From “Studies of Paris.”

THE IDEA of having been born at Paris, of having had that sign of predilection from God, is the leading thought of the Parisian, like a star, which irradiates his whole life with a heavenly consolation. The benevolence he shows to all strangers is inspired to a great degree, by a feeling of commiseration for them, and his dislike of them is not a profound one, simply from the fact that he considers his enemies sufficiently punished by the fate which caused them to be born where they were. For this reason he worships all the childishness and vices of his native city, and is proud of them, only because they belong to Paris, which, to his mind, is above all human criticism. Can one find any capital city which is more insolent to the people from the provinces, represented by its writers as a mass of cretins? and authors who offer incense to their city with a more outrageous imprudence, not only to any other national amour propre, but to all human dignity? They will tell you to your face from the stage that the smoke from its chimneys are the ideas of the universe! All lie prostrate on the ground before this enormous courtesan, mother and nurse of all vanities; of that rabid vanity of pleasing her first among them all, of obtaining from her, at any cost, at least one single glance; of that disgusting vanity which induces a writer to declare himself, in the preface of an infamous novel, capable of all the baseness and all the crimes of Heliogabalus and Nero. Take then, joking aside, their prefaces full of grimaces, puerilities, boasts, and impostures. Vanity is stamped upon them all. There is not in all contemporary literature one of those grand, modest, benevolent, and logical characters which write with the splendors of the mind, the dignity of life; one of those lofty and pure figures, before which one uncovers his head with hesitation and reserve, and whose name is a title of nobility and a comfort to humanity. All is overpowered and spoiled by the mania for pose; pose in literature, pose in religion, pose in love, pose even in the greatest afflictions. An immense and diseased sensuality constitutes the foundation of that life, and is revealed in letters, music, architecture, fashions, in the sound of the voice, glances, and even in the gait. Amusement! All the rest is only a means of attaining this end. From one limit to the other of those superb boulevards resounds a loud laugh of derision for all the scruples and all the modesty of the human soul. And a day arrives at last in which you become indignant at that life; a day in which you find yourself fearfully weary of that theatre, impregnated with the odor of gas and patchouli, where every spectacle ends in a canzonet; in which you are satiated with puns, blague, dances, dyes, puffery, cracked voices, false smiles, and purchased pleasures; then you despise that shameless city, and it seems to you that in order to purify yourself after three months of that life you ought to live for a year on the summit of a mountain, and you feel an irresistible desire to run through green fields in the open air, to smell the odor of the ground and to refresh your soul and blood in solitude, face to face with nature.

  The fit of passion is over, that is well. “Let us stand aside so that it may pass,” as the Spanish say. At Paris you can say whatever you choose; she takes no more notice of us than do the elephants in the zoölogical gardens of the children whom they carry upon their backs on holidays. But these are not our last impressions of Paris.

  The period in which everything looks rose color and that in which everything seems black, is followed by a third that is a return in the direction of the first; that period in which one commences to live peacefully in a circle of choice and well-tried friends. And one must confess it: the friend found there, the good, honest Frenchman, is really worth two. In no other European do you find a more amiable harmony of mind, heart, and manner. Between the friendship, more expansive than profound, of the southern Europeans, and that deep, but reserved one of the north, you prefer this, so warm and cold at a time and so full of solemnity and delicacy. How charming it is, when one is weary of the noise of the great city, to go in the evening to the other bank of the Seine, into a silent street, to visit the quiet, little family, which lives, as it were, on an island in the middle of that turbulent ocean. What a warm welcome you receive, what unreserved gayety you find at that refined but modest table, and how thoroughly your mind rests there. Paris itself offers you many retreats from its dangers and a thousand remedies for its fevers. After an exciting night, with what inexpressible pleasure do you dash through its beautiful groves, and the gay suburbs of the Seine, where you find the gayety of a country festival, and with its vast gardens in the midst of an enormous hive of children, or through one of its immense and solitary avenues, in which the heart and mind expand, and the sad image of the Babylon on the boulevards seems to you so far away. Everywhere you find a people who reveal more defects the more you study them; but in whom every defect is counterbalanced by some admirable quality.

  They are a frivolous people, but one in whom a noble and resolute word always finds an echo. There is always an open and safe road by which to arrive at their hearts. There is no elevated sentiment or beautiful idea which does not take root in their souls. Their quick intelligence makes all the communications of the mind both easy and agreeable. The chance word, shading, half-uttered suggestion, that which is taken for granted, the accent and the hint are seized on the wing. A thousand people reunited have but one soul with which to feel and comprehend. It is impossible not to be attracted by those fêtes, tumultuous gatherings, in which enjoyment makes all states and conditions equal, and an innumerable crowd is nothing but one immense assembly of happy thoughtless friends. Their most obstinate enemy must burst out into a hearty laugh and open his heart to all this benevolence, because underneath all the childishness of the Parisian there lies as surely a fund of goodness as under a splendid froth an excellent wine. He is naturally unreserved, (his manners do not reveal this fact); not diffident; easier to be deceived than to deceive; inclined to forgive injuries; conciliating; scornful of trivial rancor and all the petty niggardliness of life. He is constantly, by nature, in a state of mind in which one finds every one after a gay banquet where wine flows freely; equally ready to commit some great folly or do something grand, to embrace a sworn enemy, to provoke his neighbors by a word, to play a buffoon trick standing on the table, or to take pity on some little beggar who is asking for bread at the door. When he gets beyond the little circle of his ordinary existence, the spectacle of that immense life of Paris exalts all his faculties and all his good and bad feelings. We too are similarly affected. The aggrandizement in the proportions of everything gives us little by little another idea of the things themselves. Even the corruption—enormous and enticing as it is—ends by fascinating us like a vast and varied field of study, rather than repelling us by its ugliness; and we accustom ourselves to it almost as if it were a needful feature of life, or a grand and terrible school, containing a great number of experiences and ideas and set in motion by the springs of a thousand powerful minds.

  In the Bullier Hall, amid that whirlpool of three hundred girls dancing together and singing in a perruque-blonde voice, instead of an outcry against corruption there springs from our hearts an inspiring hymn to Truth and Life. Disgusted with the countries where not even vice and its language are original, we find here, at least, the absence of that lowest and vilest form of corruption, which is the mania for feigning it out of vainglory, when one has neither the strength nor means of enjoying it in its tremendous fullness. Little by little, we persuade ourselves that many of the diseases which we believed to be caused by guilt are here only the efflorescence of a too rich blood, while it is the lack of vitality which makes other nations flaunt certain negative virtues in the face of Paris, to whom one might say, as the Messalina of Cossa did to Silio, “You are so corrupt that you do not support the greatness of Vice.” Thus in all the different phases of life you find there (with a feeling of mingled regret for yourself and admiration of Paris) the original of a thousand things, of which at home you have seen the counterfeit reduced to pocket form for a more diminutive people.

  There you feel disposed to lay much to pride, when you observe things at no great distance, and can put yourself in the place of a people who see themselves imitated by the universe; who see gathered and carried all about the crumbs from their table, renowned works made from the cuttings of their own; busts raised at certain times and in certain places to people who have no other merit than that of being subscribers to the Revue des Deux Mondes; their language purloined and mixed with many foreign ones, their novels and theatres stolen, all the hearsays of their history and chronicles treasured up; the whole city known like the psalm of one’s heart; Tortoni more famous than many an immortal monument; the Maison Dorée, the first of all the dreams of the dissolute of the whole world; their fashions copied, their laughs repeated, their jokes rehearsed, their caprices adored; and one can also understand how angry they grow when one of their most pedantic scholars insults them. Why should one be astonished that people think only of themselves in a country so ardently admired, by deed if not by word? But this defect is not injurious to them or to others, since it arises from a profound knowledge of her own affairs, from regarding them with an excess of affection, and from the belief that the entire world regards with the same esteem that warm, high-colored, original, and vital something, which they exhibit in all the manifestations of themselves. They have a small field to traverse, as Schiller said of himself to Goethe; but traverse it in less time in all its parts. For this reason there is an unending continuation and combination of direct ideas and thoughts toward the same point, a great frequency of attrition which emits light and heat; every inch of space is disputed by a thousand contestants; instead of walking they all run, instead of controversy there is the fray. And in this perpetual conflict all superfluous baggage is thrown aside; everything is made a weapon of offense or defense; thought stripped of its leaves; language restricted and action hastened; art and life equally bold and rapid; and all encouraged by the great gay voice of the great city, which speaks in shrill, crystalline tones, heard throughout the world.

  The more you become absorbed in the study of that life the more astonished you are in seeing the immense amount of work accomplished under that appearance of universal dissipation. How many workmen labor in solitude; how many prepare, with incredible fatigue, in obscurity—for public combats; how, not only every kind of genius, but any particular faculty scarcely more than mediocre, finds this way in which to exercise itself to its own and to general advantage; how quickly and spontaneously a circle of amicable and cultured minds (who aid it in rising and becoming known) gather around every genius; how the slightest promise of success in the field of intellect awakens in all classes a pleasant feeling of curiosity and respect, eliciting from all that anticipatory tribute of glory which goes so far toward making it a reality; what an extraordinary impulse to human strength is the certainty of the sudden and broad change of fortune which a great success produces there; how grand and intoxicating in that city is the triumph of genius, which, scarcely noticed by her, receives the salutations of unknown admirers, and offers and counsels from every part of the globe; how, to the man unsuccessful in one direction, a hundred other roads remain open if he be willing to lower to a very slight degree his pretension to glory; how the forgetful nature of that great city, which, not permitting any one to rest upon one triumph, obliges all to represent themselves continually at the contest, produces that marvelously busy life, those obstinately warlike old men, whose example inspires coming generations with the passion for work; and, in fine, what an enormous quantity of unfinished work, of attempts, sketches, of material spoiled by some, but not useless to others, and of creations in all fields praiseworthy, but condemned to die where they arise, because they are crushed by the abundance of something better.

  When one has observed all this, the sojourn in Paris becomes agreeable and useful, if only in watching the workings of that immense machine as she polishes, perfects, transforms, squeezes out, and grinds the inexhaustible material of genius, wealth, youth, ambition, and courage, which France and the world continually throw under her formidable wheels, and how she casts from the opposite side great names, frustrated celebrities, masterpieces, immortal words, broken bones, weapons, gems, and fragments, which France and the world hasten to gather and comment upon. Censure this Colossus? Cry out against her workmen because they drink absinthe, sing falsetto, and have a woman awaiting them at the door? What pedantry!

  But even this is not the last impression which one receives of Paris. In remaining there for some time, one passes through another set of enthusiasms and disillusions. Many an evening do you return home, between those interminable rows of lights, melancholy and weary unto death of everything, with a raging love for your country in your heart. Then you become reconciled with the city on a beautiful autumn day, in witnessing one of those noisy expansions of joy which calm the darkened soul. At another time a little humiliation, a stupid play of words, repeated by a million mouths, a scene of nauseating obscenity, a dark and gloomy sky change the aspect of everything, and such violent antipathies and dislikes arise within you, that you would like to see that city disappear like an encampment carried off by a hurricane. But you will be ashamed of that feeling some other day, in thinking of the immensity of the vacuum in your mind if all that the city has placed there from the time of your infancy to the present day should suddenly leave it.

  Up to the last moment Paris will cause you many annoyances and give you many caresses, like a beautiful but nervous woman, and you will experience all the heights and depths of a passion—to-day at her feet in humility, to-morrow seized by a desire to insult her, and then again to ask her pardon, so fascinated are you. Yet every day you will find the ties that bind you to her growing stronger. And this you feel more than ever on going away; the evening you pass rapidly for the last time through that immense splendor of boulevards, which is suddenly succeeded by the half darkness of an enormous and gloomy station. Then, despite of the desire you have to see your home, you are seized by a feeling of sadness at the thought of returning into that dormitory of a city from which you started, and you listen for the last time to the distant noise of Paris with an inexplicable feeling of desire and envy. And from the end of the coupé in the darkness, you see the city once more, as you saw it one beautiful July morning from a tower of Notre Dame; traversed by the enormous blue arch of the Seine, with its distant violet-hued horizons, immense and smoky at the moment, when, from a square lying beneath, the drums of a regiment sent up to you an echo of the battle of Magenta. “Oh, beautiful and tremendous sinner,” you then exclaim, “I absolve thee, and at the risk of the damnation of my soul I love thee!”