Mademoiselle de Maupin. Theophile Gautier

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СКАЧАТЬ for Stabia, Pompeii, and Herculaneum, and that, some thousand years hence, the antiquaries of that day should make excavations and exhume the corpse of the dead city, tell me what monument would remain standing to bear witness to the splendor of the mighty entombed, the Gothic Notre-Dame?—They would form truly a fine idea of our artistic development when they cleared away the rubbish from the Tuileries, redecorated by Monsieur Fontaine! The statues on Pont Louis XV. would look splendid in the museums of those days. And were it not for the pictures of the ancient schools and the statues of antiquity or the Renaissance crowded together in the gallery of the Louvre, that long shapeless conduit; were it not for the ceiling by Ingres, which would show that Paris was not a Barbary camp or a village of Welches or Topinamboux, the things that would be unearthed from the ruins would be very interesting.—Short swords carried by National Guardsmen, firemen's helmets, coins struck from pyriform dies, that is the kind of thing they would find instead of the beautiful, curiously-carved weapons that the Middle Ages left in the recesses of their towers and ruined tombs, the medallions that fill the Etruscan vases and pave the cellars of all Roman buildings. As for our wretched veneered furniture, all the cheap boxes, naked and ugly and shabby, that we call commodes or secretaries, and all our shapeless, fragile utensils—I trust that time would have been compassionate enough to destroy the last vestige of them.

      Once, this whim of erecting a magnificent, pretentious monument took possession of us. In the first place we were obliged to borrow the plan from the old Romans; and even before it was finished, our Panthéon tottered on its legs like a child with the rickets and staggered like a drunken man, so that we had to give it crutches of stone, otherwise it would have measured its shameful length on the ground, in sight of all the world, and would have given the nations something to laugh at for more than a hundred francs.—We thought it better to set up an obelisk on one of our squares; we had to go and filch it at Luxor, and we were two years bringing it home. Old Egypt lined its roads with obelisks as we line ours with poplars; it carried bundles of them under its arm as the market-gardener carries bunches of asparagus, and carved a monolith from the sides of its mountains of granite more easily than we make tooth-picks or ear-picks. A few centuries ago Raphael was living and Michael Angelo; now we have Monsieur Paul Delaroche, all because we are progressing.—You boast of your Opéra; ten Opéras like yours could dance a saraband in a Roman circus. Monsieur Martin, himself, with his tame tiger and his poor gouty lion, sound asleep like a subscriber to the Gazette, makes a very poor showing beside the gladiator of antiquity. Take your benefit performances that last till two o'clock in the morning—what do they amount to when you think of the games that lasted a hundred days, of the plays in which real ships really fought in real water; in which thousands of men conscientiously cut one another in pieces;—aye, turn pale O heroic Franconi!—in which, when the sea retired, the desert arrived with its roaring tigers and lions, awe-inspiring supernumeraries who did duty but once; in which the leading rôle was taken by some robust, athletic Dacian or Pannonian whom they would very often have found it embarrassing to produce at the end of the play, his sweetheart being a lovely and dainty Numidian lioness who had fasted for three days?—Does it not seem to you that the rope-dancing elephant was superior to Mademoiselle Georges? Do you suppose Mademoiselle Taglioni is a better dancer than Arbuscula, and Perrot better than Bathyllus? I am convinced that Roscius could have given points to Bocage, excellent actor though he is—Galeria Coppiola played ingénue rôles when she was more than a hundred years old. It is fair to say that the oldest of our jeunes premières is but little more than sixty, and that Mademoiselle Mars shows no sign of progress in that direction: they had three or four thousand gods in whom they believed, and we have only one and we hardly believe in him; that is a strange kind of progress.—Was not Jupiter a better man than Don Juan and a much more successful seducer? Verily, I cannot see what we have discovered or even improved.

      After the progressive journalists, as if to serve as a foil to them, come the blasé journalists, who are usually twenty or twenty-two years old, who have never left their quarter and have as yet lain only with their housekeeper. Everything bores them, tires them out; they are sated, blasé, used up, inaccessible. They know beforehand what you are going to say to them; they have seen, felt, heard, experienced everything that it is possible to see, feel, hear, and experience; the human heart has no corner so dark that they have not held a lantern to it. They say to you with marvellous self-possession: "The human heart is not like that; women are not made so; that character is falsely drawn;"—or else: "What's this! always love or hatred! always men and women! Can't you talk about something else? Why, man is worn threadbare, and woman, more so, since Monsieur de Balzac took a hand.

      "'Who will deliver us from men and women?'

"Do you think your fable is new, monsieur? it is new after the fashion of the Pont-Neuf:[2] nothing in the world could be more common; I read it somewhere or other;—when I was out at nurse or somewhere else; it's been dinned into my ears for ten years.—By the way, monsieur, understand that there's nothing I don't know, that everything is worn threadbare for me, and that even if your idea were as virginal as the Virgin Mary, I would swear, none the less, that I had seen it prostituting itself on street corners to the vilest scribblers and the most contemptible pedants."

      Journalists of that stamp are responsible for Jocko, Le Monstre Vert, Les Lions de Mysore, and a thousand other charming conceits.

      They are constantly complaining of being obliged to read books and see plays. Apropos of a paltry vaudeville, they will talk about flowering almond-trees, limes that perfume the air, the breezes of spring, the odor of the young foliage; they set up for lovers of nature after the style of young Werther, and yet they have never set foot outside of Paris and could not tell a cabbage from a beet.—If it is winter, they prate about the joys of the domestic fireside, and the crackling fire, and the andirons, and the slippers, and the reverie and the state between sleeping and waking; they never fail to quote Tibullus's famous line:

      Quam juvat immites ventos audire cubantem,

      by the aid of which they assume a knowing and at the same time ingenuous air, the most fascinating thing imaginable. They pose as men upon whom the work of men can no longer make any impression, whom the emotions aroused by the drama leave as cold and hard as the knife with which they cut their quills, but who exclaim, nevertheless, with Jean Jacques Rousseau: "Ah! there's the periwinkle!" They profess fierce antipathy to the colonels at the Gymnase, the American uncles, the cousins, male and female, the sensitive old grumblers, the romantic widows, and try to cure us of the vaudeville by proving every day by the feuilletons that all Frenchmen are not born wicked.—In truth, we see no great harm in that, but the contrary, and we are glad to acknowledge that the extinction of the vaudeville or the opera-comique in France—national style—would be one of the greatest benefactions that the press and Heaven could bestow.—But I should be very glad to know what species of literature these gentlemen would allow to be established in its place. To be sure, it could be no worse.

      Others preach against false taste and translate Seneca the tragedian. Lastly, and to close the procession, a new battalion of critics has been formed, of a species never before seen.

      Their formula for estimating a work is the most convenient, the most elastic, the most malleable, the most peremptory, the most superlative, and the most successful that a critic ever could have conceived. Zoilus would certainly have lost nothing thereby.

      Hitherto, when it has seemed desirable to depreciate a work of any sort or to cast odium upon it in the eyes of the patriarchal and simple-minded subscriber, the ordinary method has been to make false or cunningly isolated quotations; to maim sentences and mutilate lines in such a way that the author himself would have considered himself the most ridiculous creature on earth; to bring accusations of imaginary plagiarisms; to place passages from his book side by side with passages from ancient or modern authors, which had not the least connection therewith; to accuse him, after the style of a cook and with innumerable solecisms, of not knowing his own language and of degrading the French of Racine and Voltaire; to assert in all seriousness that his book tended toward anthropophagy, СКАЧАТЬ