The confession of a child of the century

Front matter

Chap, No

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UNITED STATES OF AMERICA.

Part First I

To write the history of one’s life, one must first have lived it ; and so it is not my own that I write.

Having been afflicted, while yet young, with an abominable moral malady, I relate what happened to me during three years. If I were the only one sick, I would say nothing about it ; but as there are many others besides myself, who suffer from the same disease, I write for them, while not too sure that they will pay any attention to it ; for, in case no one should take warning therefrom, I shall still have derived this benefit from my words, that I shall have cured myself more effectually, and, like the fox caught in the trap, I shall have gnawed my captive paw.

II

During the wars of the Empire, whilst husbands and brothers were in Germany, uneasy mothers had given birth to an ardent, pale, nervous generation. Conceived between two battles, brought up in the colleges to the beating of drums, thousands of children looked at themselves and one another with a gloomy eye, while trying their puny muscles. From time to time their blood-stained fathers appeared, raised them to their goldbedizened breasts, then put them down again and remounted on horseback.

One man only was then the life of Europe ; all other beings tried to fill their lungs with the air that he had breathed. Each year France made to that man a present of three hundred thousand young men; that was the tax paid to Caesar, and, if he had not that flock supporting him, he could not follow out his fortune. It was the escort that he needed to traverse the world, and to go and perish in a little valley of a desert island, under a weeping willow.

Never were there so many sleepless nights as in that man’s time; never was such a people of disconsolate mothers seen reclining on city ramparts; never was there such silence around those who spoke of death. And yet never was there so much joy, so much life, so much flourishing of war trumpets in every court. Never were there suns so cloudless as those that dried up all that blood. People said that God had made them for that man, and people called them his suns of Austerlitz. But he, indeed, made them himself with his ever thundering cannon, which left clouds only on the morrow of his battles.

It was the air of that spotless sky, in which shone so much glory, in which glittered so much steel, that children then breathed. They knew well that they were destined for the hecatombs; but they regarded Murat as invulnerable, and people had seen the Emperor pass over a bridge amid the whizzing of so many balls that they knew not whether he could die. And even should one have to die, what was that? Death itself was then so beautiful, so grand, so magnificent in its smoking purple ! It so closely resembled hope, it mowed down such green ears, that it was as if it had become young, and that one no longer believed in old age. Every cradle in France was a buckler, and so, also, was every coffin ; verily there were no more old men, there were only corpses or demi-gods.

Yet, one day, the immortal Emperor was to look from a hill at seven peoples cutting one another’s throats; as he did not yet know whether he was to be the master of the world or only of half of it, Azrael passed by the way, he grazed the tip of his wing and thrust him into the ocean. At the splash of his fall, the moribund

IO powers sat up in their beds of suffering, and, reaching out their hooked claws, all the royal spiders cut up Europe, and of Caesar’s purple, made for themselves a Harlequin’s garment.

Just as a traveler, as long as he is on his way, rushes on night and day in rain and in sunshine, regardless of his vigils or of his dangers, but as soon as he has arrived in the bosom of his family and is seated before the fire, feels extremely weary and can scarcely drag himself to bed : so France, as Caesar’s widow, suddenly felt her wound. She fell in a swoon, and slept so deep a sleep that her old kings, believing her dead, enveloped her in a white winding-sheet. The old gray-haired army retired exhausted from fatigue, and the fires were rekindled in sorrow in the deserted chateaus.

Then those men of the empire, who had run so much and cut so many throats, embraced their emaciated wives and spoke of their first loves ; they looked at themselves in the fountains of their natal meadows, and they saw themselves so old, so mutilated, that they recalled their sons, so that one might close their eyes. They asked where they were ; the children left college, and, no longer seeing either sabres, or cuirasses, or infantry, or troopers, they, in their turn, asked where their fathers were. But they received for answer that the war was ended, that Caesar was dead, and that the portraits of Wellington and Bliicher were hung in the ir antechambers of consulates and embassies, with these two words at the bottom : Salvatoribus mundi.

Then a moody youth sat down on a world in ruins. All these children were drops of a boiling blood that had inundated the land ; they were born in the midst of war, for war. They had dreamt for fifteen years of the snows of Moscow and of the sun of the Pyramids. They had not gone out from their cities ; but they had been told that, through each barrier of these cities, one went to a European capital. They had a whole world in their heads ; they looked at earth, sky, streets, and roads; all that was void, and their parish bells alone resounded in the distance.

Dim phantoms, clad in dark robes, slowly traversed the fields ; others knocked at the doors of the houses, and, as soon as these had been opened to them, they drew from their pockets large, well-worn parchments, with which they drove out the inhabitants. From all sides came men still trembling with the fear that had seized them on their departure, twenty years before. All claimed, disputed, and clamored ; people were astonished that a single death could bring so many crows.

The king of France was on his throne, looking here and there lest he might spy a bee in his tapestry. Some extended their hats to him, and he gave them money ; others showed him a crucifix and he kissed it ; others were satisfied with calling great resounding names in his ear, and he replied that they should go into his great hall, that its echoes were sonorous ; still others showed him their old cloaks, as they had thoroughly wiped the bees from them, and to those he gave a new garment.

The children looked upon all that, ever thinking that Caesar’s shade was going to disembark at Cannes and breathe on these larvae ; but silence still continued, and people saw floating in the heavens only the paleness of the lilies. When the children spoke of glory, they were told : “ Become priests ; ’ ’ when they spoke of ambition : “ Become priests ! ”

Meanwhile there mounted to the tribune a man who held in his hand a contract between king and people ; he began to say that glory was a noble thing, and the ambition of war also ; but that there was one thing yet more noble, and its name was Liberty.

The children raised their heads and remembered their grandfathers, who had also spoken of it. They remembered having met, in the dark corners of their father’s house, mysterious marble busts with long hair and a Roman inscription; they remembered having seen of an evening, while sitting up together, their grandmothers shaking their heads and speaking of a river of blood far more terrible than that of the Emperor. In that word Liberty there was for them something that made their hearts beat, something at once like a distant and terrible reminiscence and also like a cherished hope, still more distant.

They bounded as they heard it; but on returning home they saw three baskets being carried to Clamart : 1 they were three young men who had pronounced the word Liberty too loudly.

A strange smile played upon their lips at this sad sight ; but other haranguers, mounting the tribune^ began to calculate publicly what ambition cost and that glory was very dear ; they pointed out the horror of war and spoke of the hecatombs as butcheries. And they spoke so much and so long that all human illusions, like trees in autumn, fell leaf by leaf around them, and that those who listened to them passed their hands over their foreheads like the fever-stricken when waking up.

Some said : “ What caused the Emperor’s fall was that the people wanted no more of him; ” others: “The people wanted the king; no, liberty; no, reason; no, religion ; no, the English constitution ; no, absolutism; ” a last added : “ No, nothing of all that, but rest.”

Three elements, then, shared the life that was at that time presented to the young ; behind them, a past forever destroyed, still quivering on its ruins, with all the fossils of the ages of absolutism ; before them, the dawn of an immense horizon, the first rays of the future ;

and between these two worlds something like the

ocean that separates the old continent from young America, something indescribably vague and wavering, a rolling sea full of wrecks, traversed from time to time by some distant white sail or by some ship puffing a heavy vapor — the present age, in a word, which separates the past from the future, which is neither the one nor the other, and which resembles both at the same time, and in which one knows not, at each step that one takes, whether one is walking on a seedling or on a ruin.

Such was the chaos in which one had then to choose; that it was that presented itself to children full of strength and daring, to the sons of the Empire and to the grandsons of the Revolution.

Now, of the past they wanted no more, for faith in nothing is assured ; the future they loved, but how ! as Pygmalion did Galatea : it was to them as a marble lover, and they waited for her to become animated, for the blood to color her veins.

There remained to them, then, the present, the spirit of the age, an angel of the twilight that is neither night nor day ; they found it seated on a lime-sack filled with bones, enclosed in the mantle of the egoists, and shivering from a terrible cold. The anguish of death entered their soul at the sight of this spectre half mummy, half foetus ; they approached it like the traveler to whom one shows at Strasburg the daughter of an old Comte de Sarvenden, embalmed in her bridal decking : that infantile skeleton makes one shudder, for its spare and livid hands wear the betrothal ring, and its head falls in dust amid orange blossoms.

As on the approach of a storm there passes through the forest a terrible wind that makes all the trees shudder, to which succeeds a deep silence : so Napoleon had shaken everything as he passed over the world ; kings had felt their crowns vacillating, and, raising their hands to their heads, found only their hair, erect from fright. The Pope had journeyed three hundred leagues to bless him in God’s name and to place his diadem on him ; but Napoleon had taken it from his hands. Thus everything had trembled in that dismal forest of old Europe ; then silence had succeeded.

It is said that when one meets a mad dog, if one has the courage to w r alk gravely, without turning back, and in a steady manner, the dog is satisfied with following you for a certain time growling between his teeth; while, if one allows a sign of terror to escape, if one walks too quickly, he throws himself on one and devours one; for, once the first bite is made, there is no way of escaping him.

Now, in the history of Europe it has often happened that a sovereign has shown this sign of terror and that his people have devoured him; but, if one had done so, all had not done it at the same time, that is, a king had disappeared, but not the royal majesty. In the presence of Napoleon the royal majesty had made that gesture which loses all, not only majesty, but religion, nobility, every divine and human power.

Napoleon being dead, the divine and human powers were indeed restored in fact; but belief in them no longer existed. There is a terrible danger in knowing i6 what is possible, for the mind is ever advancing farther. It is one thing to say : “ That might be,” and another : “This has been,” which is the first bite by the dog.

Napoleon, the despot, was the last glimmer of the lamp of despotism ; he destroyed and parodied kings, as Voltaire had done the sacred books. And after him a great noise was heard : it was the rock of St. Helena that had just fallen on the old world. At once appeared in the heavens the glacial star of reason, and its rays, like to those of the cold goddess of night, shedding light without heat, enveloped the world in a livid shroud.

Hitherto, indeed, people had been seen who hated nobles, who declaimed against priests, who conspired against kings; people had indeed raised an outcry against abuses and prejudices ; but it was a great novelty to see the people smiling at it. If a noble, or a priest, or a sovereign passed, the peasants who had made war began to toss the head and say: “Ah ! we have seen that man in due time and place ; he had a different look. ’ ’ And when one spoke of the throne and of the altar, they replied: “They are four wooden staves; we have nailed and unnailed them.” And when one said to them: “People, you have returned from the errors that had led you astray ; you have called for your kings and your priests, ’ ’ they replied : “It was not we, it was those babblers.” And when one said to them : “ People, forget the past, work and obey,” they settled themselves again on their seats, and a dull clatter was heard.

It was a rusty and notched sword that had moved in a corner of the cabin. Then they immediately added: “Be at rest, at least; if they do not injure you, do not try to inflict injury.” Alas! they were satisfied with that.

But the youth were not satisfied with this. Certain it is that there are in man two occult powers that fight to the death : the one, clear-sighted and cold, attaches itself to the reality, calculates it, weighs it, and judges the past ; the other is thirsty for the future and launches into the unknown. When passion carries man away, reason follows him weeping and warning him of the danger ; but as soon as man has stopped at the voice of reason, as soon as he has said to himself : “ True, I am a fool, whither am I going ? ’ ’ passion cries out to him : “And as for me, I, then, am going to die?”

A feeling of inexpressible unrest then began to ferment in all young hearts. Condemned to repose by the sovereigns of the world, given up to vulgar pedantries of all sorts, to laziness and to lassitude, young men saw receding from them the foaming billows against which they had prepared their arms. All these oil-rubbed gladiators felt an unbearable wretchedness in the depths of their souls. The richest became libertines ; those of moderate fortune adopted a calling, and resigned themselves either to the gown or to the sword ; the poorest heedlessly rushed into enthusiasm, into tall talk, into the frightful sea of aimless action. As human weakness i8 seeks association and as men are gregarious by nature, politics became mixed up with them. People went to fight with the body-guards on the steps of the legislative chamber, people rushed to the theatrical performance in which Talma wore a wig that made him look like Caesar, people crowded to the burial of a Liberal deputy. But of the members of both opposing parties there was not one who, on returning home, did not bitterly feel the void of his existence and the poverty of his hands.

Just at the time when public life was so colorless and so mean, the private life of society took on a sombre and silent aspect ; the most rigid hypocrisy reigned in morals; English ideas being added to devotion, even gaiety had disappeared. Perhaps it was Providence that was already preparing its new ways, perhaps it was the courier-angel of future conditions of society who was already sowing in the hearts of women the germs of the human independence that they will one day claim. But it is certain that suddenly, a thing unheard of, in the Paris salons, the men pass down one side and the women the other ; and thus, the one clad in white like brides, the others in black like orphans, they began to gauge each other with their eyes.

Let no one be mistaken about it : this black dress worn by the men of our time is a terrible symbol ; to get to that it was necessary for armor to fall piece by piece and embroidery flower by flower. It is human

*9 reason that has overthrown all illusions; but it wears mourning itself, in order that it may be consoled.

The manners of students and artists, those manners so free, so fine, so full of youth, felt the universal change. Men, by separating from women, had whispered a word that mortally wounds, — contempt. They had flung themselves into wine and into the society of courtesans. Students and artists also flung themselves therein : love was treated like glory and religion ; it was an old illm sion. People went, then, to places of ill-repute; the grisette, that class so dreamy, so romantic, and of a love so tender and so sweet, saw herself abandoned to the shop counters. She was poor, and she was no longer loved; she wanted to have dresses and hats, she sold herself. O misery ! the young man who should have loved her, whom she would have loved herself; he who formerly brought her to the woods of Verrieres and of Romainville, to dances on the grass, to suppers under the leafy shade; he who came to chat at evening under the lamp, at the farther end of the shop, during the long winter evening vigils; he who shared with her her morsel of bread steeped in the sweat of her brow, and her sublime and poor love; he, that same man, after having forsaken her, found her again some evening on an orgie in the inner recesses of a brothel, pale and dull, forever lost, with hunger on her lips and prostitution in her heart !

Now, about that time two poets, the two finest geniuses of the age following that of Napoleon, had just devoted their lives to collecting all the elements of anguish and sorrow scattered through the universe. Goethe, the patriarch of a new literature, after having depicted in Werther the passion that leads to suicide, had traced in his Faust the darkest human figure that ever represented evil and misfortune. His writings then began to pass from Germany into France. From the seclusion of his study, surrounded by paintings and statues, rich, happy, and peaceful, he looked on with a paternal smile at his work of darkness coming to us. Byron answered him with an exclamation of sorrow that made Greece bound, and suspended Manfred over the abyss, as if nothingness had been the solution of the hideous riddle that enveloped him.

Pardon me, O great poets, who » are now but mere ashes resting underground ! pardon me ! you are demi-gods, and I am only a suffering child. But in writing all this, I cannot help cursing you. Why did you not sing the perfume of the flowers, the voices of nature, hope, and love, the vine and the sun, azure and beauty ? No doubt you were acquainted with life, and no doubt you had suffered, and the world crumbled around you, and you wept over its ruins, and you despaired ; and your mistresses had betrayed, and your friends calumniated, and your fellow-countrymen slighted you ; and you had a void in your heart, death in your eyes, and you were of the colossi of sorrow. But tell me, you, noble Goethe, was there no more consoling voice in the religious murmur of your old German forests? You to whom beautiful poesy was the sister of science, could these not of their two selves find in immortal nature a plant salutary to the heart of their favorite? You who were a pantheist, an antique poet of Greece, a lover of sacred forms, could you not put a little honey in those fine vases that you knew how to make, you who had only to smile and to let the bees come upon your lips ? And you, and you, Byron, did you not have near Ravenna, under your Italian orange-trees, under your beautiful Venetian sky, near your dear Adriatic, did you not have your dearly beloved? O God, I who speak to you, and who am only a weak child, I have perhaps known evils that you have not suffered, and yet I believe in hope, and yet I bless God.

When English and German ideas thus passed over our heads, it was as a gloomy and silent disgust, followed by a terrible convulsion. For to formulate general ideas is to change saltpetre into gunpowder, and the Homeric brain of the great Goethe had sucked, alembic-like, all the juices from the forbidden fruit. Those who did not read him, then believed that they knew nothing. Poor creatures ! the explosion carried them away like grains of dust into the abyss of universal doubt.

It was like a denying of all things of heaven and of earth, which one may call disenchantment, or, if one wish, despair; as if humanity in lethargy had been thought dead by those who tried its pulse. Just like that soldier of whom one asked of old: “In what do you believe ?” and who first answered: “In myself;” so the youth of France, hearing this question, first replied: “In nothing.”

From that time there were formed, as it were, two camps : on the one side exalted, suffering minds, all the expansive souls that need the infinite, bent their heads weeping; they enveloped themselves in sickly dreams, and one no longer saw but frail reeds on an ocean of bitterness. On the other side the men of flesh remained erect, inflexible, amid positive enjoyments, and they took no other care than to count the money that they had. It was only a sob and a burst of laughter, the one coming from the soul, the other from the body.

This, then, is what the soul said :

“Alas! alas! religion is going; the clouds of heaven fall in rain ; we no longer have either hope or expectation, not even two little bits of black wood in the form of a cross before which to extend our hands. The star of the future is hardly rising ; it cannot pass the horizon ; it remains enveloped in clouds, and, like the sun in winter, its disk there appears of a blood-red, which it has kept since ’93. There is no more love, there is no more glory. What a thick night on the earth ! And we shall be dead when day shall break.”

This, then, is what the body said :

“Man is here below to make use of his senses; he has more or fewer pieces of white metal, with which he is entitled to more or less esteem. To eat, to drink, and to sleep, is to live ! As for the bonds that exist between men, friendship consists in loaning money ; but it is rare to have a friend whom one can love enough for that. Relationship serves for inheritances; love is an exercise of the body ; the only intellectual enjoyment is vanity. ’ ’

Like to the Asiatic plague exhaled from the vapors of the Ganges, terrible despair was stalking over the earth with giant strides. Already Chateaubriand, a prince of poesy, enveloping the horrible idol with his pilgrim’s cloak, had placed it on a marble altar, amid the perfumes of the sacred censers. Already, full of a henceforth useless strength, the children of the age were stiffening their lazy hands and were drinking the poisoned brewing from their sterile cup. Everything was already spoiling, when the jackals emerged from earth. A cadaverous and infected literature, which had only form, but a hideous form, began to bedew all the monsters of nature with a fetid blood.

Who will ever dare to relate what took place then in the colleges? Men doubted everything: young men denied everything. Poets sang despair: young men left the schools with the brow serene, the visage fresh and ruddy, and blasphemy in their mouths. Moreover, the French character, by nature gay and open, still predominating, the brains were easily filled with English and German ideas ; but the hearts, too light to struggle and to suffer, withered like broken flowers. Thus the principle of death descended coldly and without shock from the head to the entrails. Instead of possessing the enthusiasm of evil, we had only the abnegation of good; instead of despair, insensibility. Children of fifteen, seated carelessly under flowering shrubs, for pastime carried on conversations that would have made the insensible groves of Versailles shudder with horror. The communion of Christ, the Host, that eternal symbol of celestial love, served to seal letters; children spat out God’s bread.

Happy they who escaped those times ! Happy they who passed over the abyss gazing on Heaven ! There were some of them, no doubt, and they will pity us.

It is unfortunately true that there is in blasphemy a great loss of force which comforts the heart that is too full. When an atheist, taking out his watch, gave a quarter of an hour to God to thunder against Him, it is certain that it was a quarter of an hour’s wrath and atrocious enjoyment that he took to himself. It was the paroxysm of despair, a nameless appeal to all the celestial powers; it was a poor and miserable creature turning on the foot that is crushing him; it was a loud cry of pain. And who knows? in the eyes of Him who sees everything it was perhaps a prayer.

Thus young men found a use for inactive force in a liking for despair. Mocking glory, religion, love, everything in the world, is a great consolation to those who know not what to do ; in that they ridicule themselves and justify themselves while repeating the lesson. And then it is sweet to believe one’s self unhappy, when one is only exhausted and tired. Debauchery, besides, the first conclusion from the principles of death, is a terrible millstone when it is a question of becoming enervated.

So the rich said to themselves: “There is nothing true but riches, all the rest is a dream ; let us enjoy and die.” Those of moderate fortune said: “There is nothing true but forgetfulness, all the rest is a dream ; let us forget and die.” And the poor said : “There is nothing true but misfortune, all the rest is a dream ; let us blaspheme and die.”

Is this too black ? is it exaggerated ? What do you think of it? Am I a misanthrope? Let me make a reflection.

In reading the history of the fall of the Roman Empire, it is impossible not to take notice of the evil that the Christians, so admirable in the desert, did to the State as soon as they had the power. “When,” says Montesquieu, “I think of the profound ignorance into which the Greek clergy plunged the laity, I cannot help comparing them to those Scythians of whom Herodotus speaks, who put out the eyes of their slaves, so that nothing could distract them and keep them from their work. No affair of State, no peace, no war, no truce, no negotiation, no marriage, was attended to except by the ministry of the monks. One would not believe what evil resulted therefrom. > ;

Montesquieu might have added . Christianity destroyed the emperors, but it saved the peoples. It opened to the barbarians the palaces of Constantinople, but it opened the cabin doors to the consoling angels of Christ. It was a question, indeed, of the great ones of the earth ! and how interesting the final deathrattles of an empire corrupted even to the very marrow of its bones, the sombre galvanism by means of which tyranny’s skeleton was still agitating over the tomb of Heliogabalus and of Caracalla ! What a fine thing to preserve was the mummy of Rome embalmed with the perfumes of Nero, swathed with the shroud of Tiberius ! It was a question, ye men of politics, of going in search of the poor and of telling them to be at ease ; it was a question of letting worms and moles gnaw the monuments of shame, but yet of taking from the flanks of the mummy a virgin as beautiful as the Mother of the Redeemer, — Hope, the friend of the oppressed.