrated mosques of Omar and of El-Aksa, the first temples of Islamism after Mecca.

The town of Jerusalem rises on a stony and desolate terrain. The torrent of the Kidron, whose source is near, surrounds it with its two arms, and flows in the valley of Josaphat. On all sides, there are celebrated names recalling historical memories. The Mount of Zion, Calvary, the Mount of Olives. — Without commerce and without industry, the town is little animated (it has only 28,000 inhabitants). The Christians inhabit around the Holy Sepulcher, the Muslims around the Mosque of Omar. (1) But if you want the description of these places, the names of Chateaubriand and of Lamartine have made it much better than I should know how to make it.

We then made the journey to the Greek convent of Saint-Saba, to the Dead Sea, to the Jordan, Jericho, Bethany, Bethlehem, etc. (2)

Our return was rather difficult, for the sea had become very bad and we were forced to wait at Jaffa, for eight days, until a boat presented itself. At last the Austrian Lloyd arrived, which brought us back to Beirut.

(1) This mosque, which dates from the seventh century, is one of the masterpieces of the Byzantine style.

“It is of octagonal form, surmounted by a beautiful cupola and divided into seven naves. In one of its naves one still sees a sacred stone; that very one on which, according to tradition, Jacob had laid his head, when he had allegorical and prophetic dreams.”

(2) Here is the fine description that Chateaubriand has given of the Dead Sea:

“The valley, comprised between two chains of mountains, offers a soil similar to the bottom of a sea long ago withdrawn: beaches of salt, a dried-up wave, moving sands consumed and furrowed by the waves. Here and there puny shrubs grow painfully on this earth deprived of life; their leaves are covered with the salt that has nourished them, and their bark has the taste and the smell of smoke. Instead of villages, one perceives scarcely the ruins of a few towers. In the middle of the valley passes a discolored river… One distinguishes its course in the midst of the sand only by the willows and the reeds that border it; the Arab hides himself in these reeds to attack the traveler and despoil the pilgrim. This river is the Jordan: this lake is the Dead Sea. It appears brilliant, but the guilty cities that it hides in its bosom seem to have poisoned its waters. Its solitary abysses cannot let any living being [thrive]; never has a vessel pressed its waves; its shores are without birds, without trees, without verdure; and its water, of a frightful bitterness, is so heavy that the most impetuous winds can scarcely raise it.

“I was all [moved]; the first thing I did on setting foot to land was to enter the lake up to the knees, and to carry the water to my mouth. It was impossible for me to retain it there. The saltiness of it is much stronger than that of the sea, and it produces on the lips the effect of a strong solution of alum. My boots were scarcely dry when they covered themselves with salt; our garments, our hats, our hands, were in less than three hours impregnated with this mineral.”

During this journey, so much snow fell in Lebanon that communications with Kab-Elias have been interrupted for three weeks and will be so for a long time yet; I cannot therefore give you news of Fernand, who must not find himself very much at his ease under his tent; for while at Beirut it is hot as in July, at Kab-Elias the snow is several feet thick.

Colonel du Barail wrote me a very amiable letter; he made me no promise, but I think he will name Fernand a brigadier as soon as there are vacancies.

I came back from the Holy Land with chaplets and relics of every kind, blessed on the tomb of Our Lord, stones from the Dead Sea, etc…

I dwell at the Camp of the Pines with Colonel du Preuil, and we go every day, with great greyhounds of the country, to hunt with hounds the jackal and the fox in the dunes that border the sea; it is very amusing.

The time of our departure is more and more indeterminate. The commission has, it is said, recognized as indispensable a prolongation of three months. I believe it will be much longer, for everyone is convinced that our departure would be the signal of a new massacre of the Christians.

Farewell, my dear friend; I should like to be able to send you a little of the fine sun that warms the palm trees and the orange trees of our garden, for you are, I think, in the time of the north wind and of the great colds.

Now that I have seen Baalbek and Palestine, I shall be content only when I shall have seen Damascus… As for Palmyra, it is a difficult journey, and one on which we have little information.

5

Fernand to his mother

Kab-Elias, 4 April ‘61.

… We have just made a pretty tour, the two squadrons of Chasseurs of Africa, with the colonel and my uncle. We were in the full Druze country. Each time we were encamped, we had vedettes, and the stable guards stood sentry with loaded muskets. We were not troubled, although we were few in number. We saw the Jordan and we made the soup and the coffee with its celebrated waters.

We passed through very difficult places, and I was always very content with my horse. He is six years old and trots perfectly. He thanks you for the sack of oats that you would like to send him, although he does not know what it is, for he has never eaten anything but barley.

Alix believes that horse meat is worth nothing; she is mistaken. Being in the rearguard, we were forced to stop for a pack-horse that had tumbled down into a ravine and had broken its leg. The veterinary gave the order to blow out its brains. That done, all who were there threw themselves on this unfortunate horse to cut pieces from it. You would have believed you were seeing a band of jackals. I ate for two days of this meat in steaks, in soup and in sauce, and I assure you that it is excellent…

I am going to send to Madame Gérine a chaplet that my uncle brought back from Jerusalem. I much regret this winter not being able to dance; let us hope that I shall dance again in a few years, if I have not forgotten.

I wish Paul all the successes that his ardor for work deserves for him. He does not yet like the ball; that will come. How content I shall be to see my Louison again! Tell her then to write to me, so that I may see whether she has made much progress. As for Alix, I much hope to find her married on my return from Syria…

M. de Tucé to his sister

5 April 1861.

… I came back to Kab-Elias as soon as the snows had melted a little in Lebanon and had rendered the paths what are called practicable in this country, which does not mean that one passes there easily, I beg you to believe it.

The colonel came with a part of the spahis to lead us on an expedition, and we have been back for two days. We received your portrait, which gave us infinitely much pleasure, for it is very like and represents you occupied in following us on the map. If your map is good, you can see the route we followed. We crossed the Litany, then into the Anti-Lebanon, a day’s journey to the south of Kab-Elias. We carried on our horses four days’ victuals, and a convoy of mules carried the same quantity, for one must not think of living off the country, where we are as friends and which, moreover, has been pillaged and ravaged in such a way that dearth reigns there. The inhabitants eat the grass of the fields and the wheat in the blade; I have seen it. The aim of our march was to get us out of Kab-Elias, first to take a little exercise, then to reassure the Christians of the country, under the blow of continual menaces on the part of the Turks, of the Druzes and of the Metualis. From Djob-Djennin we went to Der-el-Ahmar, a village ruined in the last massacres; above it, in the mountain, is Racheya, a fairly important town, where the Christians have been massacred also. There remain of them only those too wretched to flee or to tempt the cupidity of the Muslims.

We went with the colonel to make a visit to the Turkish pasha who holds garrison there. The town is ruined from top to bottom. You cannot imagine the frightful aspect of those walls collapsed and blackened by the fire. Everything is destroyed with a conscientiousness that does honor to the demolishers. The Druzes of the town had fled at our approach and, in passing with our horses among the stones and the ashes — for there are no longer any streets — wretched Christians came out of the holes where they had taken shelter, and came to kiss our boots while making the sign of the cross. There is there a fairly strong Turkish garrison, but which never comes down from its eagle’s nest and leaves the revolted Druzes peacefully to come and put the villages of the valley to ransom.

The pasha received us with the ceremonial customary in the East. He was surrounded by the superior officers of his command; they all have the air of true brutes. (1)

(1) Is it the men who have changed, or rather the eyes that looked at them? Lamartine experienced, in the same circumstances and in the same country, a very different impression. He shows us the chief, seated at the door of his palace: “The principal men of the village were [clothed] in their rich pelisses, with their belts of red silk, filled with yataghans, coiffed with an immense turban of stuffs of diverse colors, with a large flap of purple silk falling back on the shoulder; one believed one was seeing a people of kings.”

From there we went to Hasbeya in two days. The town has suffered still more than Racheya: the seraglio where the Christians had taken refuge to obtain protection from the pasha is still red with the blood of those unfortunates whom the Turks, by their treason, [delivered up at that very hour]. There were still bones scattered here and there in the rooms.

The sources of the Jordan are there. We followed its course and stayed in the plain where it begins to take on importance. It is a country of the greatest beauty; one understands that it should be the Promised Land.

Our camp was established on a slight eminence in a beautiful green plain that extends as far as Lake Huleh. To our left the course of the Jordan and Palestine. One saw the ruins of the first frontier town, Dan, in the Bible, at present Banias; above it, those of Caesarea. Unfortunately the weather became bad and we were not able to go and visit them. We counted on finding in this valley the Arab tribes that hold themselves in winter between Damascus and Bagdad, but they had not arrived and their horses were grazing in the countries situated three days’ journey farther to the south. I much regretted it, for it is they who have the beautiful Syrian horses.

From there we came back to rejoin the Litany, crossing the Metualis country, a midst of rocks and of frightful paths.

Fernand is in very good health. He had arrived from Zahlé, where he had been doing the service of escort and of couriers. It seems that he likes that place fairly well, for it was the second time that he had returned there. The Chasseurs are very well off there and fairly free. There are indeed only a brigadier and four men, fairly good wine of the country, and… other agreeable things.

I am occupying myself with getting Fernand made a brigadier, but there is no place in the squadron, and old sub-officers, having given back their stripes, are much more deserving than he. Fernand puts in his letter a flower for Alix; it is a wallflower from the Garden of Olives; it served to make the bouquets that ornament the tomb of J.-C.

6

M. de Tucé to his sister

19 May 1861.

… Your letter was handed to me on my return from a journey I made to Damascus, where I passed two entire days. Fernand has not too much to complain of; I had taken him with me, and he can say that he made an excursion of the most agreeable and of the most curious.

We were fifteen officers from Beirut and from Kab-Elias, of all arms. We took two days to make the route, which is fairly insignificant; we slept at Dimasi in the house of the sheikh of the village, and the next day the caravan arrived toward ten o’clock in sight of Damascus. It was a ravishing sight. The town is in a great plain, in the midst of an oasis of verdure, from which spring white minarets and the domes of the mosques. High square towers flank the enclosure, whose walls are faced with yellow and black marble. All that takes on, in the sun, colorations of a richness and a harmony that are marvelous. We crossed the gardens and the orchards of the suburbs; it is of an extreme fertility; streams everywhere; the trees are enormous, and they are fruit trees, walnut, cherry, plum, peach, pear and apricot trees; very few orange trees and no palms. The vine climbs up the trunks and hangs in garlands that run from one tree to another.

The town is clean and the streets are fairly wide, the houses roofed in terraces, numerous palaces, the most beautiful is the seraglio, residence of the governor. Our caravan engaged itself in the bazaars, from which I believed we should not come out, so long are they. We arrived at last at our lodging. It is a hotel kept by a Greek; an oriental house with jets of water in the court and in all the rooms. Our horses and mules were beside it, in a Khan, with the orderlies. One could lodge three squadrons there.

After a very comfortable lunch, a visit to the Consul and then to Abd-el-Kader, who received us very well. At our request, he showed us all the presents that the Christian powers have sent him to thank him for his conduct during the massacres. I had already seen him at Paris. I did not find him changed; he has a serious face, extremely beautiful and distinguished; everything in his exterior reveals energy and intelligence. He spoke of France and of the emperor in terms that expressed a profound gratitude for the consideration that has been had for him.

From there we went to see the Christian town. It is a frightful spectacle: this quarter of Damascus is a town of 15,000 souls, and all of it is razed. Scarcely a few walls figure the site of the houses, which were very rich, if one judges by the marbles, the mosaics, the sculptures, scattered here and there. One sees in the midst of the blackened rubble there emerge debris of furniture, twisted iron bedsteads, etc… It is not gay. Fernand accompanies me in all these outings.

The next day we visited the bazaars, where it would be impossible to find one’s way again without a guide. They are very rich. One finds there all the merchandise of the East and of the West, of the North and of the South: cottons, stuffs of silk, cashmeres, pearls, works in mother-of-pearl, oil of roses, candied fruits, etc… One is exposed to temptations of every kind, and one must have moral strength not to spend more than one wishes. Everything there is excessively dear… Fernand has bought for Louise a pair of slippers of red morocco, embroidered in silver, which I shall send you when I can…

A visit to the pasha, with chibouks, sherbets, coffee, etc… — They showed us the citadel, which is a hovel. In the evening, a very good dinner at the Consul’s. — The day after next, outings in the bazaars and to the merchants, a visit to a few houses to see the magnificence of the interiors: it is everything that is most of the Thousand and One Nights. At last departure by another route which made us traverse a charming country.

Our orderlies, knowing that we had been to Abd-el-Kader’s, had themselves led there. He received them very well. Fernand turned back with them, and the emir recognized him for having come the day before with the officers. (1)

We have not yet any order of departure. I have indeed heard tell of the project of leaving people here. If it is realized, there are chances that it is the cavalry of Africa that remains. Provided that it is not at Kab-Elias! I have had enough of it; there blows a terrible wind there which renders the sojourn under the tent very painful.

(1) On the same date, M. de Tucé’s orderly, a devoted servant of the family, wrote to Madame Milliet:

“I take the liberty of writing you these two words of a letter to let you know the state of the health of Monsieur Fernand. I will tell you that his horse is his uncle’s and goes always well. I will tell you that our officers went to see Abd-el-Kader, and we too had a great desire to go and see Abd-el-Kader, for one likes the country much. I will tell you that Monsieur Fernand too had a great wish to see again Abd-el-Kader, and he is [eager] for us and he is useful, the orderly. The emir received us very politely; he is a very good man and not proud with the [humble]. He recognized very well Monsieur Fernand for having come the day before with the officers. I will tell you that the marshal-of-lodgings Superbi was very eager to know what he would say to so great a chief. He told Monsieur Fernand to give the best compliment to Abd-el-Kader. As for Monsieur Fernand, he was not afraid, saying that he was speaking in the name of all the Frenchmen massacred, who will never forget the courageous man who saved their lives. And he spoke like that fluently, so that I had the tear in my eye, so prettily was it turned. Abd-el-Kader was flattered by it, and he said that he loved France much, and he said that it was a very pretty country and that it could not be better represented. He pressed his hand in his two hands, [a long while]. And we all thanked Monsieur Fernand. The fact is that he spoke very well.

“I send well my respects to you and to Monsieur Milliet and to his children.

“Your devoted servant for life.

“MUNIER.”

At Damascus, the new governor Emin Pasha was not slow to reinstate in their functions the known authors of the massacres, and applied the disarmament only to the Algerians of Abd-el-Kader.

The frightened Christians did not want to regain their dwellings and came to ask asylum on our vessels. The French troops prolonged their stay in Syria until the 5th of June 1861. Soon the Druzes condemned to death saw their penalty commuted into a deportation to Tripoli. Five years afterward, they were amnestied and returned to their country.

M. de Tucé to his sister

Philippeville, 15 June 1861.

… Here we are back in Africa. Embarked on the frigate the Canada, we arrived on the 4th at Stora; our crossing was very good. A part of the squadron is on the frigate the Arétige, which we have awaited here in order to return all together to Constantine, and to rest our horses a little. During this time, here is M. Plonplon coming to visit the province of Constantine and [tarrying] at the entrance of the port. Our platoons are echeloned along the road to serve him as escort. That makes our stay here last a little longer. I do not complain of it too much, for Philippeville is very agreeable.

But here is a good piece of news, I ought to have begun with it; Colonel du Barail has sent me a telegraphic dispatch announcing to me that Fernand is named brigadier. He was very content when I informed him of his nomination, and I am also very happy about it. I think that, having henceforth authority over the others, he will take a little [authority] over himself. He would very much like to have his stripes, but as I have not yet his official nomination, I have not let him put them on; he will put them on at Constantine. There too I shall give him the wherewithal to “water” them with the comrades. I have every reason to believe that I am going to receive the order of the Medjidié.

Fernand to Paul

Constantine, 11 November 1861.

… I am content to learn that you are amusing yourselves, and I regret not having my share of all your pleasures.