“What can I say, my dear Antoinette! I can say that I love you, that the affection, the love, a true love, the joy of living in a heart wholly ours, entirely ours, without reservation, is so rare a thing and so difficult that I doubted you, that I made you endure the harshest trials. But today I love you with all my soul’s strength . . . If you follow me away from here, I will hear no voice but yours, I will see no other face—”
“Silence, Armand! You are cutting short the only moment we will be allowed in each other’s presence here below.”
“Antoinette, will you follow me?”
“But I am not leaving you. I live in your heart, not through an interest in worldly pleasures, vanity, selfish joy; I live here for you, pale and withered, in the bosom of God! If He is just, you will be happy—”
“All that is nothing but words! Pale and withered? And what if I want you and can be happy only by having you? Will you always know your duties, then, in your lover’s presence? Does he not come first in your heart? Earlier you preferred society, yourself, who knows what else; now, it is God, it is my salvation. In Sister Theresa I can still see the duchess, ignorant of the pleasures of love and still insensitive under the guise of feeling. You do not love me, you have never loved—”
“Ah, my brother—”
“You do not want to leave this tomb, you love my soul, you say? Ah well, you will lose it forever, this soul, I shall kill myself—”
“My mother,” cried Sister Theresa in Spanish, “I lied to you, this man is my lover!”
The curtain fell instantly. The general, stupefied, scarcely heard the interior doors slam shut.
“Ah! She still loves me!” he cried to himself, understanding the sublimity in the nun’s cry. “She must be carried away from here . . .”
The general left the island, returned to headquarters, asked for leave—citing reasons of poor health—and returned promptly to France.
Here now is the adventure that lay behind the situation of the two persons in this scene.
2. LOVE IN A FASHIONABLE PARISH
What is called in France the Faubourg Saint-Germain is neither a quarter of Paris nor a sect nor an institution, nor anything that can be precisely defined. There are great houses in the Place Royale, the Faubourg Saint-Honoré, and the Chaussée d’Antin where people breathe the same air as in the Faubourg Saint-Germain. So the Faubourg is not entirely within the Faubourg. People born far from its influence can feel it and are attracted to this world, while certain others who are born there can be forever banished from it. For approximately forty years now, the manners, speech, in brief the tradition of the Faubourg Saint-Germain in Paris has played the role formerly taken by the court; the Hôtel Saint Paul did the same in the fourteenth century, the Louvre in the fifteenth, the Palace, the Hôtel Rambouillet, the Place Royale in the sixteenth, then Versailles in the seventeenth and the eighteenth centuries.
In every period of history, the Paris of the upper class and the nobility has had its center, just as the people’s Paris always has its own. This periodic phenomenon offers ample reflection to those who would observe or depict the various social zones, and perhaps any inquiry into the causes of this centralization not only justifies the character of this episode but also serves serious interests, more pressing in the future than in the present, unless experience is as meaningless for the political parties as it is for the young.
In every era, the great lords, and rich people who will always ape the great lords, have kept their houses far from the more crowded parts of town. When the Duc d’Uzès, under the reign of Louis XIV, built his beautiful residence and put a fountain at the door on rue Montmartre—an act of benevolence that made him, in addition to his virtues, the object of such popular veneration that the entire quarter followed his funeral cortege en masse—this corner of Paris was deserted. But as soon as the fortifications came down and the marshes beyond the boulevards were filled with houses, the d’Uzès family left this fine residence, which is occupied in our day by a banker. Then the nobility, out of their element in the midst of shops, abandoned the Place Royale and the center of Paris, and crossed the river in order to breathe at their ease in the Faubourg Saint-Germain, where palaces had already risen around the private residence built by Louis XIV for the Duc du Maine, this favorite among the bastards whom he legitimated. For people accustomed to the splendors of life, is there indeed anything more unseemly than the tumult, the mud, the shouting, the bad smells and narrow streets of the populous quarters? The habits of a trade or manufacturing district are completely at odds with the customs of the great. Commerce and Labor retire to bed just as the aristocracy is about to dine; the shopkeepers and artisans come noisily to life when the nobility and the wealthy have gone to sleep. Their calculations never coincide—the lower classes count their receipts, the nobility spare no expense. As a result, customs and manners are diametrically opposed.
No contempt is implied by this observation. An aristocracy is in a way the intellect of a society, just as the bourgeoisie and the proletariat are its organism and action. It follows that these forces are differently situated, and from their antagonism comes a seeming antipathy produced by the performance of different functions—all, however, for the common good. This social discord is so logically the outcome of every constitutional charter that any liberal inclined to complain about it as an attack against the sublime ideas under which ambitious members of the inferior classes conceal their designs, would find it highly ridiculous for Monsieur le Prince de Montmorency to live on rue Saint-Martin, at the corner of the street that bears his name, or for Monsieur le Duc de Fitz James, descendant of the royal Scots race, to have his private mansion on rue Marie Stuart, at the corner of rue Montorgueil. Sint ut sunt, aut non sint—“Let them be what they are, or let them not be”—these fine pontifical words can serve as a motto for the great of every country.
This social fact is obvious in every era and always accepted by the people; its reasons of state are self-evident: It is at once an effect and a cause, a principle and a law. The common sense of the masses never deserts them except when people of bad faith arouse them. This common sense rests on verities of a general order, as true in Moscow as in London, as true in Geneva as in Calcutta. Everywhere you find families of unequal fortune within a given space, you will see them form classes—patricians first, then the upper classes, and so on below them. Equality may be a right, but no power on earth is capable of converting it into a fact. It would enhance the happiness of France to popularize this thought. The benefits of political harmony are still obvious to the least intelligent masses. Harmony is the poetry of order. And order, reduced to its simplest expression, is the agreement of things: Unity, isn’t that the simplest expression of order? Architecture, music, poetry, everything in France, more than in any other country, is based on this principle; it is inscribed on the foundation of its clear, pure language, and the native tongue will always be the most infallible index of a nation. You see its people, moreover, adopting the most poetic, modulated melodies; attracted to the simplest ideas; preferring supremely thoughtful, incisive motifs. France is the only country where some small phrase could bring about a great revolution. The masses have never rebelled except to bring men, things, and principles into harmony. No other nation has a better idea of the unity that should rule aristocratic life, perhaps because no other has better understood political necessity: History will never find her behindhand. France has often been mistaken, like a woman led astray by generous ideas, by a warmth of enthusiasm that may initially overtake calculation.
So to begin with, the most striking feature of the Faubourg Saint-Germain is the splendor of its mansions, its great gardens and their quiet, once upon a time in keeping with the princely fortunes drawn from its great estates. And this space between one class and the entire capital is but a material embodiment of the distances between ways of life that are bound to keep them apart. The head has its designated place in all creations. If by chance a nation allows its hea
d to fall at its feet, sooner or later it is sure to discover that it has committed suicide. As nations do not want to die, they set to work at once to refashion a head. If they lack the strength for this, they perish, as did Rome, Venice, and so many others.
The distinction between the upper and lower circles of social activity introduced by their different ways of life necessarily implies that among the leading aristocracy, there is real capital value. In any state, under whatever form of government, when the patricians fail to maintain their complete superiority, they weaken and are soon overthrown by the people. The people always want to see money, power, and initiative in their leaders’ hands, hearts, and heads: Their province is speech, intelligence, and glory. Without this triple power, all privilege collapses. Nations, like women, love force in those who rule them, and their love does not flourish without respect; they will not grant their obedience to someone who does not impose himself. An aristocracy fallen into contempt is like a lazy king or a husband in apron strings; it is a nullity on its way to nonexistence.
So the separation of the great, their separate way of life, in brief, the general customs of the patrician caste is at once a sign of real power and the reason for its death as soon as that power is lost. The Faubourg Saint-Germain let itself be laid low, temporarily, for refusing to recognize the obligations of its existence when it was still easy to perpetuate. It should have had the good faith to see in time, as the English aristocracy did, that the institutions have critical turning points—words no longer have the same meaning, ideas take on another guise, and the forms of political life are totally transformed without their foundations being deeply altered. These ideas demand further development, which forms an essential part of this story. They are given here as a definition of causes and an explanation of facts.
The grandeur of the aristocratic châteaus and palaces, the luxury of their details, the unstinting sumptuousness of the furnishings, the atmosphere in which the fortunate owner, born to riches, blithely and confidently moves; the habit of never stooping to calculate the trivial interests of daily existence, the leisure, the higher education required at an early age; in brief, the patrician traditions that give him social powers that his adversaries scarcely offset by their tenacious studies—these things should all lift the spirit of the man who possesses such privileges at an early age and stamp on his character that self-respect whose least consequence is a nobility of heart in harmony with the noble name he bears. This is true for some families. Here and there in the Faubourg Saint-Germain, you encounter persons of fine character, but they are clear exceptions to the rule of general egotism that has caused the ruin of this world apart. These privileges are the birthright of the French aristocracy, as they are of every patrician flowering formed on the surface of nations so long as their existence is based on the estate. The landed estate, like the financial estate, is the only solid foundation of an organized society. But the patricians hold these many advantages only to the extent that they maintain the conditions in which the people grant them. There is a kind of moral fiefdom whose tenure assumes service rendered to the sovereign, and here in France today the sovereign is surely the people. Times have changed, as have weapons. The knight banneret formerly wore a chain-mail tunic and a halberd, could skillfully handle a lance and show his pennant, and that was enough. Today he must prove his intelligence, and while in the old days, all he needed was a great heart, in our day he must have a good head as well. Skill, knowledge, and capital form the social triangle on which the escutcheon of power is inscribed, and it forms the basis of the modern aristocracy today.
A fine theory is as good as a great name. The Rothschilds, those modern Fuggers of the nineteenth century, are princes of deed. A great artist is really an oligarch; he represents an entire century and almost always becomes a law to others. Thus the art of the word, the high-pressure machinery of the writer, the genius of the poet, the merchant’s constancy, the willpower of the statesman that concentrates a thousand dazzling qualities, the general’s sword—the aristocratic class must have a monopoly today on these personal conquests made by a single man over a whole society in order to impose himself, as it formerly had a monopoly on material force. To remain at the head of a country, it must always be worthy of leading it, of being its mind and soul in order to direct its hands. How do you lead a people without having the powers to command? What would the marshal’s baton be without the captain’s innate power to wield it? The Faubourg Saint-Germain played with batons, believing that they were power itself. It reversed the terms of the proposition that called it into existence. Instead of throwing away the insignia that offended people and quietly retaining its power, it allowed the bourgeoisie to seize authority, clung fatally to its insignia, and constantly forgot the laws that its numerical weakness decreed. An aristocracy whose numbers scarcely constitute a small fraction of a society must today, as yesterday, multiply its means of action in order to counterbalance the weight of the popular masses in times of great crisis. In our days, those means of action must be real force and not historical memories.
The nobility in France, unfortunately still so inflated with its former vanished power, faced a kind of presumption against it, which made it difficult to defend itself. Perhaps this is a national defect. The Frenchman is less likely than other men to lower himself, moving only from the step where he finds himself to the next one up. He rarely laments the unhappiness of those over whom he has raised himself, but he always moans to see so much happiness above him. Though he may have a great heart, too often he prefers to listen to his mind. This national instinct pushes the French forward, this vanity wastes their fortunes and rules them as absolutely as the principle of thrift rules the Dutch. It has dominated the nobility for three centuries, which in this respect was preeminently French. The man of the Faubourg Saint-German, observing his material superiority, always concluded that he also possessed superior intellect. Everyone in France confirmed him in this belief, for ever since the establishment of the Faubourg Saint-Germain, the aristocratic revolution that began on the day when the monarchy left Versailles, the Faubourg Saint-Germain has always, with a few exceptions, depended on the power that in France must be based more or less in Faubourg Saint-Germain—hence its defeat in 1830.
In that period, it was like an army operating without a base. It had failed to take advantage of the peace to implant itself in the heart of the nation. It sinned through a lack of education and a total blindness to its larger interests. A certain future was sacrificed to a doubtful present. Perhaps this blunder in policy may be attributed to the following cause. The physical and moral distance that the nobility so keenly maintained between itself and the rest of the nation has had fatal results during the past forty years: sustaining personal feeling by killing caste patriotism. When the French nobility of former times was rich and powerful, gentlemen knew how to choose their leaders in moments of danger and to obey them. As their power waned, they grew undisciplined; and, as in the last days of the Roman Empire, every man wanted to be emperor. Regarding themselves as all equally weak, they believed they were all equally strong. Every family ruined by the Revolution, ruined by laws abolishing the right of primogeniture and forcing them to share their wealth equally among their offspring, thought only of itself instead of the larger family of the nobility. And it seemed to them that if each individual grew rich, the party would be strong. A mistake. Money, too, is merely an outward sign of power. All these families were made up of people who preserved the high traditions of refined manners, true elegance, fine language, noble restraint, and pride in harmony with the life they led; a life filled with petty occupations that become trivial when they are no longer merely accessories but become the center of life. There was a certain intrinsic merit in these families but this was strictly on the surface, leaving them merely a nominal value.
None of these families had the courage to ask themselves: Are we strong enough to wield power? They grabbed at power as the lawyers did in 1830. Instead of actin
g the protector, like a great man, the Faubourg Saint-Germain was as greedy as an upstart. When the most intelligent nation in the world understood that the restored nobility had organized power and the budget to its own profit, it fell mortally ill. The nobility wanted to be an aristocracy when it could only be an oligarchy, two very different systems, which anyone who is clever enough will understand by reading attentively the patronymics of the lords of the Upper House. Of course, the royal government had good intentions, but it constantly forgot that it owed everything to the people, even its happiness, and that France, that capricious woman, must be happy or beaten at whim. If there were more like the Duc de Laval, whose modesty made him worthy of his name, the throne of the elder branch would have been as secure as the House of Hanover today. In 1814, but especially in 1820, the French nobility had to rule over the most enlightened epoch, the most aristocratic bourgeoisie, and the most female country in the world. The Faubourg Saint-Germain could easily have led and amused a middle class in love with art and science and drunk with distinctions. But the petty leaders of this great intellectual era all hated art and science. They did not even know how to present religion in the poetic colors that would have endeared it to the people, although they needed its support. When Lamartine, Lamennais, Montalembert, and several other writers of talent were renewing or expanding religious ideas, gilding them with poetry, those men who were ruining the government made the bitterness of religion felt. Never was a nation more complacent, like an exhausted woman who becomes an easy one; never did power stumble more clumsily; France and woman prefer lapses from virtue.