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_ Madame de T.'s salon was all that Marius Pontmercy knew of the world.
It was the only opening through which he could get a glimpse
of life. This opening was sombre, and more cold than warmth,
more night than day, came to him through this skylight. This child,
who had been all joy and light on entering this strange world,
soon became melancholy, and, what is still more contrary to his age,
grave. Surrounded by all those singular and imposing personages,
he gazed about him with serious amazement. Everything conspired
to increase this astonishment in him. There were in Madame de T.'s
salon some very noble ladies named Mathan, Noe, Levis,--which was
pronounced Levi,--Cambis, pronounced Cambyse. These antique visages
and these Biblical names mingled in the child's mind with the Old
Testament which he was learning by heart, and when they were
all there, seated in a circle around a dying fire, sparely lighted
by a lamp shaded with green, with their severe profiles, their gray
or white hair, their long gowns of another age, whose lugubrious
colors could not be distinguished, dropping, at rare intervals,
words which were both majestic and severe, little Marius stared
at them with frightened eyes, in the conviction that he beheld
not women, but patriarchs and magi, not real beings, but phantoms.
With these phantoms, priests were sometimes mingled, frequenters of this
ancient salon, and some gentlemen; the Marquis de Sass****, private
secretary to Madame de Berry, the Vicomte de Val***, who published,
under the pseudonyme of Charles-Antoine, monorhymed odes, the Prince
de Beauff*******, who, though very young, had a gray head and a pretty
and witty wife, whose very low-necked toilettes of scarlet velvet with
gold torsades alarmed these shadows, the Marquis de C*****d'E******,
the man in all France who best understood "proportioned politeness,"
the Comte d'Am*****, the kindly man with the amiable chin, and the
Chevalier de Port-de-Guy, a pillar of the library of the Louvre,
called the King's cabinet, M. de Port-de-Guy, bald, and rather aged
than old, was wont to relate that in 1793, at the age of sixteen,
he had been put in the galleys as refractory and chained with an
octogenarian, the Bishop of Mirepoix, also refractory, but as a priest,
while he was so in the capacity of a soldier. This was at Toulon.
Their business was to go at night and gather up on the scaffold
the heads and bodies of the persons who had been guillotined during
the day; they bore away on their backs these dripping corpses,
and their red galley-slave blouses had a clot of blood at the back
of the neck, which was dry in the morning and wet at night.
These tragic tales abounded in Madame de T.'s salon, and by dint
of cursing Marat, they applauded Trestaillon. Some deputies
of the undiscoverable variety played their whist there; M. Thibord
du Chalard, M. Lemarchant de Gomicourt, and the celebrated scoffer
of the right, M. Cornet-Dincourt. The bailiff de Ferrette, with his
short breeches and his thin legs, sometimes traversed this salon
on his way to M. de Talleyrand. He had been M. le Comte d'Artois'
companion in pleasures and unlike Aristotle crouching under Campaspe,
he had made the Guimard crawl on all fours, and in that way he
had exhibited to the ages a philosopher avenged by a bailiff.
As for the priests, there was the Abbe Halma, the same to whom
M. Larose, his collaborator on la Foudre, said: "Bah! Who is
there who is not fifty years old? a few greenhorns perhaps?"
The Abbe Letourneur, preacher to the King, the Abbe Frayssinous,
who was not, as yet, either count, or bishop, or minister, or peer,
and who wore an old cassock whose buttons were missing, and the Abbe
Keravenant, Cure of Saint-Germain-des-Pres; also the Pope's Nuncio,
then Monsignor Macchi, Archbishop of Nisibi, later on Cardinal,
remarkable for his long, pensive nose, and another Monsignor,
entitled thus: Abbate Palmieri, domestic prelate, one of the seven
participant prothonotaries of the Holy See, Canon of the illustrious
Liberian basilica, Advocate of the saints, Postulatore dei Santi,
which refers to matters of canonization, and signifies very nearly:
Master of Requests of the section of Paradise. Lastly, two cardinals,
M. de la Luzerne, and M. de Cl****** T*******. The Cardinal of Luzerne
was a writer and was destined to have, a few years later, the honor
of signing in the Conservateur articles side by side with Chateaubriand;
M. de Cl****** T******* was Archbishop of Toul****, and often made
trips to Paris, to his nephew, the Marquis de T*******, who was
Minister of Marine and War. The Cardinal of Cl****** T*******
was a merry little man, who displayed his red stockings beneath his
tucked-up cassock; his specialty was a hatred of the Encyclopaedia,
and his desperate play at billiards, and persons who, at that epoch,
passed through the Rue M***** on summer evenings, where the hotel
de Cl****** T******* then stood, halted to listen to the shock
of the balls and the piercing voice of the Cardinal shouting to
his conclavist, Monseigneur Cotiret, Bishop in partibus of Caryste:
"Mark, Abbe, I make a cannon." The Cardinal de Cl****** T*******
had been brought to Madame de T.'s by his most intimate friend,
M. de Roquelaure, former Bishop of Senlis, and one of the Forty.
M. de Roquelaure was notable for his lofty figure and his assiduity
at the Academy; through the glass door of the neighboring hall
of the library where the French Academy then held its meetings,
the curious could, on every Tuesday, contemplate the Ex-Bishop
of Senlis, usually standing erect, freshly powdered, in violet hose,
with his back turned to the door, apparently for the purpose of
allowing a better view of his little collar. All these ecclesiastics,
though for the most part as much courtiers as churchmen, added to the
gravity of the T. salon, whose seigniorial aspect was accentuated
by five peers of France, the Marquis de Vib****, the Marquis de
Tal***, the Marquis de Herb*******, the Vicomte Damb***, and the Duc
de Val********. This Duc de Val********, although Prince de Mon***,
that is to say a reigning prince abroad, had so high an idea of France
and its peerage, that he viewed everything through their medium.
It was he who said: "The Cardinals are the peers of France of Rome;
the lords are the peers of France of England." Moreover, as it is
indispensable that the Revolution should be everywhere in this century,
this feudal salon was, as we have said, dominated by a bourgeois.
M. Gillenormand reigned there.
There lay the essence and quintessence of the Parisian white society.
There reputations, even Royalist reputations, were held in quarantine.
There is always a trace of anarchy in renown. Chateaubriand, had he
entered there, would have produced the effect of Pere Duchene. Some of
the scoffed-at did, nevertheless, penetrate thither on sufferance.
Comte Beug*** was received there, subject to correction.
The "noble" salons of the present day no longer resemble those salons.
The Faubourg Saint-Germain reeks of the fagot even now. The Royalists
of to-day are demagogues, let us record it to their credit.
At Madame de T.'s the society was superior, taste was exquisite
and haughty, under the cover of a great show of politeness.
Manners there admitted of all sorts of involuntary refinements
which were the old regime itself, buried but still alive. Some of
these habits, especially in the matter of language, seem eccentric.
Persons but superficially acquainted with them would have taken
for provincial that which was only antique. A woman was called
Madame la Generale. Madame la Colonelle was not entirely disused.
The charming Madame de Leon, in memory, no doubt, of the Duchesses
de Longueville and de Chevreuse, preferred this appellation to her
title of Princesse. The Marquise de Crequy was also called Madame
la Colonelle.
It was this little high society which invented at the Tuileries
the refinement of speaking to the King in private as the King,
in the third person, and never as Your Majesty, the designation
of Your Majesty having been "soiled by the usurper."
Men and deeds were brought to judgment there. They jeered at the age,
which released them from the necessity of understanding it.
They abetted each other in amazement. They communicated
to each other that modicum of light which they possessed.
Methuselah bestowed information on Epimenides. The deaf man made
the blind man acquainted with the course of things. They declared
that the time which had elasped since Coblentz had not existed.
In the same manner that Louis XVIII. was by the grace of God,
in the five and twentieth year of his reign, the emigrants were,
by rights, in the five and twentieth year of their adolescence.
All was harmonious; nothing was too much alive; speech hardly
amounted to a breath; the newspapers, agreeing with the salons,
seemed a papyrus. There were some young people, but they were
rather dead. The liveries in the antechamber were antiquated.
These utterly obsolete personages were served by domestics of the
same stamp.
They all had the air of having lived a long time ago, and of obstinately
resisting the sepulchre. Nearly the whole dictionary consisted
of Conserver, Conservation, Conservateur; to be in good odor,--
that was the point. There are, in fact, aromatics in the opinions
of these venerable groups, and their ideas smelled of it.
It was a mummified society. The masters were embalmed, the servants
were stuffed with straw.
A worthy old marquise, an emigree and ruined, who had
but a solitary maid, continued to say: "My people."
What did they do in Madame de T.'s salon? They were ultra.
To be ultra; this word, although what it represents may not
have disappeared, has no longer any meaning at the present day.
Let us explain it.
To be ultra is to go beyond. It is to attack the sceptre in the name
of the throne, and the mitre in the name of the attar; it is to ill-treat
the thing which one is dragging, it is to kick over the traces;
it is to cavil at the fagot on the score of the amount of cooking
received by heretics; it is to reproach the idol with its small
amount of idolatry; it is to insult through excess of respect;
it is to discover that the Pope is not sufficiently papish,
that the King is not sufficiently royal, and that the night
has too much light; it is to be discontented with alabaster,
with snow, with the swan and the lily in the name of whiteness;
it is to be a partisan of things to the point of becoming their enemy;
it is to be so strongly for, as to be against.
The ultra spirit especially characterizes the first phase
of the Restoration.
Nothing in history resembles that quarter of an hour which begins in 1814
and terminates about 1820, with the advent of M. de Villele, the practical
man of the Right. These six years were an extraordinary moment;
at one and the same time brilliant and gloomy, smiling and sombre,
illuminated as by the radiance of dawn and entirely covered, at the
same time, with the shadows of the great catastrophes which still filled
the horizon and were slowly sinking into the past. There existed
in that light and that shadow, a complete little new and old world,
comic and sad, juvenile and senile, which was rubbing its eyes;
nothing resembles an awakening like a return; a group which regarded
France with ill-temper, and which France regarded with irony;
good old owls of marquises by the streetful, who had returned,
and of ghosts, the "former" subjects of amazement at everything,
brave and noble gentlemen who smiled at being in France but wept also,
delighted to behold their country once more, in despair at not finding
their monarchy; the nobility of the Crusades treating the nobility
of the Empire, that is to say, the nobility of the sword, with scorn;
historic races who had lost the sense of history; the sons of the
companions of Charlemagne disdaining the companions of Napoleon.
The swords, as we have just remarked, returned the insult; the sword
of Fontenoy was laughable and nothing but a scrap of rusty iron;
the sword of Marengo was odious and was only a sabre. Former days
did not recognize Yesterday. People no longer had the feeling for
what was grand. There was some one who called Bonaparte Scapin.
This Society no longer exists. Nothing of it, we repeat,
exists to-day. When we select from it some one figure at random,
and attempt to make it live again in thought, it seems as strange
to us as the world before the Deluge. It is because it, too, as a
matter of fact, has been engulfed in a deluge. It has disappeared
beneath two Revolutions. What billows are ideas! How quickly
they cover all that it is their mission to destroy and to bury,
and how promptly they create frightful gulfs!
Such was the physiognomy of the salons of those distant and candid
times when M. Martainville had more wit than Voltaire.
These salons had a literature and politics of their own.
They believed in Fievee. M. Agier laid down the law in them.
They commentated M. Colnet, the old bookseller and publicist of the
Quay Malaquais. Napoleon was to them thoroughly the Corsican Ogre.
Later on the introduction into history of M. le Marquis de Bonaparte,
Lieutenant-General of the King's armies, was a concession to the spirit
of the age.
These salons did not long preserve their purity. Beginning with 1818,
doctrinarians began to spring up in them, a disturbing shade.
Their way was to be Royalists and to excuse themselves for being so.
Where the ultras were very proud, the doctrinarians were rather ashamed.
They had wit; they had silence; their political dogma was
suitably impregnated with arrogance; they should have succeeded.
They indulged, and usefully too, in excesses in the matter of white
neckties and tightly buttoned coats. The mistake or the misfortune
of the doctrinarian party was to create aged youth. They assumed
the poses of wise men. They dreamed of engrafting a temperate
power on the absolute and excessive principle. They opposed,
and sometimes with rare intelligence, conservative liberalism
to the liberalism which demolishes. They were heard to say:
"Thanks for Royalism! It has rendered more than one service. It has
brought back tradition, worship, religion, respect. It is faithful,
brave, chivalric, loving, devoted. It has mingled, though with regret,
the secular grandeurs of the monarchy with the new grandeurs
of the nation. Its mistake is not to understand the Revolution,
the Empire, glory, liberty, young ideas, young generations,
the age. But this mistake which it makes with regard to us,--
have we not sometimes been guilty of it towards them? The Revolution,
whose heirs we are, ought to be intelligent on all points.
To attack Royalism is a misconstruction of liberalism. What an error!
And what blindness! Revolutionary France is wanting in respect
towards historic France, that is to say, towards its mother,
that is to say, towards itself. After the 5th of September,
the nobility of the monarchy is treated as the nobility of the Empire
was treated after the 5th of July. They were unjust to the eagle,
we are unjust to the fleur-de-lys. It seems that we must always
have something to proscribe! Does it serve any purpose to ungild
the crown of Louis XIV., to scrape the coat of arms of Henry IV.? We
scoff at M. de Vaublanc for erasing the N's from the bridge of Jena!
What was it that he did? What are we doing? Bouvines belongs to us
as well as Marengo. The fleurs-de-lys are ours as well as the N's.
That is our patrimony. To what purpose shall we diminish it?
We must not deny our country in the past any more than in the present.
Why not accept the whole of history? Why not love the whole
of France?
It is thus that doctrinarians criticised and protected Royalism,
which was displeased at criticism and furious at protection.
The ultras marked the first epoch of Royalism,
congregation characterized the second.
Skill follows ardor. Let us confine ourselves here to this sketch.
In the course of this narrative, the author of this book has
encountered in his path this curious moment of contemporary history;
he has been forced to cast a passing glance upon it, and to trace
once more some of the singular features of this society which is
unknown to-day. But he does it rapidly and without any bitter
or derisive idea. Souvenirs both respectful and affectionate,
for they touch his mother, attach him to this past. Moreover,
let us remark, this same petty world had a grandeur of its own.
One may smile at it, but one can neither despise nor hate it.
It was the France of former days.
Marius Pontmercy pursued some studies, as all children do. When he
emerged from the hands of Aunt Gillenormand, his grandfather confided
him to a worthy professor of the most purely classic innocence.
This young soul which was expanding passed from a prude to a
vulgar pedant.
Marius went through his years of college, then he entered the
law school. He was a Royalist, fanatical and severe. He did
not love his grandfather much, as the latter's gayety and cynicism
repelled him, and his feelings towards his father were gloomy.
He was, on the whole, a cold and ardent, noble, generous, proud,
religious, enthusiastic lad; dignified to harshness, pure to shyness. _
Read next: VOLUME III: BOOK THIRD - THE GRANDFATHER AND THE GRANDSON: CHAPTER IV. End of the Brigand
Read previous: VOLUME III: BOOK THIRD - THE GRANDFATHER AND THE GRANDSON: CHAPTER II. One of the Red Spectres of that Epoch
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