Mademoiselle de Maupin (Illustrated Edition). Theophile Gautier
who ever lived.—Do you think there is anything stronger in the suits of Indiana and of Valentine?
Paternity is even less respected, if that be possible. Witness Orgon, Géronte, and all the rest of them.
How they are robbed by their sons, cheated by their valets! How their avarice, their obstinacy, their idiocy are laid bare, without mercy for their age!—What practical jokes! what mystifications.—How they are taken by the shoulder and pushed out of life, poor old fellows, who take a long time to die and refuse to give up their money! how much is said about the immortality of parents! what arguments against heredity, and how much more convincing they are than all this Saint-Simonian declamation!
A father is an ogre, an Argus, a jailer, a tyrant, something that at the best is good for nothing but to delay a marriage for three acts until the final reconciliation.—A father is the ridiculous husband perfected.—A son is never ridiculous in Molière; for Molière, like all authors at all possible epochs, paid his court to the young generation at the expense of the old.
And what of the Scapins, with their striped cloaks à la Napolitaine, their caps tilted over their ears, their plumes sweeping the layers of air—are not they very pious, very chaste individuals, most worthy of canonization?—The galleys are filled with honest folk who have not done the fourth part of what they do. The knavery of Trialph is paltry knavery compared with theirs. And the Lisettes, the Martons, tudieu! what hussies!—The girls of the street are far from being as sharp, as quick at prurient retort as they. How well they understand how to deliver a note! what good watch they keep during assignations!—On my word, they are invaluable girls, serviceable and shrewd advisers.
It is a charming company that walks and fidgets through those comedies and imbroglios.—Duped guardians, cuckold husbands, lewd maids, keen-witted valets, young ladies mad with love, dissolute sons, adulterous wives; are not these quite as bad as the melancholy young beaux and poor, weak women, oppressed and impassioned, of the dramas and novels of the writers in vogue to-day?
And yet the denouements, minus the final blow of the dagger, minus the regulation cup of poison, are as happy as the time-honored ending of a fairy tale, and everybody, even the husband, is perfectly satisfied. In Molière, virtue is always in disgrace, always being pummelled; it is virtue that wears horns and turns her back to Mascarille; morality barely shows its face once at the end of the play, in the somewhat commonplace person of the gendarme Loyal.
All this that we have said is not intended to knock a chip off Molière's pedestal; we are not mad enough to attempt to shake that bronze colossus with our weak arms; we desired simply to show the pious feuilletonistes, who are terrified by recent works and by those of the romantic school, that the old classics, whom they urge us every day to read and imitate, far surpass them in looseness and immorality.
To Molière we might easily add Marivaux and La Fontaine, those two strongly-contrasted exponents of the French mind, and Regnier and Rabelais and Marot, and many others. But it is not our purpose in this place to prepare, from the standpoint of morality, a course in literature for the benefit of the virgin minds of the feuilleton.
It seems to me that we should not raise such a hubbub for so small a matter. Luckily we are not living in the days of the fair Eve, and we cannot, in good conscience, be as primitive and patriarchal as people were in the days of the ark. We are not little girls preparing for our first communion; and when we play crambo, we do not answer cream-pie. We are passably knowing in our innocence, and our virginity has been on the town for a long while; those are things that one does not have twice, and, whatever we may do, we cannot recover them, for there is nothing in the world that runs faster than a fleeing virginity and a vanishing illusion.
After all, perhaps there is no great harm in that, and knowledge of everything is preferable to ignorance of everything. That is a question that I leave for those who know more than I, to discuss. The fact remains that the world has passed the age when one can feign modesty and chastity, and I consider it too old a greybeard to play the child and the virgin without making itself ridiculous.
Since its marriage to civilization, society has lost the right to be artless and bashful. There are certain blushes that are all right for the bridal bed, but can serve no further purpose the next day; for the young wife thinks no more of the maiden, it may be, or if she does think of her, it is a most improper thing and gravely endangers her husband's reputation.
When I chance to read one of the fine sermons that have taken the place of literary criticism in the public sheets, I sometimes feel great remorse and dire apprehension, having on my conscience some paltry equivocal stories, a little too highly spiced, such as a young man of spirit and animation may have to reproach himself for.
Beside these Bossuets of the Café de Paris, these Bourdaloues of the balcony at the Opéra, these Catos at so much a line, who berate the present age in such fine fashion, I esteem myself the most infamous villain that ever marred the face of the earth; and yet, God knows, the list of my sins, capital as well as venial, with the usual blank spaces and leads, would barely, even in the hands of the most skilful publisher, make one or two octavo volumes a day, which is a small matter for one who does not claim to be bound for paradise in the other world and to win the Monthyon prize or be rose-maiden in this.
And then, when I think that I have met under the table, and elsewhere, too, a considerable number of these dragons of virtue, I return to a better opinion of myself, and I consider that, whatever faults I may have, they have another which is, in my eyes, the greatest and worst of all:—I refer to hypocrisy.
By looking carefully one might perhaps find another little vice to add; but this is so hideous that I really hardly dare to name it. Come nearer and I will breathe its name into your ear:—it is envy.
Envy, and nothing else.
It is envy that crawls and wriggles through all these paternal homilies; however careful it may be to hide itself, you can see its flat little viper's head from time to time gleaming above the metaphors and rhetorical figures; you surprise it licking with its forked tongue its lips blue with venom, you hear it hissing softly in the shadow of an insidious epithet.
I am well aware that it is insufferably conceited to say that any one envies you, and that a dandy who boasts of a conquest is almost as nauseating.—I am not so boastful as to believe that I have enemies or envious detractors; that is a piece of good fortune that is not given to everybody, and I probably shall not enjoy it for a long time; so I will speak freely and without reservation as one who is perfectly disinterested in the matter.
An unquestionable fact, and easy of demonstration to those who may doubt it, is the natural antipathy of the critic to the poet—of him who does nothing to him who does something—of the drone to the bee—of the gelding to the stallion.
You do not become a critic until the fact is established to your own satisfaction that you cannot be a poet. Before descending to the pitiful rôle of watching cloaks and counting strokes like a billiard-marker or a tennis-court attendant, you have long courted the Muse, you have tried to seduce her; but you have not sufficient vigor for that; your breath has failed you and you have fallen back, pale and broken-winded, to the foot of the sacred mountain.
I can conceive that antipathy. It is painful to see another take his seat at the banquet to which you are not invited and lie with the woman who would have none of you. I pity with all my heart the poor eunuch who is compelled to assist at the delights of the Great Turk.
He is admitted to the most secret recesses of the Oda; he escorts the sultanas to the bath; he sees their lovely bodies gleaming in the silvery water of the great reservoirs, shedding streams of pearls and smoother than agate; the most hidden charms are disclosed to him unveiled. No one is embarrassed by his presence.—He is a eunuch.—The sultan caresses his favorite before him and kisses her on her pomegranate mouth.—In very truth his is a terribly false position and he must be sadly embarrassed to keep himself in countenance.
It is the same with the critic who sees the poet walking in the garden of poesy with its nine fair odalisques, and disporting himself indolently in the shade of tall green laurels. It is very hard for him not to pick up stones in the road