about to appear in several other European languages.
Yet the prosecution was annoying if only for the cost; and just because the accusation seemed ridiculous, I became anxious. I had once tasted prison through contempt of the English Judge Horridge by commenting on the conduct of a case which never came to trial, just because the whole thing was ridiculous. I was punished without a shadow of reason. Now I was to be punished again, just for telling some truths about England and Englishmen in a foreign country. The case, I am told, won't come on for some months, but I dread it most because of the unreason in the charge.
Here for example is a book, La Garconne of Marguerite, which tells of love between men and boys, and girls with girls, yet this book has sold five hundred thousand copies in France, and the author has not been brought before any court except the court of the Legion of Honor. Verlaine, too, the great poet, has given to the world posthumously a book of poems adorned with the lewdest illustrations, and all singing the praise of unnatural vices.
Finally, I have before me a copy of a publisher's circular, issued expressly as from the Libraire du Ministere des Affaires Etrangeres, with the sanction therefore of the Office of Foreign Affairs in Paris, wherein I find exposed for sale at low prices Le Marquis de Sade, Gamiani, Les Memoires de Suzon in French, and The Pearl in English-all frankly pornographic works.
My offense is after all nothing but the description of the normal love of man for woman; and I am to be punished for twenty pages in 400 and for selling thirty or forty volumes in France, every one of which, I believe, has been sold to Englishmen or Americans. My crime is that I have given work to French printers rather than to German or Italian printers. Yet my advocate, Maitre Gassin, tells me that the matter is serious and being pursued with fiendish earnestness.
One fact I must record here. As soon as news of my prosecution got into the press, all the French writers whom I know, notably Barbusse, Morand, Willy Breal, Davray, De Richter, Maurevert, and others, wrote in my favor, expressing their contempt for such persecution. Every French author of note appears to be on my side and all agree with the great phrase of Vauvenargues: 'Ce qui n'offense pas la societe, n'est pas du ressort de la justice' (That which does not offend society, has nothing to do with justice).
But no English or American writer has taken up the cudgels for me or written one word in my defense. Far from that, not a single English or American writer has even considered the book fairly or tried to see any merit in it, and while English journals have usually taken the indecency for admitted, American journals, such as the New York World and the Nation, have covered me with cheap insults. All this, of course, was to be expected. But I may be permitted to believe that the genial conduct of the French writers shows a higher level of understanding and a nobler humanity.
A previous experience substantiates this belief. I was in Paris when Zola published his Nona, which described the life of a courtesan in Paris. The book came as a shock to every reader in the city. Not only did it sell over fifty thousand copies in the first week, but the day after it appeared, everyone who counted had read it and could talk of nothing else.
'This is the limit' was the one remark that went uncontradicted. Not only was the book outspoken, but it was indubitably salacious and unspeakably suggestive and provocative. Serious people at once began to talk of prosecution. And with this in mind I hurried to call on Daudet, Dumas fils and others.
Daudet received me with his usual kindness.
'I regret the book,' he said. 'I am sorry that Zola wrote it; it will give French literature a worse name than it has already in Europe, and, really, the stigma will be deserved. Zola has gone too far this time. I have only glanced at the book, but there are pages in it that are more provocative than the youthful indiscretions of Mirabeau or Gustave Droz.'
'Then you would be in favor of prosecution?' I asked.
'Of course not,' Daudet cried. 'How can you imagine such a thing? Zola is a great writer. He must be allowed license that one would never accord to an ordinary penman. There will be no prosecution. We would all unite against that at once. No ordinary magistrate could sit in judgment on Emile Zola. But I am sorry he published the book. It can only damage his reputation.'
'Yet everybody says that it will add greatly to his bank balance,' I ventured.
Daudet held up his hands.
'Zola assuredly did not care for that aspect of it,' he replied.
Dumas and the others agreed with Daudet, and Nana was left unpursued.
What will be the outcome of the prosecution of my book, I am unable even to guess. I can only abide the issue. Meanwhile I often catch myself reciting what Matthew Arnold called My Last Word:
Let the long contention cease,
Geese are swans and swans are geese;
Let them have it as they will
Thou are tired, best be still.
They out-talked thee, jeered thee, cursed thee, Better men fared thus before thee Fired their ringing shot and passed Hotly charged, though broke at last.
Charge once more and then be dumb;
Let the victors when they come,
When the forts of folly fall
Find thy body by the wall.
Let me now for a moment talk of old age again. I said in my second volume that old age had little to recommend it, but I find a good many authorities against me on the matter.
And many friends have reproached me for the sadness of the last chapter in my previous volume, which I wrote when I was about seventy. A dozen, at least, have written to me, asking me whether there were no consolations peculiar to old age. There may be many, but not for the man who after seventy still feels young. Fortenelle at the age of ninety-five, was asked which were the twenty years of his life that he regretted the most; he replied that he regretted none of them, but that nevertheless the period he would wish to relive, the period in which he had been happiest, was from fifty-five to seventy-five. 'At fifty-five,' he said, 'one's fortune is made; one's reputation established; one is well considered by the many, honored perhaps by the few. Moreover, one sees things as they are; most of one's passions are cooled and calmed; one has reached the goal of one's career; done what one could for society; and one has then fewer enemies, or perhaps one should say fewer envious people, because one's merit is generally recognized.'
Buff on, f too, at seventy years of age, declares that the philosopher can only regard old age as a foolish prejudice; and he goes on to paint a picture of senile pleasures.
'Every day,' he says, 'that I get up in good health, have I not the full enjoyment of the day as much as ever I had? If I order my appetites, my desires, my hopes according to the dictates of wisdom and reason, am I not as happy as I ever could have been; and the thought of the past and its pleasures, which seem to give some regrets to old fools, affords me, on the contrary a joyful memory of charming pictures, precious recollections of pleasurable incidents; and these pictures and memories are free of taint and perfectly pure and bring to the soul only an agreeable emotion. The restlessness, the disappointments, the mistakes which accompany the pleasures of youth have all disappeared in age, and every regret should disappear with them, for what is regret, after all, but the last quiver of that foolish personal vanity which refuses to grow old.'
There is a good deal of truth in all this, but not, as I say about myself, for the man who after seventy still feels young. To him, old age is like poverty; its blessings must be sought in their rarity. Bernard Shaw writes me that he is 'a ruin and that all the pre-seventy in him is dead.' All the pre-seventy and the pre-fifty are nearly as much alive in me as they were twenty years ago. The keenest regret I have is that I haven't money enough to go around the world for the third time and see it all again and tell of the changes which fifty years have shown in it. I should have thought some paper would be willing to pay for my account of this journey, but no one offers to, and my autobiography and my works of the last four or five years have brought me in less than any single year's work of my whole life.
I had no idea, when I determined to write my life frankly, that I should be punished as I have been for my outspokenness. I knew, of course, that most of the foolish and all the envious would declare that I was writing pornography in my old age; they would say 'Harris was always dirty, you know; filthy minded.' I knew the popular verdict beforehand and smiled at it, but I had no idea that this Anglo-Saxon condemnation would injure the sale of
