Berlin, March 1821
I ENTERED Paris by the same road that I had followed the first time, and I alighted at the same hotel in the rue du Mail: I knew none other. I was lodged across the hall from my first room, but this second one was slightly larger and the windows gave onto the street.
My brother, perhaps because he was embarrassed of my manners, or perhaps because he took pity on my shyness, did not take me into society or introduce me to anyone. He was living on the rue des Fossés-Montmartre, and I used to go there every day to dine with him at three o’clock. We then said our farewells and did not see each other again until the following day. My fat cousin Moreau was no longer in Paris. I walked past Madame de Chastenay’s house three or four times without asking the porter what had become of her.
It was early autumn. Every day I would get up at six o’clock, go to the riding school, and have breakfast. I had a happy rage for Greek in those days, and I would translate the Odyssey and the Cryopaedia until two o’clock, interspersing my labors with historical research. At two o’clock I would dress and go to my brother’s apartment. He would ask me what I had been doing, what I had seen, and I would answer: “Nothing.” He would shrug his shoulders and turn his back to me.
One afternoon, we heard a heard a noise in the street. My brother ran to the window and called to me, but I had no desire to leave the armchair where I sprawled at the other end of the room. My poor brother predicted that I would die unknown, useless to myself and my family.
At four o’clock, I went back to my hotel and took my seat behind the windowpanes. Two young girls of fifteen or sixteen came at that hour to sketch at the window of a hotel directly across the street. They had noticed my punctuality, as I had noticed theirs. From time to time, they would raise their heads and glance at their neighbor; I owed them infinite gratitude for this sign of attention: they were my only company in Paris.
When night came down, I went to some show or another. The wilderness of the crowd pleased me, though it still cost me a little effort to buy my ticket at the door and mingle with other men. I rectified the ideas that I had formed of the theater in Saint-Malo. I saw Madame de Saint-Huberti as Armida, and I felt that there had been something missing from the sorceress I had created. Whenever I was not imprisoning myself in the Opéra or the Français, I wandered from street to street or along the quais until ten or eleven in the evening. To this day, I cannot look at the line of streetlamps from the Place Louis XV to the Barrière des Bons-Hommes without recalling the agonies I suffered when I followed that route on the way to my presentation at Versailles.
Back in my room, I spent a part of the night gazing into my fire. It told me nothing. I did not possess, like the Persians, an imagination lavish enough to envision the flames as anemones or the embers as pomegranates. I listened to the carriages coming, going, and crossing paths, and their distant rumbling seemed to imitate the murmur of the breakers on the beaches of my Brittany, or the wind in my woods at Combourg. These noises of the world, which recalled the noises of solitude, reawakened my regrets. I conjured up my old despondency, or my imagination invented stories about the people that the carriages were conveying through the streets; I pictured radiant salons and balls, love affairs and conquests. Soon enough, though, I fell back on myself, and saw myself as I was: forsaken in a hotel room, looking at the world through my window and hearing its echoes in my hearth.
Rousseau believes that he owes it to his sincerity, and to the edification of mankind, to confess the suspect sensual pleasures of his life. He even supposes that he is being seriously interrogated and asked to account for his sins with the donne pericolanti of Venice. If it were true that I had prostituted myself to the courtesans of Paris, I would not consider myself obliged to enlighten posterity; but I was too timid on the one hand, and too idealistic on the other, to let myself be seduced by the filles de joie. When I shouldered my way through packs of these unhappy women, who grabbed at the arms of passersby to pull them up to their quarters like Saint-Cloud cabmen trying to make travelers climb into their carriages, I was overcome by disgust and horror. The pleasures of such adventure would only have appealed to me in times past.
In the fourteenth, fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries, our imperfect civilization, our superstitious beliefs, and our strange and half-barbarous customs lent romance to all things. Characters were strong; imagination was powerful; existence was mysterious and hidden. By night, around the high walls of the cemeteries and the convents, under the deserted ramparts of the city, along the chains and ditches of the marketplaces, on the outskirts of the closed quarters, in the narrow streets without streetlamps, where thieves and murderers lay in ambush, where meetings took place by torchlight or in impenetrable darkness, it was at the risk of your head that you kept a rendezvous with some Héloïse. To give himself over to such chaos, a man would have to be truly in love; to violate the prevailing moral code, he would have to make great sacrifices. Not only would it be a question of facing unforeseen dangers, and braving the killing blade of the law, but also of having to conquer within himself the power of fixed habits, the authority of his family, the tyranny of domestic conventions, the opposition of his conscience, and the terrors and duties of a Christian. All these obstacles would double the energy of one’s passions.
In 1788, I was not about to follow a starving wretch who would have dragged me into her hovel under the surveillance of the police, but it is possible that, in 1606, I would have pursued an adventure of the kind so beautifully recounted by Marshal Bassompierre.
“About five or six months ago,” the marshal writes, “every time I crossed the Petit-Pont (for in those days the Pont-Neuf was not yet built), a beautiful woman, a seamstress at Les Deux-Anges would make me a deep curtsy and follow me with her eyes as long as she could; and as I had taken note of this gesture, I began to look at her and treat her with new attention.
“It happened that one day I was returning from Fontainebleau to Paris over the Petit-Pont, and as soon as she saw me coming she stood in the doorway of her shop and said as I passed: ‘I am your servant, Monsieur.’ I bowed to her, and, turning back to look at her from time to time, I saw that she followed me with her eyes as long as she could.”
Bassompierre arranged a rendezvous. “I found,” he says, “a very beautiful woman, aged twenty, her hair done up for the night, dressed in nothing but a very thin chemise and a little skirt made of emerald ratteen, with slippers on her feet and a shawl wrapped around her. She was very pleasing to me. I asked if I could not see her again. ‘If you wish to see me again,’ she replied, ‘it will have to be in the rue Bourg-l’Abbé, near Les Halles, next to the rue aux Ours, the third door on the rue Saint-Martin side. I shall wait for you there from ten until midnight, and later still. I shall leave the door open. In the entryway there is a little passage that you must hurry through, for my aunt’s door opens onto it, and there you will find a stairwell that will take you up to the second floor.’
“I went at ten o’clock and found the door she had described, and I saw a big bright light, not only on the second floor, but on the third and the first floor as well. The door, however, was shut. I knocked to announce my arrival, but I heard a man’s voice, which asked me who I was. I turned around and walked to the rue aux Ours, and then, circling back again, and finding the door open, I went up to the second floor. I found that the light came from the straw of a bed that was being burned there, and I saw two naked bodies laid out on a table in this same room. I staggered backward quite astonished. Then, on my way out, I encountered a group of crows (buriers of the dead) who asked me what I was after; and I, so as to have done with them, took my sword in hand and went past them, returning to my lodgings, not a little disturbed by this unexpected sight.”
I went, in my turn, on a quest for the address given two hundred and forty years earlier by Bassompierre. I crossed the Petit-Pont, passed Les Halles, and followed the rue Saint-Denis until the rue aux Ours appeared on my right; the first street on the left, joining the rue aux Ours, is the rue Bourg-l’Abbé. The street sign, blackened by time and smoke, gave me high hopes. The storyteller’s information was so accurate that, on the rue Saint-Martin side, I soon found the “third door on the left.” There, sadly, the two and a half centuries that I had at first thought remained in the street disappeared. The façade of the house is modern, and no light shone from the first, nor the second, nor the third floor. From the windows of the attic, beneath the roof, there was a garland of nasturtiums and sweet peas; on the ground floor, a hairdresser’s shop displayed a multitude of braided hair behind its glass.
Quite disappointed, I entered this Museum of Éponines. Ever since the Roman conquest, the Gauls have been selling their blond tresses to less well-adorned heads. My countrywomen in Brittany still have themselves shorn on certain feast days: they trade their natural headdress for an Indian kerchief. Addressing myself to a wigmaker busy dragging his iron comb through a wig, I said, “Monsieur, by any chance have you purchased the hair of a young seamstress who used to live at the Deux-Anges, near the Petit-Pont?” He stared at me flabbergasted, unable to say yes or no; I excused myself, muttering a thousand apologies, through a labyrinth of toupees.
Now I wandered from door to door. I found no twenty-year-old seamstress making “deep curtsies” to me; no frank, disinterested, passionate young woman, “her hair done up for the night, dressed in nothing but a very thin chemise and a little skirt made of emerald ratteen, with slippers on her feet and a shawl wrapped around her”; only a grumpy old crone ready to rejoin her teeth in the grave who tried to beat me with her crutch: perhaps she was the aunt of the rendezvous.
What a wonderful story, this story of Bassompierre’s! It allows us to understand one of the reasons why he was so resolutely beloved. In his day, the French were still separated into two distinct classes, one dominant and the other half-servile. The seamstress held Bassompierre in her arms like a demigod descended into the heart of a slave: he gave her the illusion of glory, and French women, above all other women, are prone to be intoxicated by this illusion.
But who will reveal to us the obscure agents of the catastrophe? Was it the fetching grisette of the Deux-Anges whose body lay on the table beside the other body? And who was this second person? Was it the husband, or the man whose voice Bassompierre had heard? Was it the plague (for there was plague at that time in Paris) or jealousy that rushed down the rue Bourg-l’Abbé ahead of love? The imagination runs wild with such a subject. Combine a poet’s inventions with music-hall songs, the gravediggers rushing onto the scene, the “crows” and Bassompierre’s sword—a superb melodrama would come of the adventure.
You will no doubt admire the chastity and restraint of my youth in Paris. In this capital where I was free to surrender myself to all my whims, as in the Abbey of Thélème, where everyone did whatever he desired, I did not abuse my independence in the least.[7] The only congress I had was with a two-hundred-and-sixteen-year-old courtesan who had formerly been smitten with a French marshal, Henry IV’s rival for the affections of Mademoiselle de Montmorency and the lover of Mademoiselle d’Entragues, whose sister the Marquise de Verneuil spoke so unfavorably of Henry IV. Louis XVI, whom I was about to meet, would never have suspected my secret connections with his family.