1817 WAS the year which Louis XVIII, with a royal aplomb not lacking in arrogance, called the twenty-second of his reign. It was the year in which M. Bruguière de Sorsum, the translator of Shakespeare, became celebrated. The hairdressing establishments, hoping for the return of powdered wigs and birds of paradise, broke out in a rash of azure and fleur-de-lis. It was the guileless period when Comte Lynch sat every Sunday as a churchwarden on the high bench in Saint-Germain-des-Prés, clad in the robes of a Peer of France, with his red ribbon and long nose and the stately bearing proper to a man who has performed a notable act. M. Lynch’s notable act was as follows: on 12 March 1814, being then Mayor of Bordeaux, he had handed over the town a little too soon to the Duc d’Angoulême. Hence his peerage. It was the fashion in 1817 to engulf the heads of six- to eight-year-old boys in enormous fur hats with ear-flaps, which made them look like Eskimos. The French Army wore white uniforms in the Austrian fashion. Regiments were styled legions and instead of being numbered bore the names of départements. Napoleon was at St Helena, and since the English would not allow him any green cloth he had his old tunics turned. Pellegrini was singing, Mlle Bigottini was dancing, Potier was presiding at the Théâtre des Variètés and Mme Saqui had succeeded Forioso on the tight-rope. There were still Prussian troops in France. Legitimacy had asserted itself by cutting off first the hands and then the heads of Pleignier, Cabonneau, and Tolleron, convicted of having plotted to blow up the Tuileries. The Prince de Talleyrand, grand chamberlain, and the Abbé Louis, finance minister designate, exchanged the smiles of rewarded prescience, both having celebrated the Mass of the Federation held on the Champ de Mars on 14 July 1790, one as a bishop, the other as a deacon. In 1817 large wooden posts, painted blue and still bearing traces of gilt eagles and bees, lay rotting on the grass in that same Champ de Mars, some scorched by Austrian bivouac fires. They were what remained of the podium erected two years previously by order of the Emperor for the ceremonial known as the Champ de Mai – a celebration remarkable for the fact that it was held on the Champ de Mars in the month of June. Two things were popular in the year 1817, the selected edition of the works of Voltaire issued by a certain Colonel Touquet and the ‘Charter snuff-boxes’, engraved with the People’s Charter, designed by the same gentleman. The latest Paris sensation was the murder committed by Dautun, who had flung his brother’s head into the pool in the Marché-aux-fleurs. An official inquiry was opened into the loss of the frigate Méduse, which was in due course to cover her captain with shame and the painter Géricault with glory. Colonel Selves went to Egypt, there to become a Moslem and assume the title of Suleiman Pasha. The Ns were erased from the Louvre. The Pont d’Austerlitz was swallowed up in the Jardin du Roi, a designation embracing both the bridge and the Jardin des Plantes. Louis XVIII, searching his Horace for instances of heroes who became emperors and shoemakers who became heirs apparent, had two particular cases in mind, Napoleon and Mathurin Bruneau, the cobbler whose claim to be the Dauphin had won some support among the royalists of Normandy. The Académie Française announced that the subject of its essay award was ‘The Happiness to be Derived from Scholarship’.* An imitation Chateaubriand named Marchangy cropped up, to be followed by an imitation Marchangy named d’Arlincourt. In recognition of her masterpieces Claire d’Albe and Malek-Adel, Mme Cottin was proclaimed the greatest writer of the age. The Institut de France struck the name of Napoleon Bonaparte off its rolls. By Royal Decree a naval college was established at Angoulême: since the Duc d’Angoulême was Grand Admiral of the Fleet, clearly the town must be given the status of a seaport or the whole principle of monarchy would be undermined. Mme de Stael died in July. Political differences were still not unknown, the Café Lemblin, in the Palais-Royal, favouring the Emperor as opposed to the Café Valois which favoured the Bourbons. The newspapers had shrunk, but if the format was diminished the freedom of expression was tremendous. Le Constitutionnel was constitutional and La Minerve spelt the name of Chateaubriand with a final ‘t’, causing much mirth among the citizenry at the expense of that great writer.
The suborned press showered insults on the persons exiled in 1815 – David was denied all talent, Arnault all wit, Carnot all integrity; Soult had never won a battle and Napoleon had lost his genius. It is rare, as we know, for exiles to receive letters from their native country, since the police make it their particular duty to intercept them. David, who complained of this in a Belgian newspaper, was handsomely mocked in the Royalist press. Differences of terminology – ‘regicides’ as opposed to ‘voters’, ‘enemies’ instead of ‘allies’, ‘Napoleon’ for ‘Buonaparte’ – represented something more than a gulf between individuals. All sensible persons were agreed that King Louis XVIII, ‘the immortal author of the Charter’, had put an end for ever to the age of revolutions. The word ‘Redivivus’ was being carved on the pedestal in the garden by the Pont-Neuf destined for the statue of Henry VI. Plans were under discussion for the consolidation of the Monarchy, and in critical moments the right-wing leaders said, ‘We must consult Bacol,’ a deputy notable only for his ultra-monarchist views. But there was also a movement (cautiously approved by ‘Monsieur’, the king’s brother) in favour of the Comte d’Artois; this was to become known as ‘the waterside conspiracy’ since the conspirators were accustomed to meet on the terrace of the Tuileries overlooking the Seine. Nor were other plots lacking. The Minister of Police was the Due Decazes, a gentleman of moderately liberal views. Chateaubriand, clad in pyjama trousers and slippers, with a cap of Madras cotton on his grey head, stood every morning at his window in the Rue Saint-Dominique, peering into a mirror and cleaning his excellent teeth with a complete set of dentist’s equipment while he dictated drafts of La Monarchie selon la Charte to his secretary, M. Pilorge. The leading critics rated Lafon higher than Talma. Charles Clodier was writing Thérèse Aubert. Divorce had been abolished. High schools were called colleges, and the young collegians, their collars adorned with a golden fleur-de-lis, brawled over the Roi de Rome. The palace secret police complained to Her Royal Highness, Madame, about the portrait of her husband, the Duc d’Orléans, which was to be seen everywhere: the duke in his hussar uniform looked a great deal more imposing than the Duc de Berry in the uniform of the dragoons – a most uncomfortable circumstance. The City of Paris had the dome of the Invalides re-gilded at its own expense. The actor Picard – a member of the Academy, which Molière had never succeeded in becoming – was playing in Les deux Philberts at the Théâtre de l’Odéon, over the front of which the partly effaced words, ‘Théâtre de l’Impératrice’, could still be clearly discerned. It was generally agreed that M. Charles Loyson would become the genius of the century; envy, a sure sign of fame, was already beginning to assail him and the following line was written about him – ‘Même quand Loyson vole, on sent qu’il a des pattes.’* The philosopher Saint-Simon, largely unknown, was a celebrated Fourier in the Académie des Sciences whom posterity has forgotten and an unknown Fourtier living in an attic whom the future will remember. Byron was beginning to emerge: a footnote to a poem by Milleboye introduced him to France with the words ‘a certain Lord Byron’. David of Angers was trying to shape marble. A contraption which reeked and spluttered was manoeuvring on the Seine between the Pont-Royal and the Pont-Louis-XV: a useless mechanical toy, an inventor’s daydream observed with indifference by the Parisians – in fact, a steamboat. The aristocracy of the Faubourg Saint-Germain supported M. Delaveau for the post of Prefect of Police, because of his piety. Two leading surgeons quarrelled in the lecture-hall of the Ecole de Médicine over the divinity of Christ, shaking their fists at each other. Cuvier, with one eye on Genesis and the other on the natural world, sought to placate religious bigotry by adapting fossils to the Scriptures and demonstrating the superiority of Moses to the mastodons. A man who, at the sight of the Comte d’Artois entering Notre-Dame, was so rash as to exclaim aloud, ‘God, how I regret the day when I saw Bonaparte and Talma go arm-in-arm into the Bal-Sauvage!’ was tried and sentenced to six months’ imprisonment for sedition. But the traitors under Napoleon now came out of hiding. Men who had gone over to the enemy on the eve of battle cynically paraded their rewards and dignities; the deserters of Ligny and Quatre-Bras flaunted their monarchist allegiance with a brazenness that disregarded the injunction to be read on the walls of English public lavatories – ‘Please adjust your dress before leaving.’
Such is a random, superficial picture of the year 1817, now largely forgotten. History discards nearly all these odds and ends and cannot do otherwise; the larger scene absorbs them. Nevertheless such details, which are wrongly called trifling – there are no trifles in the human story, no trifling leaves on the tree – are not without value. It is the lineaments of the years which form the countenance of the century.
And in that year of 1817 four young gentlemen of Paris played ‘a merry prank’.
The four Parisians came, one from Toulouse, one from Limoges, the third from Cahors, and the fourth from Montauban; but they were students, and to say ‘student’ is to say ‘Parisian’. To study in Paris is to belong to Paris.
They were unremarkable young men, average representatives of their kind, neither good nor bad, learned nor ignorant, brilliant nor doltish; handsome with the April lustre of their twenty-odd years. Four commonplace Oscars, for the Arthurs had not yet arrived. Ossian was still in vogue and the mode was Scandinavian and Caledonian. The pure English style was to come later, the first of the Arthurs, Wellington, having only just won the Battle of Waterloo.
The Oscars were named Felix Tholomyès, from Toulouse, Listolier from Cahors, Fameuil from Limoges, and Blachevelle from Montauban. Each, of course, had his mistress. Blachevelle loved Favourite, so-called because she had been in England: Listolier adored Dahlia, who had chosen a flower for her nom de guerre; Fameuil idolized Zéphine, short for Josephine; and Tholomyès had Fantine, called ‘la Blonde’ because of her golden hair.
Favourite, Dahlia, Zéphine, and Fantine were enchanting girls, scented and glowing, still with a flavour of the working-class since they had not altogether abandoned the use of their needles, distracted by love-affairs but with a last trace of the serenity of toil in their expressions, and in their hearts that seed of purity which in a woman survives her first fall from grace. One of the four, the youngest, was known as ‘the baby’; and one was ‘big sister’. Big sister was aged twenty-three. It must be said that the three older ones were more experienced, more heedless, and more versed in the ways of the world than Fantine la Blonde, who was encountering her first illusion.
Dahlia, Zéphine, and particularly Favourite could not have said as much. There had already been more than one episode in the tale of their love-affairs, and the Adolphe of Chapter One had become the Alphonse of Chapter Two and the Gustave of Chapter Three. Poverty and coquetry are fateful counsellors; the one complains and the other flatters, and both whisper in the ear of pretty working girls, defenceless creatures who cannot forbear to listen. Hence their disasters and the stones that are flung at them. They are swept off their feet by the prospect of all that is glorious and inaccessible.
Favourite, having been in England, was greatly admired by Zéphine and Dahlia. She had acquired a home of her own at a very early age. Her father, an elderly, coarse, and boastful teacher of mathematics, had never married but despite his years was still a womanizer. In his youth he had seen the skirts of a chambermaid caught up on a fender and the vison had caused him to fall in love. Favourite was the outcome. From time to time she saw her father, who nodded to her. One morning a wild-eyed elderly woman had entered her room saying, ‘You don’t know who I am? I’m your mother.’ The woman had helped herself to food and drink, fetched a mattress and moved in. She was bad-tempered and devout. She never spoke to Favourite, stayed silent for hours on end, ate enough for four, and went downstairs to unbosom herself to the concierge, complaining about her daughter.
What had caused Dahlia to take up with Listolier, and perhaps with others, were her pretty pink fingernails. How could such nails be expected to do hard work? A girl wanting to remain virtuous must sacrifice her hands. As for Zéphine, she had won Fameuil’s heart by her provocative and caressing way of saying, ‘Oui, Monsieur’.
The young men were comrades and the girls were friends. Love-affairs of that kind always go hand-in-hand with that kind of friendship.
Virtue and philosophy are separate things, the proof of which is that, making due allowance for these irregular arrangements, Favourite, Zéphine, and Dahlia were philosophical, whereas Fan-tine was virtuous.
Virtuous, you may ask – but what of Tholomyès? Solomon would reply that love is a part of virtue. We will merely say that Fantine’s was her first and only love, and she was wholly faithful. She was the only one of the four girls whom only one person addressed with the familiar tu.
She was one of those beings hatched, as it were, in the bosom of the people. Sprung from the nethermost depths of society, she bore the stigma of anonymity and the unknown. She had been born at Montreuil-sur-mer, but nothing was known of her parents. She was called Fantine because she had never been called anything else. At the time of her birth the Directory had been in power. She could have no family name since she had no family, and no baptismal name since at that time there had been no Church. She was called by the name bestowed on her by some passer-by who had seen her running barefoot in the streets, and she accepted it as she accepted the raindrops when they fell. La Petite Fantine – and that was all anyone knew about her. At the age often she had left the town and gone into service with a farming family in the neighbourhood. At fifteen she had gone to Paris ‘to seek her fortune’. She was beautiful and had stayed pure as long as she could – a beautiful blonde with fine teeth. Gold and pearls were her dowry, but the gold was on her head and the pearls were in her mouth.
She worked in order to live, and presently fell in love, also in order to live, for the heart, too, has its hunger. She fell in love with Tholomyès.
For him it was a passing affair, for her the love of her life. The streets of the Latin quarter, swarming with students and grisettes, saw the beginning of the dream. In that maze on the hill of the Panthéon where so many knots have been tied and loosed, she fled for a long time to escape from Tholomyès, but always in such a fashion as to meet him again. There is a way of running which resembles pursuit. And so it happened.
Tholomyès, being the liveliest, was the guiding spirit of the small group formed by Blachevelle, Listolier, Fameuil, and himself.
He was an older student in the classic style. He was rich, with an income of four thousand francs, a matter of awestruck report on the Montagne Sainte-Geneviève. He was a thirty-year-old, ill-preserved rake, wrinkled and gap-toothed, with a bald patch of which he said unrepining, ‘Tonsured at thirty, on one’s knees at forty’. He had a poor digestion and a weakness in one eye; but his youth in its passing heightened his gaiety, replacing teeth with mockery, hair with lightheartedness, health with irony and adding a twinkle to the rheumy eye. He flourished in dilapidation; youth, retreating in good order, did so with laughter and high spirits. He had had a play refused by the Théâtre du Vaudeville, and now and then wrote indifferent verse. Moreover, he was superiorly sceptical of all things, which lent him great authority with lesser souls. In short, balding and ironical, he was the leader.
One day Tholomyès took the other three aside and said with an oracular flourish:
‘For nearly a year Fantine, Dahlia, Zéphine, and Favourite have been asking us for a surprise and we have solemnly promised to give them one. They keep on about it, especially to me. Like the old women of Naples who exclaim to St Janvier, “Yellow Face, work your miracle!” they keep saying to me, “Tholomyès, when are you going to produce the surprise?” And in the meantime we have all had letters from our parents. We are harassed on both sides. I think the time has come. Let us now consider.’
Tholomyès then lowered his voice and what he said was so mirth-provoking that it drew a great burst of laughter from all four and caused Blachevelle to exclaim: ‘That’s a stupendous idea!’
The rest of the conference was lost in the smoke of an adjacent ale-house, but its outcome was a pleasure-party which took place on the following Sunday, the four young men and the four girls.
It is not easy for us in these days to imagine what a country outing of students and grisettes was like forty-five years ago. Paris no longer has the same outskirts, and what might be termed the face of circum-Parisian life has wholly changed. Instead of the post-chaise we have the railway-carriage, and instead of the sailing-cutter the steamboat. We now talk of Fécamp as once we talked of Saint Cloud. Paris in 1862 is a town with all France for its suburbs.
The eight young people conscientiously indulged in all the rustic pastimes that were then available. It was the beginning of the holiday season, a warm, bright summer’s day. The day before, Favourite, the only one who could write, had sent Tholomyès the following note in the name of the four girls, ‘Early to rise for the great surprise!’ – and they had got up at five that morning. They went by coach to Saint-Cloud, inspected the dry cascade exclaiming, ‘How wonderful it must be when there’s any water! breakfasted at the Tête-Noire, had fun tossing quoits by the big pond, climbed up to the Lantern of Diogenes, bet macaroons on the gambling-wheel on the Pont de Sèvres, picked bunches of flowers at Puteaux, bought cream-puffs at Neuilly, ate apple-turnovers everywhere and were entirely happy.
The girls laughed and twittered like uncaged birds, now and then administering reproving taps to their young men. It was the morning intoxication of life, the unforgettable years, the trembling of the dragonfly’s wing. Can you not remember it? Have you never walked through undergrowth thrusting the branches aside to protect the delightful head behind you, or slid down a damp slope with a girl clinging to your hand and protesting, ‘Heavens, my new boots!’ Let it be said that not even this trifling vexation troubled that happy company, although Favourite had said maternally when they set out, ‘There are slugs on the paths. It’s a sign of rain, my dears.’
All four girls were so enchantingly pretty. An elderly poet, seeing them go by under the chestnut-trees of Saint-Cloud at six that morning, exclaimed, ‘There’s one too many!’ having in mind the three Graces. Favourite, the friend of Blachevelle and the eldest, being twenty-three, ran ahead under the branches, jumping ditches, skipping over bushes, leading the dance with the nimbleness of a dryad. Zéphine and Dahlia, whose looks were in some sort complementary, each enhancing the other, stayed close together, partly from coquetry and partly from friendship, and adopted English mannerisms. Melancholy was in vogue for women, as Byronism was later for men, and feminine hair was beginning to be only loosely curled. Zéphine and Dahlia wore theirs in tight rolls. Listolier and Fameuil, engaged in discussing their university professors, were describing to Fantine the dispute then in progress between M. Delvincourt and M. Blondeau, both of the Faculty of Law. Blachevelle was looking as though he had been expressly created for the purpose of carrying Favourite’s shawl on Sundays.
Tholomyès, following behind, was still in charge. He was merry, but his leadership made itself felt; there was authority in his good-humour. His most notable garment was a pair of baggy nankeen trousers – elephant-legs as they were called – with understraps of copper mesh. He was carrying a handsome rattan cane and, since his audacity was boundless, he had in his mouth a strange object called a cigar. Nothing being sacred to him, he had taken up smoking.
“Tholomyès is extraordinary,’ the others said in awe. ‘Those trousers!’
As for Fantine, she was happiness itself. Those beautiful white teeth had evidently been intended most especially for laughter. She carried in her hand, more often than she wore it on her head, a straw bonnet with long white ribbons, and her thick golden locks, which so easily broke loose and were always having to be pinned up, might have been those of Galatea fleeing under the willows. Her lips were parted in delight. The corners of her mouth, sensually upturned like an antique mask of Erigone, seemed to invite some bold advance, but long eyelashes cast their discreet downward shadow over this wantonness, as though to call it to order. Her clothing had a quality of song and flame. She was wearing a mauve dress of the gauzy material made in Barège, with bronze-leather bootees whose crossed laces disclosed white openwork stockings, and with a muslin bodice from Marseilles of which the name, canezou – a corruption of the words quinze août, as pronounced on the Canebière-denotes high summer and the warm south. The other three, less diffident, wore frankly low-necked dresses which, under their flowered hats, were both charming and provocative; but compared with this daring display, Fantine’s canezou with its transparencies, its indiscretion and reticence, at once concealing and revealing, was a piquant triumph of modesty, and it may well be that the famous Court of Love presided over by the Vicomtesse de Cette with her sea-green eyes would have awarded it the prize for coquetry despite its intended restraint. What is most innocent is sometimes most calculating. These things happen.
Glowing of face and delicate in profile, eyes of deep blue with heavy lids, small, arched feet and admirably turned wrists and ankles, white skin with here and there an azure tracery of veins, firm, youthful cheeks, the sturdy, supple neck of an Aegean Juno and shoulders such as Coustou might have modelled with an enticing hollow between them visible through the gauze – such was Fantine, gaiety sobered by thoughtfulness, sculptural and exquisite, a statue to be guessed at beneath her draperies and a soul contained in the statue.
She was beautiful without being too aware of it. Those rare observers, the worshippers of the beautiful who measure all things against perfection, would have discerned in this little working-girl, under her Parisian fripperies, a hint of antique harmony. The daughter of the shadows had breeding. She was graced with the two orders of beauty, style and rhythm. Style is the form of the ideal, rhythm is its movement.
We have said of Fantine that she was happiness itself; but she was also modesty. What the close observer might have perceived beneath the intoxication of youth, summer, and a love-affair, was an unconquerable reserve. She was always a little taken aback, and it is this innocent dismay which distinguishes Psyche from Venus. Her long, slender fingers were those of a vestal stirring the ash beneath the sacred flame with a rod of gold. Although, alas, she would have refused Tholomyès nothing, her expression in repose was above all virginal; a sort of dignity, earnest and almost austere, would at moments take possession of it, and it was strongly disconcerting to see her gaiety thus eclipsed in an abrupt withdrawal. In those moments of swift and sometimes emphatic gravity she was like a disdainful goddess. Her forehead, nose, and chin presented that balance of line, very different from the balance of proportion, which constitutes the harmony of a face; and in the eloquent interval separating the base of her nose from her upper lip she had that charming and scarcely perceptible fold which is the mysterious token of chastity, and which caused Barbarossa to fall in love with a Diana found in the ruins of Iconium.
Love, let us agree, may be a fault. Fantine’s was the innocence that rides above it.
That day was flooded from beginning to end with sunshine. All Nature seemed on holiday. Scent rose up from the lawns of Saint-Cloud, leaves and branches fluttered in the river breeze, bees pillaged the clover, a riot of butterflies hovered over jasmine, milfoil, and wild oats, and the King of France’s noble park was occupied by a host of vagabonds, the birds.
The four entranced couples were a part of all this magic, singing as they danced and ran, chasing butterflies, gathering wild flowers, wetting openwork stockings in the long grass, youthful, foolish, and kind, each exchanging a kiss now and then with any other, except Fantine, who was enclosed in her own shy dream and was in love. ‘You’ve always got a look about you,’ Favourite said.
These are life’s delights. These momentary, happy pairings are a deep response to life and nature, a summons to warmth and light. There must once have been a good fairy who ordered the fields and trees expressly for young hearts, and thanks to her we have the eternal école buisonnière, that school for lovers under the sky which will endure as long as there are trees and novices. Hence the popularity of spring among thinkers. Nobleman and shop-boy, peer and peasant, the people of the Court and the people of the town, all are under the spell of that good fairy. They seek to find themselves in laughter, and there is a glow of discovery in the air, a miraculous transformation in the fact of loving. The lawyer’s clerk becomes a god. The cries and chasings in the grass, the clasped waist, the murmur of half-spoken words that are a song of rapture, the cherry passed from mouth to mouth, these like a flame rising and sinking are the heaven of life. Girls sweetly give themselves and believe that it will last for ever. Philosophers, poets, and painters contemplate these ecstasies and cannot encompass them, so dazzled are they. ‘The departure for Cythera’ cries Watteau. Lancret, the painter of the middle-class, sees his people soaring skyward; Diderot opens his arms to all light loves, and d’Urfé brings in the druids.
After breakfasting, the four couples visited what was then called the King’s Enclosure to see a plant newly arrived from India, of which we have forgotten the name but which was drawing all Paris to Saint-Cloud. It was a strange and charming tall-stemmed shrub whose dense tangle of threadlike branches bore no leaves but innumerable small white blossoms, so that it resembled a head of hair dusted with flowers. There was always an admiring crowd round it.
After this Tholomyès cried, ‘I propose a donkey-ride,’ and having bargained with a donkey-man they rode through Vanvres to Issy.
At Issy an incident occurred. The park, now part of the bien national, which at that time was owned by the army-caterer Bourguin, happened to be open. They went in through the wrought-iron gates and, after inspecting the statue of the anchorite in his grotto, ventured upon the mysteries of the famous hall of mirrors whose wanton distortions were worthy of a satyr become millionaire or a Turcaret turned into Priapus. Then they came to the great swing, slung between the chestnut-trees, which has been celebrated by the Abbé de Bernis. The girls were swung in turn amid laughter provoked by a billowing of skirts that would have delighted Greuze and which moved Tholomyès, who came from Toulouse and was partly Spanish, to deliver himself dolefully of an old Spanish song a gallega, doubtless inspired by some similar occasion.
Soy de Badajoz
Amor me llamo.
Toda mi alma
Es en mi ojos
Porque enseñas
A tus piernas.*
Only Fantine refused to let herself be swung.
‘I don’t like people to give themselves airs,’ Favourite remarked rather sharply.
Having finished with the donkeys they took a boat along the Seine and walked from Passy up to the Barriére de l’Étoile. We may recall that they had been on their feet since five that morning, but there – ‘There’s no getting tired on a Sunday,’ said Favourite. ‘On Sundays tiredness doesn’t happen.’ At three o’clock they were sliding down the switchback, a singular structure then standing on the high ground round the Rue Beaujon, of which the rugged outline showed above the tops of the trees on the Champs-Élysées.
Now and then Favourite cried:
‘But the surprise? When do we get the great surprise?’
‘You must be patient,’ said Tholomyès.
Having exhausted the Russian Peaks and being by now a little weary, the thoughts of the party turned to dinner and they repaired to the Cabaret Bombarda, a branch establishment opened on the Champs-Élysées by the famous restaurateur, Bombarda, whose sign hung on the Rue de Rivoli at the corner of the Passage Delorme.
A big, ugly room with an alcove containing a bed at one end (the place was so full on a Sunday that they had to put up with this); two windows from which the embankment and the river could be seen through the elms; the radiant glow of August beyond the windows; two tables, one piled high with bouquets and male and female hats, and the other, at which the four pairs were seated, loaded with plates and dishes, bottles and glasses, jugs of beer and carafes of wine – little order on the table and some disorder below it, whence proceeded, in Molière’s words, ‘a great clatter of feet’. Such was the scene at about half past four that afternoon, with the sun beginning to set and the appetites to diminish.
The Champs-Élysées, filled with sunshine and people, was all glare and dust, those two constituents of glory. The Marly horses, neighing marble, reared in a golden haze. Carriages drove up and down. A squadron of the magnificent Gardes du Corps with a trumpeter at their head rode along the Avenue de Neuilly, and the white nag, touched with pink in the sunset, floated over the dome of the Tuileries. The Place de la Concorde, at that time re-named Place Louis XV, was thronged with strollers, many wearing the silver fleur-de-lis on a white ribbon, which in 1817 had still not disappeared from all buttonholes. Here and there clusters of little girls surrounded by applauding spectators sang the Bourbon ditty with its refrain, ‘Rendez-nous notre père de Gand, Rendez-nous notre père,’ which had electrified the Hundred Days.
People from the working-class districts in their Sunday clothes, some wearing the bourgeois fleur-de-lis, were scattered over the open spaces, drinking, playing skittles, riding on the roundabouts. There were printer’s apprentices in paper caps. There was laughter everywhere. It was a time of settled peace and royalist security. A confidential report to the King from the Prefect of Police, the Comte Anglès, on the Paris working population ended as follows: ‘All things considered, Sire, there is nothing to be feared from these people. They are as heedless and indolent as cats. The lower orders in the provinces are restive, but not those in Paris. The men are all small in size. It would take two of them put together, Sire, to make one of your grenadiers. We have nothing to fear from the working people of the capital. What is remarkable is that their physical stature has further shrunk during the past fifty years and the people of the Paris suburbs are smaller than they were before the Revolution. They are not dangerous. An easy-going riff-raff, to sum up.’
No Prefect of Police believes that a cat can turn into a lion; nevertheless the thing happens, and that is the miracle of the people of Paris. Moreover the cat, so despised by Comte Anglès, was held in reverence as the embodiment of liberty by the republics of antiquity; a bronze colossus of a cat stood in the main square at Corinth, as though it were complementary to the wingless Minerva of the Piraeus. The simple-minded Restoration police took a too rosy view of the Paris populace; it was not an ‘easy-going riff-raff’ as they thought. The Parisian is to the French what the Athenian was to the Greeks: no one sleeps better than he, no one is more openly frivolous and idle, no one appears more heedless. But this is misleading. He is given to every kind of listlessness, but when there is glory to be won he may be inspired with every kind of fury. Give him a pike and he will enact the tenth of August, a musket and you have Austerlitz. He was the springboard of Napoleon and the mainstay of Danton. At the cry of ‘la patrie’ he enrols, and at the call of liberty he tears up the pavements. Beware of him! His hair rising in anger assumes an epic quality, his shirt becomes a Grecian mantle, the first street uprising becomes a Caudine Fork. When the tocsin sounds the dweller in the back streets gains in stature, the little man assumes a terrible look and the breath from his narrow chest becomes a gale to change the skyline of the Alps. It is thanks to the little man of Paris that the Revolution, inspiring the armies, conquered Europe. He delights in song. Suit his song to his nature and you will understand. With just the ‘Carmagnole’ to sing he will only overthrow Louis XVI; but give him the ‘Marseillaise’ and he will liberate the world.
Having added this footnote to Comte Anglès’s report we must return to our four couples, whose meal, as we have seen, was ending.
Table-talk and lovers’ talk, both fleeting as air. Lovers’ talk is the mist and table-talk the scent.
Fameuil and Dahlia were humming, Tholomyès was drinking, Zéphine was laughing, and Fantine was smiling. Listolier was blowing a wooden trumpet he had bought at Saint-Cloud. Gazing tenderly at her lover, Favourite said:
‘Blachevelle, I adore you.’
This drew from him a question.
‘What would you do, Favourite, if I stopped loving you?’
‘Me?’ she cried. ‘You mustn’t say such things, even as a joke! If you stopped loving me I’d come after you, I’d beat you, I’d scratch your eyes out, I’d have you arrested.’
While Blachevelle smiled the fatuous smile of gratified male vanity, she added: ‘I’d scream the place down! I’d rouse the whole neighbourhood, you brute!’
Blachevelle by now was leaning back with his eyes closed in a simper of delight. Dahlia, who was still eating, murmured in an aside to Favourite:
‘Are you really as fond of him as all that?’
‘I can’t stand him,’ said Favourite in the same undertone, picking up her fork. ‘He’s mean. I like the boy over the way. Do you know the one I mean? You can see he’s cut out to be an actor. I like actors. When he comes home in the evening his mother says, “Well, that’s the end of peace for today; he’ll start shouting till he’s given me a headache” – because he goes up to the top of the house, right up to the attic with the rats, and he sings and recites and I don’t know what so loud that you can hear him on the ground floor. He’s earning twenty sous a day already, copying rubbish for a lawyer. His father was a chorister in Saint-Jacques-du-Haut-Pas. But he’s really nice, and he adores me so much that one day when I was making batter for pancakes he said, “Mamselle, if you were to make your gloves into fritters I’d eat them.” It takes a real artist to say a thing like that. He’s sweet. I’m crazy about him. But I go on telling Blachevelle I adore him. I’m an awful liar, aren’t I?’
Favourite was silent for a moment but then continued:
‘I’m in a bad mood, Dahlia. Nothing but rain all this summer, and the wind gets on my nerves, it never seems to drop, and Blache-velle’s really too mean for anything, and there are scarcely any peas to be had in the market and butter’s so dear one doesn’t know what to buy and – oh, well, I’ve got the spleen, as the English say. And to cap everything, here we are, dining in a room with a bed in it. I think life’s disgusting!’
Some members of the party were singing and others loudly talking. The room was in a state of uproar which Tholomyès now sought to abate.
‘Let us talk with more reason and less speed,’ he said. ‘We must think if we wish to shine. Blurted conversation is an expense of spirit. Flowing beer gathers no head. Let us not be hasty, gentlemen, but mingle dignity with revelry, deliberation with appetite. Festina lente. Let us take a lesson from the spring. If it comes too soon it burns itself out – that is to say it freezes. Its excess of zeal destroys the peaches and apricots. And excess of zeal kills elegance and a good dinner. In this matter Grimod de la Reynière, the gourmet, was on the side of Talleyrand – “Surtout, messieurs, pas trop de zéle.”’
There was a chorus of protest from his audience.
‘Leave us alone, Tholomyès,’ said Blachevelle.
‘Down with the tyrant!’ cried Fameuil. ‘It’s Sunday.’
‘And we’re all sober,’ said Listolier.
‘My dear Tholomyès,’ said Blachevelle, ‘observe my state of calm.’
‘You are the very marquis of calm,’ said Tholomyès.
The Marquis of Montcalm was a prominent monarchist of the period. The pun, indifferent though it was, had the effect of a stone dropped into a pool: the frogs fell silent.
‘Take comfort, my friends,’ said Tholomyès in the cool tone of a leader reasserting his authority. ‘Do not be too much impressed by a jest let fall in passing. Such trifles fallen from heaven are not necessarily deserving of respect. Puns are the droppings of the spirit in its flight. They may fall anywhere, and the spirit, having voided itself of a flippancy, rises into the blue. A white splash on a rock does not prevent the eagle from soaring. Not that I am a despiser of puns. I give them the credit they deserve, but no more. The loftiest spirits in mankind and perhaps beyond mankind, the most illustrious and delightful, have had resort to the play on words. Jesus made a pun about Peter, the Rock. Moses made a pun about Isaac, Aeschylus about Polynices, Cleopatra about Octavius. And we may note that without Cleopatra’s pun, made before the Battle of Actium, no one would remember the town of Toryna, whose name is derived from a Greek word meaning a wooden spoon. But having conceded all this, let me return to my original matter. I repeat, dear brothers and sisters, pas de zèle – no clamour, no excess, even of gaiety, wit and merriment. Hear me, for I have the prudence of Amphiaraus and the baldness of Caesar. There must be a limit even to riddle-making – modus in rebus – and even to dining. Ladies you like apple-turnovers, but you must not over-indulge in them. Art and good sense must play their part even in the eating of apple-turnovers. Gluttony punishes the glutton. Indigestion was designed by God to impose morality on stomachs. And remember this: each of our passions, even that of love, has a stomach that must not be surfeited. We must write finis to all things at the proper time, exercise restraint when desire is still urgent, lock the door on appetite, put fantasy in the stocks and ourselves under arrest. The wise man is he who knows when the moment has come. Have faith in me, because I have read a little law, or so the examination results tell me, and can distinguish between what is explicit and what is implicit; because I have written a thesis in Latin on the methods of torture used in Rome at the time when Munatius Demens was Quaestor of Parricide; because it appears that I am shortly to be awarded my doctorate, from which it would seem that I am not wholly an imbecile. I urge you to be moderate in your desires, and as surely as my name is Félix Tholomyès this is wise counsel. Happy is he who when the hour strikes takes the heroic course and abdicates, like Sulla or Origen.’
Favourite had been listening with profound attention.
‘Félix,’ she said. ‘Such a lovely name. It’s Latin. It means happy.’
‘My friends and brothers,’ Tholomyès continued, ‘do you wish to escape the pricks of desire, to dispense with the nuptial couch and defy love? It is easily done, and this is the prescription: lemonade and hard labour. You must exhaust yourselves in sleepless toil, drink tisanes of herbs and flowers, so limit your diet that you nearly starve, wear a hair shirt and take cold baths.’
‘I’d sooner have a woman,’ said Listolier.
‘Woman!’ exclaimed Tholomyès. ‘Beware of woman! Woe to him who trusts himself to her inconstant heart. Woman is perfidious and devious. She hates the serpent as a professional rival. The serpent is in the house across the way.’
‘Tholomyès, you’re drunk,’ cried Blachevelle.
‘Then at least be cheerful.’
‘Very well.’ And filling his glass, Tholomyès got to his feet.
‘To the glory of wine! Nunc te, Bacche, canam. Forgive me, ladies, that’s Spanish. The measure of a people is the measure of their wine. The arroba of Castille holds sixteen litres, the cantaro of Alicante twelve, the almuda of the Canaries twenty-five, the cuatrin of the Balearios twenty-six – and the jackboot of Tsar Peter thirty! All honour to the great Tsar, and to his boot which was greater still! Ladies, a word of friendly advice: change partners whenever you choose. It is proper that love should stray. The love-affair was never meant to be debased like an English charwoman with calloused knees, but to rove and flutter in gaiety of heart. To err is human, it is said; but I say that to err is to love. Ladies, I adore you all. Zéphine, Josephine, with your indignant expressions you would be enchanting if you were less reproving. And Favourite! One day when Blachevelle was crossing the gutter in the Rue Guérin-Boisseau he saw a girl in trim white stockings who showed her legs, and the sight so delighted him that he fell in love. Favourite, you have Grecian lips. There was a painter called Euphorion who was known as the painter of lips, and he alone would have been worthy to paint your mouth. And no one before you was worthy of the name of Favourite. You deserve to be awarded the apple, like Venus, and to eat it, like Eve. Just now you spoke of my name and I was touched. But names can be deceptive. My name is Félix but I am not happy. Words can be liars, we must not blindly believe what they say. In your place, Miss Dahlia, I would call myself Rose. A flower should be fragrant and a woman should have wit. Of Fantine I say nothing. She is a dreamer, a sensitive soul, a wraith shaped like a nymph with the downcast eyes of a nun who has drifted into the life of a grisette but takes refuge in illusion. She sings and prays, looks heavenward without much knowing what she sees or does, strays in a garden where there are more birds than exist in life. Take heed of what I say, Fantine – I, Tholomyès, am an illusion … But she is not even listening, lost in her golden-head dreams. Everything in her is freshness, softness, youth, and morning light. Dear Fantine, you should be called Marguerite or Pearl, you are a woman of the most splendid East … Ladies, a second counsel: do not marry. But why am I saying this? Why waste my breath? In the matter of marriage women are incorrigible, and nothing that wise men can say will prevent the stay-maker and the seamstress from dreaming of a husband loaded with diamonds. So be it: but, ladies, remember this – you eat too much sugar. If you have a fault it is that you are forever nibbling sweets. Your pretty white teeth crave sugar. But you must bear in mind that sugar is a salt; all salts are desiccating and sugar is the most desiccating of all. It heightens the rush of blood through the veins, leading to coagulation, to tubercles in the lung, to death. That is why diabetes leads to consumption. Therefore, ladies do not eat sugar, and live long … I turn now to the men. Gentlemen, make conquests. Be ruthless in robbing your comrade of his mistress. Thrust and parry – in love there is no friendship. Wherever there is a pretty woman there is open warfare, no quarter, war to the knife. A pretty woman is a causus belli; she is flagrante delicto. Petticoats have been the cause of every invasion in history. Woman is man’s rightful prey, Romulus carried off the Sabine women, William of Normandy the Saxon women, Caesar the women of Rome. The man who is not loved preys like a vulture on the loves of other men, and for my part, to these unfortunates without a mistress I repeat the sublime proclamation of Bonaparte to the army of Italy: “Soldiers, you lack everything. The enemy has it.”’
Tholomyès here paused for breath, and Blachevelle, supported by Listolier and Fameuil, broke into a nonsense-song, a topical catch with more rhyme than reason of the kind that springs up amid tobacco-smoke and is as swiftly blown away. The effect was to drive Tholomyès to higher flights. Draining his glass, he re-filled it and concluded his discourse as follows:
‘Down with wisdom! Forget everything I have said. Let us be neither prudish nor prudent. I drink to merriment. Let us be merry and end our course on law with folly and with food. Indigestion and the Digest, Justinian the male principle and festivity the female. How splendid is creation, how filled with gaiety, the world glittering like a gem in the benefaction of summer, the blackbird pouring forth its un-fee’d song, the paths of the Luxembourg, the Rue Madame and the Avenue de l’Observatoire rich with the dreams of delicious nursemaids as they watch over the young. I would delight in the South American pampas if I had not the arcades of the Odéon. My soul flies out to virgin forests and savannahs. Everything is beautiful. The flies swarm in the sunlight and the humming-bird is born of the sun. Kiss me, Fantine.’
And absent-mindedly he kissed Favourite.
‘The food is better at Edon’s than in this place,’ said Zéphine.
‘I prefer Bombarda,’ said Blachevelle. ‘The setting is more luxurious, more oriental. There are mirrors on the walls downstairs.’
‘I’m more interested in what’s on my plate,’ said Favourite.
‘But look at these knives, with their silver handles. They’re bone at Edon’s. Silver is worth more than bone.’
‘Except to those who wear it on their chin,’ said Tholomyès.
He was gazing out of the window at the dome of the Invalides. There was a brief pause.
‘Tholomyès,’ said Fameuil, ‘Listolier and I have been disputing.’
‘To dispute is excellent,’ said Tholomyès. ‘To quarrel is even better.’
‘We were discussing a matter of philosophy. Which do you prefer – Descartes or Spinoza?’
‘I prefer Desaugiers,’ said Tholomyès. Desaugiers was a cabaret-singer.
Having thus pronounced judgement he continued:
‘I am content to live. The world is not yet ended since we can still talk nonsense, and for this I give thanks to the immortal gods. We lie, but we laugh. We affirm, but we doubt. And that is admirable. The unexpected springs out of the syllogism. There are still people on earth who take pleasure in opening and closing that box of surprises, the paradox. The wine you are so peacefully drinking, ladies, is a Madeira from the Coural das Freiras vineyard, which is three hundred and seventeen fathoms above sea-level. Take heed of this as you drink. Three hundred and seventeen fathoms, and Monsieur Bombarda, that princely restauranteur, lets us have them for four francs fifty a litre.’
Fameuil attempted to interrupt.
‘Tholomyès, your opinion is law. But do you think –’
Tholomyès brushed this aside.
‘All honour to Bombarda! He would be the equal of Munophis of Elephanta if he could find me a dancing-girl, and of Thygelion of Cheroneus if he could bring me a hetaera. For believe me, ladies, there were Bombardas in Greece and Egypt, as Apuleius tells us. Alas, as Solomon said, there is nothing new under the sun, and as Virgil said, amor omnibus idem, love is the same for all of us. Lisette goes off with her Louis in a boat at Saint-Cloud just as Aspasia embarked with Pericles in the fleet at Samos. Do you know who Aspasia was, ladies? She lived in an age when women were not supposed to possess souls, yet she had a soul that was both rose-pink and scarlet, hotter than flame and cooler than the dawn. She encompassed the two extremities of woman, she was the prostitute goddess, part Socrates, part Manon Lescaut. She was created for the service of Prometheus, should he desire a wanton.’
Being again in full spate Tholomyès might have been difficult to stop, but at that moment a horse fell in the street directly below their windows. It was a lean, aged mare, fit only for the knacker’s yard, harnessed to a heavy cart. Exhaustion had brought it to a halt outside Bombarda’s and it refused to go further. A crowd gathered. The carter, cursing loudly, applied his whip, whereupon the creature collapsed and could not be got to its feet again. The hubbub caused Tholomyès’s audience to rise and go to the window.
‘Poor horse,’ sighed Fantine, and Dahlia exclaimed, ‘Well, listen to her, making a fuss about a horse.’
But Favourite, taking advantage of the diversion, confronted Tholomyès with a resolute expression, arms crossed and head thrust back.
‘Well,’ she said, ‘and what about the surprise?’
‘Quite so,’ said Tholomyès. ‘The time has come. Gentlemen, it is time for us to surprise our ladies. Ladies, we must ask you to wait here for a few minutes.’
‘It begins with a kiss,’ said Blachevelle.
‘On the forehead,’ said Tholomyès.
Each solemnly kissed his mistress on the forehead; then the four young men moved in single file to the door, each with a finger to his lips.
Favourite clapped her hands as they went out.
‘It’s fun already,’ she exclaimed.
‘Don’t be too long. We shall be waiting,’ murmured Fantine.
The girls, left to themselves, leaned in pairs on the two windowsills and chattered as they gazed down into the street. They saw the young men come out arm-in-arm and turn to wave gaily before disappearing in the dusty Sunday hubbub of the Champs-Élysées.
‘Don’t be long!’ called Fantine.
‘What do you think they’ll bring us?’ said Zéphine.
‘Something nice, I’m sure,’ said Dahlia.
‘Me,’ said Favourite, ‘I hope it will be something in gold.’
Their attention was presently caught by a stir of activity at the water’s edge which was visible through the trees. It was the hour of departure for mails and diligences, when nearly all the stage-coaches for the south and west passed by way of the Champs-Élysées, generally following the river embankment and leaving the town by the Passy gate. Great yellow- and black-painted vehicles with jingling harness drove by at short intervals, swaying under their canvas-covered load of travellers’ luggage, packed with briefly glimpsed heads, grinding the cobblestones to dust and thundering past the crowd in a shower of sparks as though they were manned by furies. This commotion delighted the girls.
‘Heavens, the noise!’ said Favourite. ‘They’re like heaps of old iron trying to fly.’
One of these conveyances, of which they had only a glimpse through a thick cluster of elms, stopped for a moment and then drove on at a gallop. This surprised Fantine.
‘Surely that’s unusual,’ she said. ‘I thought the stage-coaches never stopped.’
Favourite made a gesture.
‘Fantine is wonderful,’ she said. ‘I never cease to marvel. She’s amazed by the most ordinary things. Listen, dear. Suppose I’m a passenger and I say to the driver, “I’m going on ahead. I’ll be on the embankment, and you can pick me up as you pass.” So the driver watches out for me and picks me up. It happens every day. My love, you know nothing about life.’
Some time passed in chatter of this kind and presently a thought struck Favourite.
‘Well!’ she said. ‘What about this surprise?’
‘Yes,’ said Dahlia, ‘the great surprise.’
’They’re being very slow,’ sighed Fantine.
As she finished sighing the waiter who had served their meal entered. He had something that looked like a letter in his hand.
‘What’s that?’ asked Favourite.
‘It was left behind by the gentlemen, to be handed to the ladies.’
‘Then why didn’t you bring it to us at once?’
Favourite snatched it from him and found that it was indeed a sealed letter.
‘There’s no address,’ she said. ‘But this is what is written outside: “Here is the Surprise.” ’
She hurriedly broke the seal, unfolded the sheet and read aloud (she was the one who could read):
Beloved mistresses!
Be it known to you that we have parents. The word is one that means little to you, but in the simple and honourable definition of the Code Civil it means fathers and mothers. And they are distressed, these excellent old people. They want us back. They call us prodigals and promise to kill the fatted calf upon our return. Being dutiful, we obey. When you read these lines five fiery horses will be taking us home to our papas and mammas. We are clearing out – going, going, gone – taking flight on the arms and wings of Laffitte and Caillard, those worthy coach-proprietors. The Toulouse coach is rescuing us from the primrose path which is yourselves, sweet loves. We are returning to the ways of society, duty and good behaviour at a steady trot of three leagues an hour. Our country requires that, like everyone else, we should become prefects, fathers of families, rural guards and Councillors of State. Honour us for our self-sacrifice. Weep for us a little and speedily replace us. If this letter rends your hearts, treat it in a like fashion. Adieu.
For nearly two years we have made you happy. Do not bear us ill-will.
Signed: Blachevelle
Fameuil
Listolier
Félix Tholomyès
Post-Scriptum. The dinner is paid for.
The four girls gazed at one another.
Favourite was the first to break the silence.
‘All the same,’ she said, ‘it’s a good joke.’
‘It’s very funny,’ said Zéphine.
‘I’m sure it was Blachevelle’s idea,’ said Favourite. ‘It makes me quite in love with him. No sooner lost than loved. That’s how things are.’
‘No,’ said Dahlia, ‘it was Tholomyès’s idea. It’s typical.’
‘In that case,’ said Favourite, ‘down with Blachevelle and long live Tholomyès!’
‘Long live Tholomyès!’ cried Dahlia and Zéphine and burst out laughing.
Fantine joined in the laughter; but when, an hour later, she was back in her room she wept bitterly. It was her first love, as we have said. She had given herself to Tholomyès as to a husband, and the poor girl had a child.