“Why do you behave so?” said the Marquise de Vandenesse to him one day.
“Are not pearls found in oyster shells?” was the pompous reply.
To someone else, who put a similar question, he answered:
“If I made myself agreeable to everyone, what should I have left for her whom I design to honor supremely?”
Raoul Nathan carries into his intellectual life the irregularity which he has made his badge. Nor is the device misleading: like poor girls, who go out as maids-of-all-work in humble homes, he can turn his hand to anything. He began with serious criticism, but soon became convinced that this was a losing trade. His articles, he said, cost as much as books. The profits of the theatre attracted him, but, incapable of the slow, sustained labor involved in putting anything on the boards, he was driven to ally himself with du Bruel, who worked up his ideas and converted them into light paying pieces with plenty of humor, and composed in view of some particular actor or actress. Between them they unearthed Florine, a popular actress.
Ashamed, however, of this Siamese-like union, Nathan, unaided, brought out at the Théâtre Français a great drama, which fell with all the honors of war amidst salvoes from the artillery of the press. In his youth he had already tried the theatre which represents the fine traditions of the French drama with a splendid romantic play in the style of Pinto, and this at a time when classicism held undisputed sway. The result was that the Odéon became for three nights the scene of such disorder that the piece had to be stopped. The second play, no less than the first, seemed to many people a masterpiece, and it won for him, though only within the select world of judges and connoisseurs, a far higher reputation than the light remunerative pieces at which he worked with others.
“One more such failure,” said Émile Blondet, “and you will be immortal.”
But Nathan, instead of sticking to this arduous path, was driven by stress of poverty to fall back upon more profitable work, such as the production of spectacular pieces or of an eighteenth-century powder and patches vaudeville, and the adaptation of popular novels to the stage. Nevertheless, he was still counted as a man of great ability, whose last word had not yet been heard. He made an excursion also into pure literature and published three novels, not reckoning those which he kept going in the press, like fishes in an aquarium. As often happens, when a writer has stuff in him for only one work, the first of these three was a brilliant success. Its author rashly put it at once in the front rank of his works as an artistic creation, and lost no opportunity of getting it puffed as the “finest book of the period,” the “novel of the century.”
Yet he complained loudly of the exigencies of art, and did as much as any man towards having it accepted as the one standard for all kinds of creative work—painting, sculpture, literature, architecture. He had begun by perpetrating a book of verse, which won him a place in the pleiad of poets of the day, and which contained one obscure poem that was greatly admired. Compelled by straitened circumstances to go on producing, he turned from the theatre to the press, and from the press back to the theatre, breaking up and scattering his powers, but with unshaken confidence in his inspiration. He did not suffer, therefore, from lack of a publisher for his fame, differing in this from certain celebrities, whose nickering flame is kept from extinction by the titles of books still in the future, for which a public will be a more pressing necessity than a new edition.
Nathan kept near to being a genius, and, had destiny crowned his ambition by marching him to the scaffold, he would have been justified in striking his forehead after André de Chénier. The sudden accession to power of a dozen authors, professors, metaphysicians, and historians fired him with emulation, and he regretted not having devoted his pen to politics rather than to literature. He believed himself superior to these upstarts, who had foisted themselves on to the party-machine during the troubles of 1830–3 and whose fortune now filled him with consuming envy. He belonged to the type of man who covets everything and looks on all success as a fraud on himself, who is always stumbling on some luminous track but settles down nowhere, drawing all the while on the tolerance of his neighbors. At this moment he was traveling from Saint-Simonism to Republicanism, which might serve, perhaps, as a stage to Ministerialism. His eye swept every corner for some bone to pick, some safe shelter whence he might bark beyond the reach of kicks, and make himself a terror to the passersby. He had, however, the mortification
