To Monseigneur le Comte Guillaume de Wurtemberg, in token of the author’s respectful gratitude
I NEVER saw anyone, even among the remarkable men of our time, whose appearance was more striking than this man’s; studying his physiognomy inspired, first, a sense of melancholy and, ultimately, a nearly painful sensation. There was a kind of harmony between the person and the name. That “Z.” preceding “Marcas,” which always appeared on letters addressed to him and which he never failed to include in his own signature, that last letter of the alphabet brought to mind some sense of fatality.
MARCAS! Say it over to yourself, that two-syllable name: Don’t you hear some sinister meaning to it? Don’t you feel as if the man who bears it must be destined for martyrdom? However strange and wild, still the name does have the right to go down to posterity: It is properly constructed, it is easy to pronounce, it has that brevity desirable in famous names.
Is it not as gentle as it is bizarre? Also, doesn’t it seem unfinished? Far be it from me to declare that names have no influence on destiny. Between the facts of a life and a man’s name there are mysteries and inexplicable concordances, or visible discordances, that are surprising; often distant but consequential correlations come to light. Our globe is full, everything is possible. We may yet some day turn again to the occult sciences.
Don’t you see some thwarted stride in the shape of that “Z”? Doesn’t it look like the arbitrary, whimsical zigzag of a tormented life? What wind could have blown onto this letter that occurs in scarcely fifty words in whatever languages even use it? Marcas’s first name was Zéphirin. Saint Zéphirin is widely worshiped in Brittany. Marcas was Breton.
Look again at the name: Z. Marcas! The man’s whole life is evident in the weird assemblage of those seven letters. Seven! The most significant of the Kabbalah numbers. The man died at thirty-five, thus his life counted seven lustrums. Marcas! Doesn’t it evoke the idea of something precious shattering in a fall, with or without a sound?
I was finishing my law degree in 1836, in Paris. At the time I lived on rue Corneille, in a building occupied entirely by students, one of those buildings where the stairwell twists upward at the rear, lighted first from the street, then through grilled transoms, and farther up by a skylight. There were forty rooms, furnished the way students’ rooms are furnished. What more would a young man need in a room: a bed, a few chairs, a chest of drawers, a mirror, and a table. As soon as the sky turns blue, the student opens the window. But in that street there was no pretty neighbor to flirt with. Across the way, the Odéon Théâtre, long closed, blocked the view with its blackened walls, its small gallery windows, its vast slate roof. I wasn’t rich enough to have a good room; I couldn’t even afford a room to myself. Juste and I shared one with two beds on the top floor.
On our side of the stairwell, there was only our room and another small one occupied by Z. Marcas, our neighbor. Juste and I lived for about six months utterly unaware of his presence. An elderly woman who ran the house had in fact told us the small room was occupied, but she added that we would not be disturbed in the slightest, the tenant was extraordinarily quiet. In fact, for six months we never saw our neighbor and we heard not a sound from the room despite the flimsiness of the wall between us—one of those partitions built of slats and plaster so common in Paris buildings.
Our room, seven feet high, was lined in cheap blue wallpaper scattered with flowers. The painted floor had never known the polishers’ brushes. Thin mats lay alongside the beds. The chimney pipe stopped short above the roof and gave off so much smoke that we had to attach an extension to it, at our own expense. Our beds were painted wooden cots like the ones in boarding schools. On the mantelpiece stood only two copper candlesticks with or without candles in them, our two pipes, a little tobacco in a packet or loose, as well as some small heaps of cigar ash dropped there by visitors or ourselves. A couple of calico curtains slid along rods at the window, on either side of which hung the small cherrywood bookshelves familiar to anyone who ever strolled the Latin Quarter and on which we stacked the few books needed for our courses. The ink was always solid in the inkwell, like lava caked in the crater of a volcano. These days, can’t any inkwell become a Vesuvius? Our distorted pens we used for cleaning our pipestems. Contrary to the laws of credit, paper was even scarcer in our place than coin.
How could young folk be expected to stay at home in furnished rooms like that? So students would often study in the cafés, in the theater, along the walks in the Luxembourg Gardens, in girlfriends’ quarters—anywhere, even at the law school—rather than in their rooms, which were awful for studying but charming for chatting and smoking. Spread a cloth on the table, lay out a last-minute dinner sent in from the best cookhouse in the neighborhood, four settings and two girls, catch the scene in a lithograph, and even a prig couldn’t help but smile at it.
All we thought about was having a good time. The reason for our dissolute behavior was the very grave nature of the current political situation: Juste and I could see no place for us in the professions our parents insisted we should pursue. For every vacant post there are a hundred lawyers, a hundred doctors. Hordes of applicants block those two pathways, which are supposed to be the route to success but are more like two great arenas where men kill one another, not with knives or guns but with intrigue and slander and by horrendous toil, intellectual combat as murderous as the battles in Italy were for France’s Republican troops. Today, when everything is intellectual competition, a man must be capable of sitting in his chair at a desk for forty-eight hours straight just as a general had to sit for two days in his saddle on horseback.
The crush of candidates has forced the medical field to divide into categories: the doctor who writes, the doctor who teaches, the political doctor, and the militant doctor—four different ways of being a doctor, four sectors already full to bursting. As for the fifth sector—the one involving doctors who peddle remedies—there is competition there, too, carried on by rivals posting squalid advertisements onto walls throughout Paris.
And in every courtroom there are nearly as many lawyers as there are cases. The lawyer has been thrown back onto journalism, politics, literature. And the state, under siege for the lowliest posts in the justice system, has taken to requiring applicants to have independent means. The pear-shaped skull of some rich grocer’s son wins out over the square head of a talented but penniless youngster. Doing his utmost, deploying all his energy, a young man setting out from zero can wind up after ten years somewhere below where he started. Today, talent needs the kind of luck that favors the incompetent; in fact, if a skilled man rejects the vile arrangements that bring success to rampant mediocrity, he will never get on at all.
While we understood our times perfectly well, we also understood ourselves, and we preferred a thinking man’s idleness to aimless agitation, loafing and pleasure to useless labors that would have taxed our enthusiasm and worn the edge off our intelligence. We analyzed the social situation while we laughed, smoked, and strolled around. But our thinking, our long discussions were no less wise, no less profound for going about them this way.
Even though we were fully aware of the abject state to which the young generation was condemned, we were still astonished at the government’s brutal indifference toward anything to do with intellect, or thought, or poetry. What looks we exchanged, Juste and I, as we read the newspapers and watched the political goings-on, scanned the debates in the chambers, discussed the behavior of a court whose willful ignorance was matched only by the courtiers’ servility, the mediocre quality of the men who formed a hedge around the newly restored throne—all of them without wit or vision, without achievement or learning, without influence or nobility. What a compliment to the old court of Charles X is this one, if it can even be called a court! What hatred for the nation, handing citizenship to vulgar talentless foreigners who go on to be enthroned in the Chamber of Peers! What a miscarriage of justice! What an insult to our own distinguished youth, to the ambitions sprung from our own soil! We watched all these developments like theater, and we groaned over them without taking a position for ourselves.
Juste, whom no one came to seek out and who would never seek out anyone himself, was, at twenty-five, a profound political thinker, a man with an extraordinary capacity to grasp obscure connections between present events and events yet to come. He told me in 1831 what was going to occur, and those things actually did come to pass: assassinations, conspiracies, the dominance of the Jews, France’s constraints on any real movement, the shortage of good minds in the upper echelons, and the abundance of talented men in the lower ranks, where the noblest hearts are smothered beneath cigar ash.
What was to become of him? His family wanted him to be a doctor. But wouldn’t that mean spending twenty years to establish a practice? You know what did become of him? No? Well, he is a doctor, but he has left France—he is in the East. At this very moment, he may be fainting with exhaustion in a desert, he may be dying beneath the pummeling of a barbarian horde, or he may be the prime minister to some Hindu prince.
My own vocation is action. Finishing school at twenty, I could join the army only as a common soldier, and unenthusiastic at the dreary prospect of a lawyer’s life, I set about acquiring a seaman’s skills. I shall do as Juste did: I mean to quit France, where in order to make any place at all for oneself requires expending the time and energy needed for the very loftiest activities. Do as I do, my friends: I’m off to where a man makes his own destiny as he pleases.
These grand resolutions were coolly decided in that little room in the house on the rue Corneille, as we went along, stopping in at the Musard dance hall, flirting with the street girls, leading a wild, seemingly careless life. Our resolutions, our ponderings floated formless for a long while. Our neighbor Marcas was a kind of guide who led us to the edge of the precipice or the torrent and made us understand it, who showed us what our future would be if we let ourselves fall over. He put us on guard against making compromises with poverty in the name of hope, accepting a precarious position to fight from, succumbing to the wiles of Paris, that great courtesan who will take you up and drop you, who smiles on you and then just as lightly turns away, who wears down the firmest purpose with specious delays, and where Bad Luck is sustained by Chance.
Our first encounter with Marcas was rather dazzling. Coming in separately before dinner after a day at the schools, we always went up to our room and waited there for one another, to discuss any change in our evening plans. One day, at four o’clock, Juste saw Marcas on the stairs; I had passed him in the street. It was November by now, and Marcas had no cloak; he wore thick-soled shoes, heavy felt trousers, and a blue frock coat buttoned up to the chin, with a stiff collar that lent an even more military look to his torso given his black neckerchief. There is nothing unusual about such an outfit, but it did suit the style of the man and his face. My first impression at the sight of him wasn’t surprise or amazement, or sorrow, or interest, or pity, but a curiosity that combined traces of all those responses. He moved slowly, with a gait that suggested a deep melancholy, head crooked forward but not lowered like a man who feels himself to be guilty. His head, large and strong, seemed to contain the resources required for a highly ambitious man and looked heavy with thought, bent beneath the weight of some mental grief, but his expression showed no sign of any remorse. As for his face, a single word would describe it, according to a folk tradition that says every human face resembles some animal: Marcas’s was the lion. His hair looked like a mane, his nose was short, flattened, broad, and cleft at the tip like a lion’s. A strong groove divided his forehead into two prominent lobes; his furry cheekbones looked the sharper for the thinness of the flesh below; his huge mouth and hollow jaws—all were marked by a bold pattern of creases brought out by a complexion full of yellowish tones. This almost fearsome visage seemed brightened by two lights—eyes that were black but infinitely kind, calm, profound, full of thought. If I may express it so, those eyes were humiliated. Marcas was afraid to look at people—less for his own sake than for those on whom he might level his compelling gaze: He possessed a certain power, and he was reluctant to wield it; he wanted to spare passersby, so he feared to be noticed. This was not modesty but resignation, and not the Christian resignation that involves charity but the resignation advised by reason that sees our talents going useless, the impossibility of entering and living within the setting where we ought to be. At moments that gaze could shoot lightning. From that mouth one expected a thunderous voice; it was much like the mouth of Mirabeau.
“I just saw an extraordinary man in the street,” I told Juste as I came in.
“That must be our neighbor,” he answered, and described exactly the figure I had passed. “A man who lives like a wood louse must look that way.”
“Such humility, and such dignity!”
“The one is the effect of the other.”
“So many hopes dashed, so many plans thwarted!”
“Seven leagues’ worth of ruins! Obelisks and palaces and towers: the ruins of Palmyra in the desert.” Juste laughed.
So we named our neighbor “the Ruins of Palmyra.” On our way out to dine in the gloomy restaurant on rue de la Harpe where we had meal tickets, we asked about the man in number 37, and thus we learned the wondrous name “Z. Marcas.” Like the children we were, we took to repeating it a hundred times in a hundred different ways, clownish and melancholic, that name whose sound lent itself so neatly to our game. Sometimes Juste would hiss the “Z” like a rising rocket, make a brilliant flash of the next syllable, then enact its fall to earth in the brief, blunt thud of the ending.
“Ah . . . well, where and how does he make a living?” we wondered. From that question to the playful espionage born of curiosity, it took us only a moment to start our project. Instead of wandering the streets that night, we returned to the house, each with a book in hand, and sat down to read and listen. In the absolute silence of our garret we heard the soft, regular sound of the breathing of a man asleep.
“He’s sleeping,” I said, as the first to make it out.
“At seven o’clock!” Doctor replied. I called Juste “Doctor”; he called me “Attorney General.”
“A person has got to be pretty unhappy to sleep as much as our neighbor does,” I said, as I climbed onto the dresser holding an enormous knife with a corkscrew in its handle. At the top of the partition I bored a round hole the size of a five-sou coin. It hadn’t occurred to me that there would be no light at the far side; I put my eye to the hole and all I saw was darkness. At one in the morning, having finished our books and starting to undress, we heard sounds from our neighbor’s room: He rose from his bed, struck a match, and lit his candle. I climbed back onto the dresser and spied Marcas seated at his table copying out what looked like legal documents. His room was half the size of ours; the bed stood in a recess beside the door, for the hallway ended at his threshold and its width added to his space. But apparently the land beneath the building was irregular, for that wall met the mansard ceiling at a slant. He had no fireplace, just a small white porcelain stove trimmed in green, with its pipe leading out onto the roof. The window in the slanted wall was hung with worn red curtains. An armchair, a table, and a flimsy nightstand made up the furnishings. His linens hung in a cupboard. The wallpaper was stained. Probably no one but a housemaid had ever lived there until Marcas arrived.
“What did you see?” Doctor asked as I jumped down.
“Look for yourself,” I replied.
The following morning, at nine o’clock, Marcas was still in bed, asleep. He had breakfasted on a cervelat sausage—on a plate, among some bread crumbs, lay the remains of that mainstay we knew so well. He woke only at about eleven and sat down again to the copying he had begun during the night, which lay open on the table. Downstairs, we asked the price for that room and we were told it cost fifteen francs a month.
In a few days we knew all about Z. Marcas’s way of life. He drew up documents, probably at so much per page, for a transcription service with offices in the courtyard of the Sainte-Chapelle. He worked through half the night; after sleeping six to ten hours he would return to his table and go on copying until three in the afternoon, then leave to deliver his copies before dinner. He would eat on rue Michel-le-Comte at Mizerai’s for about nine sous, then go home to sleep until six o’clock. We reckoned that Marcas said no more than fifteen sentences in the course of a month; he spoke to no one, and he said not a word to himself there in his horrid little garret.
“Really, the Ruins of Palmyra are terribly silent!” exclaimed Juste.
That silence, in a man whose appearance was so impressive, seemed deeply significant to us. Sometimes, running across him, we would exchange very interested looks, but they were never followed by any overture. Gradually the man became the object of our private admiration, though we could not explain it to ourselves. Was it his plain, private habits? The monastic routine? The hermit-like frugality? The idiot toil that left the mind free to be neutral or active, and which suggested expectation of some happy event or some exceptional attitude toward life?
We spent a good while exploring the Ruins of Palmyra, and then forgot about him; we were so young. And then carnival arrived! The Parisian carnival that will overtake the old Venice carnival and in a few years draw the whole of Europe to Paris, that is if certain wretched police commissioners do not oppose it. Gambling ought to be tolerated during carnival, but the stupid moralists who had it outlawed are narrow-minded bean counters who will only bring back the necessary evil when it is clear that France regularly leaves millions on German gaming tables.
The merry carnival reduced us to awful poverty, along with all the other students. We stripped ourselves of our luxury possessions, having already sold our extra suits, our extra boots, our extra waistcoats, whatever we had two of except our friends. We ate bread and sausages, we walked carefully to spare our shoes, we settled down to work. We owed two months’ rent and expected at any moment to be presented with a bill listing sixty or eighty charges amounting to forty or fifty francs. We quit our noisy passage through the tiled foyer at the bottom of the stairs; rather, we often crossed it in silence with a single leap from the last step right into the street. The day our pipe tobacco ran out, we realized that for the past several days we had been eating our bread without any kind of butter. The grief was enormous.
“No more tobacco!” said Doctor.
“No more overcoat!” said Attorney General.
“Ah, you rascals! Dressing up like the Coachman of Longjumeau! You thought you’d live like dockworkers, snack in the morning and lunch at Very’s, maybe even at the Rocher de Cancale! Well, it’s back to dry crusts, gentlemen! You’d best” (here I broadened my voice) “go sleep under your beds, you’re not worthy to sleep on top of them—”
“Yes, but Attorney General! No more tobacco!” Juste cried.
“It’s time to write to our aunts, our mothers, our sisters that we’re out of linens, that working in Paris could wear out even iron-mail underclothes. And we’ll solve an interesting chemistry problem: turning linens into silver.”
“We’ve still got to live till they reply.”
“Well, I’ll see about engineering a loan from friends who haven’t run through their capital yet.”
“What can you get?”
“Maybe ten francs!” I boasted.
Marcas had heard the whole conversation: It was noontime. He knocked on our door and said, “Gentlemen, here is some tobacco. You can pay me back later.”
We stood dumbstruck—not at the offer, which we accepted, but at the richness, the depth, the fullness of that voice; it could only be compared to the low string on Paganini’s violin. Marcas vanished without waiting for our thanks. We looked at each other, Juste and I, in utter silence. To be rescued by someone obviously poorer than ourselves! Juste sat down to write to all his familial sources, and I went off to negotiate the loan.
I collected twenty francs from a hometown friend. In those hard but rollicking days gambling still went on, and mining its veins, tough as any mineral lode in Brazil, young people could risk a little and just possibly dig out a few chunks of gold. My countryman had some Turkish tobacco that a sailor had brought back from Constantinople, and he gave me the amount we had received from Z. Marcas. I sailed the rich cargo back to port, and we went in triumph to repay his black caporal with a voluptuous blond hank of Turkish tobacco.
“You didn’t want to owe me anything,” he said. “But you give me gold for copper. You’re children . . . good children . . .”
Those three sentences, each spoken at a different pitch, bore different tonalities. The words were nothing, but the tone—oh! The tone turned us into decade-old friends in a moment.
Marcas had covered over his worksheets when he heard us approach, and we understood that it would be indiscreet to mention his livelihood; we were ashamed then to have spied on him. His closet stood open, revealing just two shirts, a white cravat, and a razor. The straight razor made me shudder. A mirror worth perhaps a few francs hung by the window. The man’s simple, spare gestures had a kind of primitive nobility. We looked at each other, Doctor and I, as if to determine what to say. Seeing me caught short, Juste asked jokingly, “Are you involved in literature, sir?”
“Certainly not!” Marcas answered. “I wouldn’t be this wealthy.”
“I thought,” I said, “that these days poetry was the only thing that could consign a man to a room as bad as ours.”
My sally made Marcas smile, and that smile warmed his yellow face. “Ambition is no less demanding for people who do not succeed,” he said. “So, you boys starting out in life: Stick to the beaten paths! Don’t aim high—it will be the end of you!”
“You advise us to stay just what we are?” Doctor smiled.
The banter of youth has such contagious, childlike charm that Juste’s teasing line made Marcas smile again.
“What experiences could have given you such a dreadful philosophy?” I asked him.
“Once again I forgot that chance is the result of an elaborate equation, and we cannot know all of its roots. When we start at zero on our way to one, the odds are incalculable. For ambitious people, Paris is one immense roulette wheel, and every young man believes he’s got the winning strategy.”
He offered us the tobacco I had brought him by way of inviting us to smoke with him. Doctor went to fetch our pipes; Marcas filled his own and then, carrying it, he came to sit at our place; in his room he had only a desk chair and his armchair. Nimble as a squirrel, Juste slipped downstairs and reappeared with a boy carrying three bottles of Bordeaux, a slice of Brie, and some bread.
“Well,” I said to myself, “that’s fifteen francs right there!” And indeed, Juste gravely laid a hundred sous in change on the mantelpiece.
There are immeasurable differences between social man and the man who lives as close as possible to nature. Once he was captured, Toussaint Louverture died without uttering another word. Napoleon, on his rock, babbled like a magpie; he kept trying to explain himself. Z. Marcas committed the same error, but for our sake alone. Silence and all its majesty are found only in the savage. There is no criminal who, given the chance to drop his secrets into the bloody basket along with his head, doesn’t instead feel the purely social need to tell them to somebody. No, I’m wrong: We have seen one of those Iroquois from the Faubourg Saint-Marceau raise Parisian character to the level of the savage’s: A man—a Republican, a conspirator, a Frenchman, an old man—outdid everything we knew of an African’s resolve, and anything Fenimore Cooper ascribed to the redskins in the way of calm disdain in the midst of defeat. Morey, that Cuauhtémoc of the Montagne Sainte-Geneviève, maintained a posture unseen in the annals of European justice.
This is what Marcas told us that morning, interlacing his tale with tartines smeared with cheese and moistened by wine. All the tobacco disappeared. Occasionally carriages crossing place de l’Odéon and buses trundling around it would send up their dim rumble to us, as if to attest that Paris was still there.
His family was from Vitré; his father and mother lived on fifteen hundred francs a year. Marcas was educated tuition-free in a seminary, then refused to become a priest: He felt inside himself the flame of a huge ambition, and he came on foot to Paris at the age of twenty with two hundred francs in his pocket. He read law, working the while at an attorney’s office where he rose to chief clerk. He took his doctorate in law; he knew the old and the new codes; he could more than match the most illustrious barristers. He knew The Law of Nations and was familiar with all the European treaties and international customs. He had studied men and events in five capital cities: London, Berlin, Vienna, Petersburg, and Constantinople. No one knew legislative precedent better than he; for five years he had reported on the chambers for a daily newspaper. He could improvise; he spoke admirably and at length in that deep, rich voice that had struck us to the soul. Telling the story of his life, he showed himself a great orator, concise and grave, with a penetrating eloquence. He had Berryer’s qualities of warmth, his impulses to appeal to the masses; he had Monsieur Thiers’s finesse and skill, but he would have rambled less, been less awkward in his closings. He expected to move rapidly into power without becoming tangled in doctrines, which may initially be necessary for a man of the opposition but which can burden a statesman later on.
Marcas had learned everything a true statesman must know, so he was astonished when he witnessed the profound ignorance of those already established in public service. For him such a vocation meant study, but nature had also been generous, granting him much that cannot be acquired by study alone: a lively grasp, insight, self-discipline, a supple mind, swift judgment, decisiveness, and—the special genius of such figures—fertile resourcefulness.
When he felt adequately prepared, Marcas returned to France but to a country wracked by internal divisions born of the triumph of the Orléans branch over the elder Bourbon branch. Clearly the political battleground is different. Civil war in France cannot last for long now, and it will not be waged in the provinces; from now on struggle will be brief, fought right at the seat of government, and it will end the intellectual struggle that superior minds fought in the past. This state of affairs will persist as long as France has this singular political system, which is unlike that of any other country; there is no more equivalence between the English government and ours than there is between the two nation’s physical terrains.
So Marcas’s place was in the political press. As a poor man, and thus unable to stand for election, he would have to give prompt evidence of his abilities. He decided on the most costly sacrifice a superior man can make: to work under some rich, ambitious deputy. Like a new Bonaparte, he sought his Barras; like Colbert, he hoped to find a Mazarin. He rendered enormous service and rendered it promptly; he made no display of it, he never boasted, he never complained of ingratitude; he rendered service in the hope that his deputy would make it possible for Marcas to be elected deputy himself. All Marcas wanted was a loan to buy a house in Paris, to meet the requirements of the election law. All Richard III wanted was a horse.
Within three years, Marcas built his man into one of the country’s fifty would-be power centers: the racquets which a couple of shrewd players wield to bat cabinet posts back and forth, the way a puppeteer knocks Punch and the Constable about in his little theater stall, always with profit in mind. This man only existed through Marcas’s skill, but he was intelligent enough to appreciate his aide’s value, to know that once Marcas came to the fore he would remain there as an indispensable figure, whereas he himself would be relegated to the antipodes of the Luxembourg Palace. He therefore set impossible obstacles in Marcas’s path to advancement and masked his strategy with protestations of heartfelt devotion. Like all small men, he was expert at dissembling; then he moved ahead in the ingratitude game: He had to kill Marcas so as not to be killed by him. These two men, seemingly so close, hated each other once the one had tricked the other.
The politician was named to a ministry; Marcas stayed behind with the opposition forces to keep them from attacking his man—and he even managed, by an ingenious maneuver, to win him their praise. To avoid rewarding his lieutenant, the new minister claimed that obviously he could not, suddenly and without some subtle preparations, appoint a man so strongly identified with the opposition. Marcas had counted on the appointment to enable him to marry and to qualify to stand for election. He was thirty-two years old, and he foresaw that the chamber would soon dissolve. Finding the minister acting in such flagrant bad faith, he overthrew him, or at least contributed importantly to his fall, and dragged him through the mire.
Any fallen minister seeking to return to power must arrange to look formidable; this man, drunk on royal flattery, had believed his position would last a long while. Now, however, he acknowledged his wrongdoing and did a small financial favor for Marcas, who had gone into debt during their quarrel: He underwrote the journal Marcas worked on and had him appointed editor in chief. Thus Marcas was indirectly subsidized as well, and although he despised the man, he agreed to an apparent alliance with him. Without yet revealing all the many aspects of his excellence, Marcas advanced farther than he had the first time around while using only half his skills. The new government lasted a mere hundred and eighty days before it was swallowed up. But Marcas had been working closely with a few deputies, manipulated them like pastry dough, and left them all with a lofty idea of his talents. His puppet-chief was again named to a ministry, and the newspaper became a ministerial organ.
The man then merged the paper with another, solely in order to do away with Marcas, who in the merger was forced to give over to a rich, insolent rival with a well-known name and one foot already in the stirrup. Marcas fell back into the direst poverty; his patron/protégé was fully aware of the abyss into which he had thrown his aide. Where could he go? The governmental journals, quietly warned off, would have nothing to do with him. The opposition papers were unwilling to take him on. Marcas could join neither the Republicans nor the Legitimists, two parties whose victory would mean the upending of the current situation.
“Ambitious men love current events,” he told us with a smile.
He managed a living by writing an occasional article on business; he worked at one of the encyclopedias produced out of speculation rather than learning. Finally someone started a paper that was destined only to publish for two years but which sought out Marcas as editor. He renewed his acquaintance with his minister’s enemies; he joined the faction that sought to bring down the government; and once his own pickax set to work, the administration was overthrown.
When we met, it was already six months since Marcas’s paper had gone under; he had not found another position anywhere. He was reputed to be a dangerous man; the calumny gnawed at him that he had just killed off an enormous financial and industrial operation with a few articles and a pamphlet. He was called the mouthpiece of a banker who was said to have paid him extremely well and from whom he could supposedly expect some favors in return for his dedication. Disgusted with men and politics, wearied by a five-year struggle, Marcas—viewed rather as a mercenary soldier than as a great captain, broken by the need to make a living which kept him from making other headway, despairing over the influence of money on thought, gripped by severe poverty—withdrew into his garret, earning thirty sous a day as the absolute lowest sum required for his needs. Meditation stretched a kind of wilderness around him. Now he had to read the papers to keep current with events; Pozzo di Borgo had lived in that condition for a period. Marcas was probably plotting some serious attack, learning to cover his tracks and punishing himself for his mistakes by living in Pythagorean silence; he didn’t tell us the reasons for his behavior.
It is impossible to describe the scenes of high comedy that lay beneath this algebraic account of his life: the futile rituals offered at the feet of elusive Fortune, the long chases through the Parisian underbrush, the endless errands of a panting petitioner, the efforts spent wooing idiots, the elaborate projects that finally miscarried because of some foolish woman, the meetings with shopkeepers who expected their investments to bring them not only sizable interest but a box at the theater and a peerage besides, the hopes that rose to a crest then crashed onto a rocky reef, miracles worked to bring together opposing interests in projects that functioned well for a week and then fell apart, the vexation time and again of seeing a fool decorated with the Legion of Honor (a fellow as ignorant as an errand boy preferred over a man of talent), and then what Marcas called the stratagems of stupidity: You hit on a prospect, he seems convinced, he nods, it is all coming together, and then the next morning the rubber wad that was momentarily molded into a useful shape has regained its old form overnight—it’s even become inflated and the whole business must begin over again. You keep reworking it until you recognize that what you are dealing with is not a man but some gummy mass that dries out in the sun. These thousand setbacks, this huge waste of human energy poured onto barren terrain, underscores the difficulty of doing good, the incredible ease of doing ill: two major games played, twice won and twice lost; the hatred of a statesman, a blockhead with a face painted on it, and a wig, but a figure people believed in—all those large and small things had not undone Marcas but only temporarily knocked him down. On days when money came in, his hands never held on to it; he afforded himself the heavenly pleasure of sending it all on to his family—to his sisters, his brothers, his old father. He himself, like the fallen Napoleon, needed only thirty sous a day to live, and any energetic fellow can make thirty sous a day in Paris.
When Marcas had finished recounting the story of his life, interspersed with reflections, maxims, and observations that bespoke a great politician, a few more queries and discussions among us on the direction of matters in France and Europe sufficed to persuade us that Marcas was indeed a true statesman—for the quality of a man can be promptly and readily measured when he consents to step onto the terrain of problems: Certain shibboleths can reveal a superior person, and we belonged to the tribe of modern Levites without yet dwelling in the temple. As I have said, our frivolous life was a cover for plans that Juste, for his part, has already carried out; mine will soon come to pass.
After our exchange, we all three left the house, and despite the cold we went to walk a little before dinner in the Luxembourg Gardens. Our discussion, still somber, touched on the painful points of the political situation. Each of us had his own view, observation, statement, jest, or maxim. The talk wasn’t only of life at the colossal scale laid out before us by Marcas, the veteran of political battle, nor was it the horrible monologue of the shipwrecked navigator cast up in the garret atop the Hotel Corneille; rather, it was a conversation in which two thoughtful young men, having come to a judgment on their times, were exploring their own futures under the guidance of an accomplished man.
“Why,” Juste asked him, “did you not bide your time and follow the example of the only man to emerge since the July Revolution, by always just keeping his head above water?”
“Haven’t I said that we never know all the roots of chance? Carrel was in exactly the same position as the orator you mean: Carrel the morose young man, that bitter character, carried a whole government in his head; the one you are talking about had just one idea—to climb onto the rump of every event as it came along. Of the two, Carrel was the better man. Well, the one became a government minister, and Carrel remained a journalist; that incomplete but shrewd fellow, the minister, is still alive, but Carrel is dead. I would point out that that fellow has spent fifteen years making his way, and he has still only partly made it; he could get caught anytime and ground up between two carts on the high road. He has no home; he hasn’t a palace, a stronghold of royal favor, like Metternich, nor like Villèle the sheltering roof of a reliable majority. I don’t believe the present situation will still exist in ten years. So supposing such a sorry good fortune, I am too late; in order not to be swept aside in the upheaval I foresee, I would have to be already established in a high position.”
“What upheaval?” Juste asked.
“August 1830,” Marcas answered in solemn tones, stretching a hand toward Paris. “August—the child born of Youth, who tied up the sheaves of grain, and of Intellect, who had cultivated the harvest—August 1830 failed to provide for youth and intellect. Youth is going to explode like the boiler of a steam engine. Youth has no outlet in France; it is gathering an avalanche of unrecognized abilities, of legitimate and unsatisfied ambitions; the young are rarely marrying, families don’t know what to do with their children. What shock will come and shake loose these masses I do not know, but they will surge forward into the current situation and overturn it. There are laws of flux that reign in the sequence of generations, which the Roman Empire failed to recognize when the barbarians arrived. Today’s barbarians are intelligent minds. Pressure is rising among us now, slowly, quietly. The government is behaving criminally: It doesn’t recognize youth and intelligence, the two powers to whom it owes everything; it has let its hands be bound by the absurdities of the contract; it is setting up to be a victim. Louis XIV, Napoleon, England were and are all hungry for intelligent young people; in France, the young are imprisoned by the new legalities, by the noxious requirements of the election rules, by the wrong thinking of the ministerial constitution. Look at the roster of the elective chamber: You will not find a single deputy under thirty. Richelieu’s young people or Mazarin’s, the young of Turenne and Colbert, of Pitt and Saint-Just, of Napoleon and Prince Metternich—none of their youthful constituents would have a seat here. Burke, Sheridan, Fox would not be elected. Even if the age of political majority were set at twenty-one, and if the eligibility requirements were cleared of every sort of limiting condition, the regional departments still would only elect these present deputies, people with no political talent whatsoever, who cannot speak without slaughtering grammar, and among whom, over these ten years, scarcely a single statesman has emerged. We can generally make out the forces tending toward some disaster, but we cannot foresee the disaster itself. Right now we are driving our whole younger generation to turn republican because they believe the republic will bring their emancipation! They remember that the representatives of the people were young, and the young generals! This government’s foolishness is matched only by its avarice.”
That day went on echoing in our lives; Marcas confirmed us in our determination to leave France, where talented young people bursting with energy are being crushed beneath the weight of mediocre climbers, envious and insatiable.
We dined together on rue de la Harpe. From that night on we gave him our most respectful affection, and he gave us practical training in the sphere of ideas. The man knew everything; he had thought deeply about everything. He scanned the political globe, seeking the places where opportunities were the most plentiful and the most favorable for the success of our plans. He set out lines of study for us, and he urged us to move quickly, explaining the importance of timing, arguing that a massive exodus would soon begin, that its effect would be to strip France of its best energy, its young talent; that these necessarily nimble minds would choose the best destinations and that it was crucial to get there first. From then on, we would often work late by lamplight. Our generous teacher wrote us memoranda—two for Juste and three for me—marvelous instructions, full of the sort of information that only experience can yield, with guidelines that only genius can lay out. In those pages, perfumed with tobacco, jammed with writing in an almost hieroglyphic cacography, there were pointers toward fortune and uncanny predictions regarding various developments in America and Asia that have since, even before Juste and I could leave, come true.
Marcas, like us in fact, had reached utter destitution; he earned his daily living, but he had neither linen, nor coats, nor shoes. He didn’t pretend to be a better person than he was; he had dreamed of luxury along with his dream of power. He didn’t view his present self as the true Marcas; he left its current shape to the whim of daily life. He lived on the breath of his ambition, dreamed of revenge, and reproached himself for harboring so hollow an attitude. The true statesman ought above all to be indifferent to vulgar passions; like the scholar, he should care only for matters within his expertise. Through those days of poverty Marcas seemed to us a great, even an awesome man: There was something terrifying in his gaze, which looked onto a world past the one that strikes the eyes of ordinary men. He was the focus of our constant study and amazement, for youth feels an urgent need to admire (who among us has not experienced this?); the young are eager to attach to something and naturally lean toward offering themselves to the service of figures they think superior, just as they dedicate themselves to great causes. We were particularly bemused by his indifference to sentimental matters: Women had never disturbed his life. Whenever we mentioned the subject, that eternal topic of conversation among Frenchmen, he would only say, “Dresses cost too much!” He saw the look Juste and I exchanged, and he went on: “Yes, they cost far too much. The woman you buy—and that’s the least expensive sort—takes a great deal of money; the woman who gives herself free takes all our time! A woman snuffs out all activity, all ambition. Napoleon reduced woman to what she ought to be; on that point he was great. He did not fall into ruinous fantasies like Louis XIV and Louis XV; still, he had his secret lovers.”
We discovered that like Pitt, who took England to wife, Marcas carried France in his heart; he worshipped her, never had a thought that was not for his country. He was gnawed by rage at holding in his very hands the remedy for the ailment whose tenacity so saddened him and at his incapacity to apply it, but worse was his rage at France’s status as lower than Russia and England. France in third place! The cry recurred constantly in his conversation. The country’s intestinal upset had moved into his own gut! He called the chamber’s quarrels with the court cheap belowstairs squabbling revealed by so many shifts, such constant agitation, that damaged the nation’s well-being.
“They give us peace by selling off the future,” he said.
One evening, Juste and I were busy in our room, plunged in deep silence. Marcas was at work on his copying. He had refused our help with the task despite our strongest urgings; we had offered to take turns copying in his stead, so that he would have only a third of the dreary labor to do himself; he grew angry, and we stopped insisting. We heard the sound of expensive boots in our corridor and looked up at each other. The newcomer knocked at Marcas’s door, which was always left on the latch. We heard our great man say “Come in!” and then “You—here, monsieur?”
“Yes, it is I,” replied the former minister, Emperor Diocletian to the unknown martyr.
The two men talked for a while in low tones. Our neighbor’s voice emerged only rarely, as occurs in a meeting where the interested party begins by setting out his purpose, but suddenly Marcas burst forth at some proposal we had not caught.
“You would laugh at me if I took you seriously!” he cried. “The Jesuits are over, but Jesuitism is eternal! There’s no good faith in your Machiavellianism or in your generosity. You know how to count, but no one can count on you. Your royal court is made up of owls afraid of the light, old men who are either terrified of the young or pay them no attention. And the government does the same as the court. You’ve searched out the leftovers of the Empire, just as the Restoration court recruited Louis XIV’s old Voltigeur troops! So far, people have taken your cowardly, timid evasions for smart maneuvering, but the dangers will come, and the young generation will rise up as they did in 1790. Our youth did some fine things back then. Now you keep changing ministers like a sick man changing positions in bed. These fidgetings show the decrepitude of your government. Your system of political evasions will be turned against you because the country will tire of all this equivocation. The nation won’t tell you outright that it’s tired of it; an invalid never knows exactly how he’s dying—the why is for the historian to say—but die you surely will, for failing to ask the youth of France for their strength and vigor, their dedication and ardor; for scorning capable people, for not picking them out, with love, from this beautiful generation; for always, in every sphere, choosing mediocrity. You come to ask my support, but you are a part of that decrepit mob made hideous by their self-interest, the crowd that trembles, that cringes, that wants to reduce France to a mean thing because you yourselves are mean things. My strong nature, my ideas would be like poison to you. You’ve tricked me twice, twice I’ve brought you down, and you know it. For us to join forces a third time, it would have to be very serious. I would kill myself if I allowed you to dupe me again, for I would lose faith in my own person: Not you but I would be to blame.”
Then we heard humble appeals, hot pleadings to not deprive the nation of its finest talent. There was talk of “patriotism”; Marcas uttered some sardonic grunts of “Hmpf hmpf!” he mocked his would-be employer. The politician grew more explicit: He acknowledged the superiority of his former counselor and swore to see to it that Marcas would stay on in the administration and become a deputy. Then he offered him a position of real eminence, saying that he, the minister, would take a subordinate role to Marcas, that he could only be the lieutenant to such a figure. He was expected to join the new cabinet, he said, and did not want to return to power unless Marcas held a post that was worthy of him; he had mentioned that condition to the others, and Marcas was understood to be indispensable.
Marcas refused.
The minister said, “I’ve never before been in a position to keep my commitments; here is a chance to be faithful to my promises, and you reject it.”
Marcas did not reply. The fine boots rang in the corridor again, moving toward the stairwell.
“Marcas! Marcas!” the two of us shouted, rushing into his room. “Why refuse? The man meant what he said. His conditions were honorable. And besides, you’d be working with the other ministers!”
In the blink of an eye we listed a hundred reasons why Marcas should agree: The future minister’s tone was honest; without seeing him, we were sure he was not lying.
“I have no clothes,” Marcas said.
“We’ll take care of that,” Juste said, looking over at me.
Marcas was brave enough to trust us; a light flared in his eyes. He ran a hand through his hair, baring his forehead in one of those gestures that reveal a belief in good fortune, and when he had, so to speak, unveiled his face, we saw a man who was utterly unknown to us: Marcas sublime, Marcas in power, the mind in its element, the bird released into the air, the fish returned to the water, the horse galloping across the steppe. It was transitory: The forehead darkened again, and he had a kind of vision of his destiny. Halting Doubt followed close upon the heels of White-Winged Hope. We left him.
“Well,” I said to Doctor, “we promised, but how will we manage it?”
“We’ll think overnight,” Juste replied, “and in the morning we’ll see what ideas we’ve had.”
The next morning we took a walk in the Luxembourg Gardens. We reviewed the events of the night before, both of us surprised at Marcas’s feeble capacity for confronting life’s smaller difficulties—he who was cowed by nothing when it came to solving the most complex problems of theoretical or practical politics. But these great natures are all susceptible to tripping over a grain of sand, to fumbling the most promising projects for lack of a thousand francs. It is the story of Napoleon who for lack of boots did not go off to the Indies.
“What have you come up with?” asked Juste.
“Well, I have a way to get a full outfit on credit.”
“Where?”
“At Humann’s.”
“How is that?”
“Humann, my good fellow, never goes to his clients, the clients come to him, so he doesn’t know whether I am rich; all he knows is that I dress well and carry off the suit he makes for me. I’ll tell him that I’ve just been handed an uncle from the provinces whose indifference in matters of dress is a huge problem for me in the fine houses where I hope to marry, and that he wouldn’t be Humann if he sent his bill before three months.”
Doctor found this an excellent idea for a vaudeville act but a deplorable one for real life, and he doubted it could succeed. But I swear to you, Humann did dress Marcas and, artist that he is, managed to dress him as a political figure should be dressed.
Juste gave Marcas two hundred francs, the earnings off two watches bought on credit and immediately handed over to the pawnshop. Myself, I said nothing about the six shirts and all the necessary linen that cost me only the pleasure of asking for them from the forelady of a lingerie shop with whom I had spent some time during carnival. Marcas accepted it all with no more thanks than was appropriate. He did inquire how we had come by all this treasure, and we made him laugh for the last time. We gazed upon our Marcas the way shipowners who have exhausted their every last credit and all their resources to fit out a vessel must look on as it hoists sail.
Here Charles fell silent; he seemed pained by his memories.
“Well?” we all cried. “What happened?”
“I’ll tell you in a few words, as this is a story, not a novel. We saw nothing of Marcas for some time. That government lasted three months; it fell after the parliamentary session. Marcas came back to us penniless, exhausted from work. He had plumbed the crater of power; he climbed out of it with the beginnings of brain fever. The illness progressed fast; we nursed him. Juste brought in the chief physician from the hospital where he had started as intern. I was living alone in our room and was a very attentive caretaker, but the care and the science—it was all futile. In that month of January 1838, Marcas himself felt that he had only a few days to live. The minister whose soul he had been for six months never came to see him, didn’t even send for news. Marcas made clear his deep contempt for the administration; he seemed to doubt the very future of France and this doubt had made him ill. He thought he saw treason at the heart of the government—not a palpable, actionable betrayal by particular acts but a betrayal produced by a whole system, by the subjection of the national interests to selfish ends. His belief in the abasement of the country was so strong that his illness worsened daily from it.
“I was witness to proposals made him by a leader of the opposition group he had been fighting. His hatred for the men he had tried to serve was so violent that he would have consented joyfully to join the coalition taking shape among these ambitious men who harbored at least one idea: the idea of shaking off the yoke of the court. But Marcas answered the negotiator with the phrase of the Hôtel de Ville: ‘It is too late!’
“Marcas did not leave enough to provide for his burial. Juste and I went to great pains to spare him the shame of the pauper’s cart, and the two of us alone followed behind the hearse bearing Z. Marcas’s coffin, which was thrown into the common grave at the Montparnasse cemetery.”
We looked at one another sadly as we listened to this story, the last one Charles Rabourdin told us, the day before he boarded a brig at Le Havre for the Malay Islands—for we all knew more than one Marcas, more than one victim of a political dedication that is rewarded by betrayal or oblivion.
Les Jardies, 1840
Translated by Linda Asher