Les Misérables by Victor Hugo
CHAPTER III—REQUIESCANT
2240 words | Chapter 247
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,
Noé, Lévis,—which was pronounced Lévi,—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 pseudonym 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 Chévalier 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 Abbé 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 Abbé Letourneur,
preacher to the King, the Abbé 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 Abbé Keravenant, Curé of
Saint-Germain-des-Prés; 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 Encyclopædia, 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, Abbé, 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 Père Duchêne. 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
régime 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 Générale. Madame la
Colonelle_ was not entirely disused. The charming Madame de Léon, in
memory, no doubt, of the Duchesses de Longueville and de Chevreuse,
preferred this appellation to her title of Princesse. The Marquise de
Créquy 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 elapsed 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 _emigrée_ 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 altar; 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 Villèle, 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 Fiévée. 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
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