M. de Cisy, no doubt in order to get information or to make a good impression, broke in with this remark, which he uttered in a mild tone:
“These two men of science are not, then, of the same way of thinking as Voltaire?”
“That fellow! I make you a present of him!”
“How is that? Why, I thought—”
“Oh! no, he did not love the people!”
Then the conversation came down to contemporary events: the Spanish marriages, the dilapidations of Rochefort, the new chapter-house of Saint-Denis, which had led to the taxes being doubled. Nevertheless, according to Sénécal, they were not high enough!
“And why are they paid? My God! to erect the palace for apes at the Museum, to make showy staff-officers parade along our squares, or to maintain a Gothic etiquette amongst the flunkeys of the Château!”
“I have read in the Mode,” said Cisy, “that at the Tuileries ball on the feast of Saint-Ferdinand, everyone was disguised as a miser.”
“How pitiable!” said the Socialist, with a shrug of his shoulders, as if to indicate his disgust.
“And the Museum of Versailles!” exclaimed Pellerin. “Let us talk about it! These idiots have foreshortened a Delacroix and lengthened a Gros! At the Louvre they have so well restored, scratched, and made a jumble of all the canvases, that in ten years probably not one will be left. As for the errors in the catalogue, a German has written a whole volume on the subject. Upon my word, the foreigners are laughing at us.”
“Yes, we are the laughingstock of Europe,” said Sénécal.
“ ’Tis because Art is conveyed in fee-simple to the Crown.”
“As long as you haven’t universal suffrage—”
“Allow me!”—for the artist, having been rejected at every salon for the last twenty years, was filled with rage against Power.
“Ah! let them not bother us! As for me, I ask for nothing. Only the Chambers ought to pass enactments in the interests of Art. A chair of aesthetics should be established with a professor who, being a practical man as well as a philosopher, would succeed, I hope, in grouping the multitude. You would do well, Hussonnet, to touch on this matter with a word or two in your newspaper?”
“Are the newspapers free? are we ourselves free?” said Deslauriers in an angry tone. “When one reflects that there might be as many as twenty-eight different formalities to set up a boat on the river, it makes me feel a longing to go and live amongst the cannibals! The Government is eating us up. Everything belongs to it—philosophy, law, the arts, the very air of heaven; and France, bereft of all energy, lies under the boot of the gendarme and the cassock of the devil-dodger with the death-rattle in her throat!”
The future Mirabeau thus poured out his bile in abundance. Finally he took his glass in his right hand, raised it, and with his other arm akimbo, and his eyes flashing:
“I drink to the utter destruction of the existing order of things—that is to say, of everything included in the words Privilege, Monopoly, Regulation, Hierarchy, Authority, State!”—and in a louder voice—“which I would like to smash as I do this!” dashing on the table the beautiful wineglass, which broke into a thousand pieces.
They all applauded, and especially Dussardier.
The spectacle of injustices made his heart leap up with indignation. Everything that wore a beard claimed his sympathy. He was one of those persons who fling themselves under vehicles to relieve the horses who have fallen. His erudition was limited to two works, one entitled Crimes of Kings, and the other Mysteries of the Vatican. He had listened to the advocate with open-mouthed delight. At length, unable to stand it any longer:
“For my part, the thing I blame Louis Philippe for is abandoning the Poles!”
“One moment!” said Hussonnet. “In the first place, Poland has no existence; ’tis an invention of Lafayette! The Poles, as a general rule, all belong to the Faubourg Saint-Marceau, the real ones having been drowned with Poniatowski.” In short, “he no longer gave into it;” he had “got over all that sort of thing; it was just like the sea-serpent, the revocation of the Edict of Nantes, and that antiquated humbug about the Saint-Bartholomew massacre!”
Sénécal, while he did not defend the Poles, extolled the latest remarks made by the men of letters. The Popes had been calumniated, inasmuch as they, at any rate, defended the people, and he called the League “the aurora of Democracy, a great movement in the direction of equality as opposed to the individualism of Protestants.”
Frederick was a little surprised at these views. They probably bored Cisy, for he changed the conversation to the tableaux vivants at the Gymnase, which at that time attracted a great number of people.
Sénécal regarded them with disfavour. Such exhibitions corrupted the daughters of the proletariat. Then, it was noticeable that they went in for a display of shameless luxury. Therefore, he approved of the conduct of the Bavarian students who insulted Lola Montès. In imitation of Rousseau, he showed more esteem for the wife of a coal-porter than for the mistress of a king.
“You don’t appreciate dainties,” retorted Hussonnet in a majestic tone. And he took up the championship of ladies of this class in order to praise Rosanette. Then, as he happened to make an allusion to the ball at her house and to Arnoux’s costume, Pellerin remarked:
“People maintain that he is becoming shaky?”
The picture-dealer had just been engaged in a lawsuit with reference to his grounds at Belleville, and he was actually in a kaolin company in Lower Brittany with other rogues of the same sort.
Dussardier knew more about him, for his own master, M. Moussinot, having made enquiries about Arnoux from the banker, Oscar Lefébvre, the latter had said in reply that he considered him by no means solvent, as he knew about bills of his that had been renewed.
The dessert was over; they passed into the drawing-room, which was hung, like that of the Maréchale, in yellow
