The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 82, August, 1864

Monsieur Sandeau looked at me, and smiled as be remarked,—

"Oh! as for them, they don't care a whit for piece or author or public. They think of nothing but showing off themselves. Monsieur Théophile Gautier has no care except to display the wealth of a palette which mistook its vocation when it sought to obtain from pen, ink, and paper those colors which pencil and canvas alone can give. He discards sentiments, ideas, characters, dialogue, probability, intellectual delicacy, everything which raises man above wood or stone. He would be the very first writer of the age, if the world would agree to suppress everything like heart and soul. He is never more at ease than when he has to report a piece whose literary beauties are its splendid scenery and costumes. He will dismiss the subject, the plot, the characters, and the details in five lines; while fifteen columns will not suffice for all the wonders of the decorations. If you ask him to send you to some person most familiar with contemporary dramatic art, instead of sending you to Alexandre Dumas, the elder or the younger, to Ponsard, or to Augier, he will send you to the celebrated scene-painters, to Cicéri or Séchan or Cambon. As for Monsieur Jules Janin, of whom I am very fond, he is—You have sometimes been to concerts where virtuosos play variations on the sextuor of "Lucie," or the trio of "William Tell," or the duet of "Les Huguenots"? You listen attentively, and do at first detect a phrase here and a phrase there which vaguely recall the work of Donizetti, or of Rossini, or of Meyerbeer; but in an instant the virtuoso himself forgets all about them. You have nothing but volley after volley of notes, a musical storm, tempest, avalanche; the primitive idea is fathoms deep under water, and when it is caught again it is drowned. Now Monsieur Jules Janin has had for the last five-and-twenty years the business of executing brilliant variations upon the piano of dramatic criticism. He acts like the virtuosos you hear at concerts. He writes, for conscience' sake, the name of the author and the title of the play at the head of his dramatic report, and then off he goes, heels over head, with variation and variation, and variation and variation again, in French and in Latin, until at last no human being can tell what he is after, where he is going, what he is talking about, or what he means to say. He will tell you the whole story of the Second Punic War, speaking of a sentimental comedy played at the Gymnase Theatre, and a low farce of the Palais Royal Theatre will furnish him the pretext to quote ten lines of Xenophon in the original Greek. Monsieur Jules Janin is, notwithstanding all this, an excellent fellow, and a man of great talents; but you must not ask him to work miracles; in other words, you must not ask him to express briefly and clearly what he thinks of the play he criticizes, nor to remember to-day the opinion he entertained yesterday. These are miracles he cannot work. He hears a piece; he is delighted with it; he says to the author, 'Your piece is charming. You will be gratified by my criticism upon it.' He comes home; he sits at his desk. What happens? Why, the wind which blew from the north blows from the south; the soap-bubble rose on the left, it floats away towards the right. His pen runs away with him; praise is thrown out by the first hole in the road; epigram jumps in; and at last the poor dramatic author, who was lauded to the skies yesterday, complimented this morning, finds himself cut to pieces and dragged at horses' tails in to-morrow's paper. Don't blame Monsieur Jules Janin for it. 'Tis not his fault. The fault lies with his inkhorn; the fault lies with his pen, which mistook the mustard-pot for the honey-jar; 'twill be more careful next time. 'Tis the fault of the hand-organ which would grind away while he was writing; 'tis the fault of the fly which would keep buzzing about the room and bumping against the panes of glass; 'tis the fault of the idea which took wings and flew away. The poor dramatic author is mortified to death; but, Lord bless your soul! Monsieur Jules Janin is not guilty."

"What do you think of Monsieur Sainte-Beuve? Is he as unfaithful a critic as Monsieur Théophile Gautier and Monsieur Jules Janin?" I asked, rather timidly.

"Monsieur Sainte-Beuve has received from Heaven (which he has ceased to believe in) an exquisite taste, an extraordinary delicacy of tact, admirable talents of criticism, relieved, and, as it were, fertilized, by rare poetical faculties. He possesses and exercises in the most masterly manner the art of shading, of hints, of hesitations, of insinuations, of infiltrations, of evolutions, of circumlocutions, of precautions, of ambuscades, of feline gambols, of ground and lofty tumbling, of strategy, and of literary diplomacy. He excels in the art of distilling a drop of poison in a phial of perfume so as to render the poison delicious and the perfume venomous. His prose is as attractive and magnetizing as a woman slightly compromised in public opinion, and who does not tell all her secrets, but increases her attractions both by what she shows and by what she conceals. Monsieur Sainte-Beuve has had no desire but to be a pilgrim of ideas, lacking the first requisite in a pilgrim, which is faith. He has circumnavigated, merely in the character of amateur, every doctrine of the century; but though he has never adopted one of them for his creed, when he abandoned them he seemed to have betrayed them. Accused unjustly of treachery and apostasy, he has done his best to confirm his reputation, and has ended by becoming the enemy of those from whom at first he had only deserted. His error has been in adulterating that which he might have put, with singular grace, talents, and natural superiority, pure into currency,—in acting as if literature were a war of treachery, where one was constantly obliged to keep a sword in the hand and a poniard in the pocket. They say he is at great pains to provide himself with an immense arsenal of defensive and offensive weapons, that he may be able to crush those he loves to-day and may detest to-morrow, and those he hates to-day and wishes to wreak vengeance on hereafter. Monsieur Sainte-Beuve might have been the most indisputable of authorities: he is only the most delightful of literary curiosities."

Such was the language of Monsieur Jules Sandeau. He spoke in the same strain of many another eminent literary man. Around these illustrious planets gravitated satellites. When new pieces were brought out, he told me one could see between the acts the lieutenants go up to the captain-critics and receive instructions from them; the consequence was, the theatrical criticisms were either collective apotheoses or collective executions. One day it was Mademoiselle Rachel they put on the black list for three months, and they raised up against her Madame Ristori, declaring that she was as superior to Rachel as Alfieri was to Racine. Then 'twas the Gymnase Theatre they put in Coventry, for having spoken disrespectfully of newspaper-writers. Another day Monsieur Scribe was their victim, to punish him for fatiguing with his dramatic longevity the young men, the new-comers, who are neither young men, nor new men, nor men of talents. Monsieur Jules Sandeau had passed through the thorny paths, the steppes, and the waste frontiers of literary life in Paris, without losing his honor, but without retaining a particle of illusion. He told me of his days of harsh and pernicious poverty, the abyss of debt, the constable at the door, the agony of hunting after dollar by dollar, "copy" hastily written to meet urgent wants, and the sweet toil of literary exertion changed into torture. I questioned him about Madame George Sand. What child of twenty has not been fired by that free, proud poetry which refused to accept the cold chains of commonplace life and justified the paradoxes of revolt by the eloquence of the pleading and the beauty of the dream? I soon discovered that the ideal and the real are two hostile brothers. De Balzac's works had kindled sincere enthusiasm in my breast. Monsieur Jules Sandeau showed me the dash of madness and of ingenuous depravity mixed with incontestable genius in that powerful mind. He told me of De Balzac's insane vanity, of his furious passion for wealth and luxury, of his readiness to plunge and to drag others after him into the most hazardous adventures, and of his insensibility to commercial honor.

After parting from Monsieur Jules Sandeau, I strolled towards a circulating-library. I was asking the mistress of the establishment some questions about the latest publications, when all of a sudden the glass door opened in the most violent manner, and who should come in but Monsieur Philoxène Boyer, rushing forward like a whirlwind, a last lock of hair dancing on top of a bald pate, a livid complexion, a feverish eye, a sack-overcoat friable as tinder, a hat reddened by the rain, trousers falling in lint upon boots run down at the heel: such was the appearance presented by Monsieur Philoxène Boyer, our old classmate at college, and now a critic, a romantic, an uncomprehended man of genius, and a literary man. I had already seen at the Exchange the martyrs of money; I now saw a martyr of letters. Monsieur Philoxène Boyer is neither a fool nor a foundling; he was educated with care; he belongs to an excellent family of Normandy; he might have been at this very hour an excellent gentleman-farmer, honored by his neighbors, and leading a quiet, useful life, while cultivating his paternal acres, and making a respectable woman happy. But when he graduated at the Law School, the demon of literature seized and refused to release him. His patrimonial estate was worth thirty thousand dollars; ignorant of business, he sold it below its true value, and, instead of placing the capital out at interest, he put it in his pocket and dissipated it in those taxes, as varied as old feudal burdens, which the poor, uncomprehended men of genius levy on their wealthy brethren. One day it went in dinners given to brethren who deliver diplomas of genius; another day it went in money lent to Grub-Street penny-a-liners who were starving; again it went to found petty newspapers established to demolish old reputations and raise new ones, and to die of inanition at their fifth number for want of a sixth subscriber. In fine, before three years had passed away, not a cent was left of Monsieur Philoxène Boyer's estate, and in return he had acquired neither talents nor fame. He is scarcely thirty years old: he looks like a man of sixty. I know no man in the world who, for the hope of half a million of dollars and a place in the French Academy, would consent to bear the burden of tortures, privations, and humiliations which make up Monsieur Philoxène Boyer's existence. He undergoes the torments of the damned; he fasts; he flounders in all the sewers of Paris. But he is riveted to this horrible existence as the galley-slave to his chain; he can breathe no other air than this mephitic atmosphere; he can lead no other life. When I saw him on the threshold of that sombre and humid reading-room, muddied, wet, pale, thin, almost in rags, I could not help thinking of this wretched galley-slave of literary ambition as he might have been at home in his old Norman mansion, cozily stretched before a blazing fire, with a cellar full of cider and a larder groaning beneath the fat of that favored land, smiling at a young wife on whose lap merry children were gambolling. He was in the vein of bitter frankness. He had not dined the preceding day. He seized me by the arm, and, dragging me out of the circulating-library, said to me, in a voice as abrupt as a feverish pulsation,—

"Don't listen to that old hag! All the books she offers you are miserable stuff, fit at best for the pastry-cooks. Oh! you don't know how success is won nowadays. I'll tell you. There is an assurance society between the book, the piece, and the judge. Praise me, and I'll praise you. If you will praise us, we will praise you. The public buys."

Then he went on with his bitter voice to utter a furious philippic against our celebrated literary men. He attacked them all, with scarcely an exception. This one sold his pen to the highest bidder; that one levied contributions of all sorts on the vanity of authors and artists; another was a mere actor; a fourth was nothing but a mountebank; a fifth was a mere babbler; and so on he went through the whole catalogue of authors. The illustrious literary democrats were Liberals and Spartans only for the public eye. They cared as much about liberty as about old moons: this one speculated on a title; that one on a vice; a third, to possess a carriage and dine at Vefour's, had become the thrall of a wealthy stockjobber who paid his virtues by the month and his opinions by the line. He spoke in this way for an hour, bitter, excessive, nervous, extravagant, and sometimes eloquent. All at once he stopped,—and pressing my hand with a mixture of bitterness and cynicism, he said,—"Old boy, I have now given you a dollar's worth of literature; lend me ten dimes." I hastily drew from my pocket three or four gold coins, and, blushing, slipped them into his hand; it trembled a little; he thanked me with a glance, and, muttering something like "Good bye," disappeared around the next corner.

The next time I met Monsieur Jules Sandeau he said to me,—"I want you to go with me to Madame Émile de Girardin's to-morrow evening. She is to read a tragedy she has written in five acts and in verse. You will meet a good many of our celebrated literary men there. You must remember that the watchword at that house is, Admiration, more admiration, still more admiration. You must excite enthusiasm to ecstasy, compliments to lyrical poetry, and carry flattery to apotheosis. But before we go there I beg you to allow me to return your aristocratic breakfast by a poor literary man's dinner, which we will eat, not in Bignon's sumptuous private room, but outside the walls of Paris, at 'Uncle' Moulinon's, which is the rendezvous of the supernumeraries of art and literature. The wine, roast, and salad are cheaper than you find them on the Boulevard des Italiens, and it is advisable that a fervent neophyte like you should take all the degrees in our freemasonry as soon as possible. 'Uncle' Moulinon's dining-saloon is to Madame Émile de Girardin's drawing-room what a conscripts' barrack is to the official mansion of a French marshal."

I gratefully accepted the invitation, and at the appointed time I joined Monsieur Jules Sandeau. We left Paris by the Barrière des Martyrs, climbed Montmartre hill, and entered "Uncle" Moulinon's dining-saloon when it was full of its usual frequenters. I had never seen such a sight before. Imagine a gourmand obliged to witness with gaping mouth all, even the most prosaic details of the culinary preparations for a grand dinner. The dining-saloon was a long, narrow room, low-pitched and sombre; it was filled with small tables, where in unequal groups were seated young men between eighteen and fifty-five, anticipating glory by tobacco-smoke. Here were beardless chins accompanied by long locks; there were bushy beards which covered three-quarters of the owners' cadaverous, wasted faces; yonder were premature bald heads, leaden eyes, feverish glances: look where you would, you saw everywhere that uneasy, startled air which bore witness to a disordered life. To the sharp aroma of tobacco were joined the stale and rancid odors peculiar to fifth-rate eating-houses. I sought in vain upon all those faces youth's gentle and poetical gayety, the exuberance of gifted natures, the amiable cordiality of travelling-companions pressing on together in different paths. The most salient characteristics of this bizarre assembly were sickly smiles, an incredible mixture of triviality and affectation, motions of wild beasts trying their teeth and claws, starving attitudes, words tortured to make them look like ideas, a brutal familiarity, and the evident desire to devour all their superiors that they might next crush all their equals. I was glad when dinner was over, for I felt ill at ease,—the sight before me differed so much from that I had dreamed.

Monsieur Jules Sandeau gave me his arm, and we walked towards the Avenue des Champs Elysées. It was nine o'clock when we reached the Rue de Chaillot, where Madame Émile de Girardin resided. She lived in a sort of Greek temple, built about thirty feet below the level of the street, and down to which we had to go as if we were entering a cellar. The house was full of columns, statues, flowers, paintings, candelabra, and servants in black dress-coats and short breeches; but everything about the place looked so accidental and ephemeral that the Comte de Saint-Brice, a very witty frequenter of the house, used to say,—"Whenever I visit the place, I am always afraid of finding the horses sold, the servants dismissed, the husband run away, the drawing-room closed, and the house razed." The Comte de Saint-Brice's fears must have been allayed on this evening. Everything was in its place,—horses, servants, husband, drawing-room, house. Madame Émile de Girardin was in full dress; the manuscript tragedy was in her lap. I found in the drawing-room Monsieur Victor Hugo, Monsieur de Lamartine, Monsieur Alfred de Musset, the three stars of our poetical heavens; Monsieur Théophile Gautier, Monsieur Méry, Monsieur Paulin Limayrac, the secondary planets; Madame George Sand, the great Amazon novelist; some doctors, some artists, two or three actors from the French Comedy, and some other gentlemen. At this period of time Madame Émile de Girardin was forty-five years old. Her flatterers still spoke of her beauty. Her conversation was dazzling, but it lacked charm: her talents forced themselves upon one; her bons mots took you by storm. Strength had overcome everything like grace, and two hours' conversation with Madame Émile de Girardin left one with a sick-headache or exhausted by fatigue. Nevertheless, one of her most fervent admirers has uttered this singular paradox about her: "She would be the first woman of the age, if she had always talked and never written a line."

Her husband, Monsieur Émile de Girardin, was present, with his pale face, lymphatic complexion, glassy eye, and forehead checkered with a Napoleon-like lock. He was then, and has remained ever since, the most exact personification of a pasteboard man of genius lighted by histrionic foot-lights. He was a compound of the dandy, the sophist, and the agitator. His talents lay in making people believe him in possession of ideas, when he had none,—just as speculators disseminate the illusion of their capital, when in reality they are worse than bankrupt. He began what others have since completed,—that is, he made trade and advertisements the sovereign masters of literature and newspapers. Abetted by the spirit of the age, he introduced into the intellectual world the risks and unexpected hazards of stock-jobbing circles. He made a great deal of money in this trade, and, besides, it gave him the pleasure of making a great deal of noise in the world, of overturning governments, of dreaming of being minister, nay, prime-minister, when the day may come in which good, sense is to be challenged and France made bankrupt. Everybody around him, even his wife, seemed to accept his superiority for something unquestionable. Their union was not one of those affectionate, faithful, and tender marriages, such as commonplace folk hope to enjoy, but it was a copartnership of two smart people, aided by two bunches of quills. Each pretended to admire the other with an extravagance of show which made it hard for the bystander to repress doubts and smiles.

Monsieur Jules Sandeau had informed Madame Émile de Girardin that he intended to bring me with him. I do not know how she found out that I had, in the very heart of the Faubourg Saint Germain, an old aunt, a real duchess, who was recognized as an authority whose dicta could not be disputed by any noble family to be found from the Quai Voltaire to the Rue de Babylone, which, as all the world knows, are the frontiers of that, the most aristocratic quarter of Paris. Madame de Girardin knew that my aunt was in a position to open to vanity the portals of some noble houses which talents and fame alone could not open. Now Madame Émile de Girardin's monomania was to be received in the noble faubourg,—to live there perfectly at home, as if it were her native sphere,—to be able to say, "My friend, the little Marchioness," or, "I have just come from our dear Jeanne's house, my charming Countess, you know: she is suffering dreadfully from her neuralgia." She reckoned a triumph of this sort a thousand times preferable to the applause of her readers and her friends. All the dull pleasantries with which she adorned her over-praised "Letters" owed their origin solely to the unequivocal veto placed by two or three courageous noble ladies on the attempts made by Madame Émile de Girardin to force her entrance vi et armis into their mansions. For my aunt's sake, she received me with especial courtesy, which I was ingenuous enough to attribute to my own personal merit. However, I had not time to indulge in analysis: she was about to begin to read her tragedy.

The tragedy was that "Cléopâtre" in which Mademoiselle Rachel appeared, after wrangling for some time with the authoress to induce the latter to give Antony some other name, vowing that Antoine was entirely too vulgar to be uttered on the stage. The great tragic actress had never heard of the illustrious Roman, and knew no other Antony but the Antoine who scrubbed her floors and brought her water. It was a woman's tragedy, but written by a woman in man's attire, determined to write a very masculine, vigorous work, but succeeding in producing only a plated piece, in which everything was puerile, artificial, and conventional, from the first word to the last line. It was an olla podrida, in which Shakspeare hobnobbed with Campistron, Théophile Gautier locked arms with Dorat, Plutarch was dovetailed with the Mantua-Makers' Journal of Fashions. Cleopatra spouted long speeches upon archæology, hieroglyphics, the sun, climate, and virtue; Antony was guilty of concetti in the style of Seneca; Octavia prattled like a respectable Parisian lady, who takes care of her children when they have the measles, and hides from them their father's bad habits. It was neither antique nor Roman, nor classic nor romantic, nor good nor bad nor indifferent; it was a tragical wager won by a smart woman at the expense of her audience. The latter, nevertheless, bravely did their duty. Neither "Le Cid," nor "Polyeucte," nor "Andromaque," nor "Athalie"—Corneille and Racine's masterpieces—ever produced such rapturous enthusiasm. Monsieur Méry dashed off extemporaneously, in Marseillais accent, admiring paradoxes which lacked nothing but splendid rhyme. Monsieur Théophile Gautier, who looked like an obese Turk habited in European clothes, laid aside his Moslem placidity to cry that the tragedy was marvellous. Monsieur Alfred de Musset, lolling in his arm-chair in an attitude which seemed a compromise between sleep and Kief, smiled beatifically. Monsieur Victor Hugo vowed that nothing half so fine had ever before been written in any age or in any country or in any language—except (aside) "my own 'Burgraves'"! Monsieur de Lamartine, like a god descended upon earth and astounded to find himself at home, let fall from his divine lips compliments perfumed with ambrosia, sparkling with poetry, and glittering with indifference. Monsieur Paulin Limayrac, that little bit of a fellow, the fly of the political and literary coach, went first to one and then to another, his eye-glass incrusted in his eyebrow, stiffening his wee form as long as he could make it, rattling his high-heeled boots as loudly as he could contrive, stretching out his round, dogmatic face, puffing and blowing to give himself importance, dying to be the Coryphæus of the company, and mortified to see himself reduced to sing his enthusiasm in the chorus; he frisked about the room, and seemed to be handing around his rapture on a waiter, as domestics hand around cake and ices at parties.

The tragedy fatigued me. This comedy of adulation disgusted me. My very humble and obscure position in the midst of all these illustrious shareholders of the Mutual-Admiration Society, organized by the vanity of all to the profit of the vanity of each, kindled in me a desire to show myself frank and independent. I murmured, loud enough to be heard by all my neighbors,—"Of a truth, the Country's Muse is not Melpomene!" Madame Émile de Girardin, when Mademoiselle Delphine Gay and in the most brilliant period of her poetical youth, had styled herself "the Country's Muse"; her admirers had adopted the title, and it had remained her poetical alias. The exclamation was, therefore, if not very brilliant, at least very plain and quite just. It soon went around the room as rapidly as every ill-natured phrase will go; for everybody is glad to borrow such remarks from his neighbor without paying the price of them himself. I soon saw one of Madame Émile de Girardin's intimate friends whisper something into her ear. She blushed. Her thin lips became thinner. Her nose and her chin, which always seemed as if about to wage war on each other, became more menacing than ever; her bright, clear eyes turned from her friend and gave me a glance ten times more tragic than the five acts of her tragedy. I saw that my exclamation had been repeated to her, and that a universal anathema was thundered at the rustic boor, at the barbarian impudent enough to dare to be witty by Monsieur Méry's side, and to affect to be insensible to the sublime beauties of "Cléopâtre." However, all was not yet lost; I had unconsciously another way of conquering Madame de Girardin's favor. Her countenance became wreathed in smiles, she advanced towards me, and said, in a honeyed tone,—"Well, Count, give me some tidings of our excellent Duchess de –, your aunt, I believe?"