It’s understandable, let them admire their Emperor’s brilliant qualities. It is possible to have the greatest respect for his intelligence, his circumspection, his high qualities and so forth. You cannot tell such an enthusiastic gentleman before his face that he is a dissembler.
His reply to you would be: “Such is my conviction – and that’s that” – precisely the reply you would get from some of our own journalists. You see, he is quite safe: he has an answer with which to shut your mouth. The freedom of conscience and of conviction is the first and principal freedom. But in this case what reply can he give you? In this case he no longer pays any regard to the laws of reality, he defies probability and does so intentionally.
And why, after all, should he do so intentionally? Surely no one will believe him? The horseman himself is not likely to read it, and even if he does, are the little Frenchman who wrote the correspondence, the newspaper which published it and the newspaper’s editorial board really all too stupid to grasp that their lord and master has not the slightest use for the reputation of being the first horseman of France, that he does not even expect this reputation in his old age and will naturally refuse to believe it if people try to convince him that he is the most expert rider in all France: they say he is an exceptionally intelligent man.
Oh no, there is something else in view here: it may be improbable and ridiculous, the sovereign himself may regard it with disgust and may laugh it to scorn; maybe, maybe, but then he will also see the blind obedience, he will see the infinite obsequiousness – servile, stupid and unreal, but obsequiousness all the same, and that is the main thing.
Think it out for yourselves now: if this were not in the spirit of the nation, if such vulgar flattery were not considered entirely possible and ordinary, entirely natural and decent even, could such an article be published in a Paris newspaper? Where in print will you find such flattery except in France? The reason why I speak of the spirit of the nation is precisely because it is not one paper only that writes in this way, but almost all of them, they are all exactly the same, except two or three which are quite independent.
I remember once sitting in a hotel dining room – not in France that time, in Italy, but there were a number of Frenchmen at my table. At that time everyone was always talking of Garibaldi. This was about a fortnight before Aspromonte.* Naturally people spoke somewhat enigmatically: some kept silent, not wishing to make their meaning absolutely clear, others shook their heads.
The general sense of the conversation was that Garibaldi had started a risky, indeed a rash venture; but this opinion was never stated quite explicitly, because Garibaldi is a man of such different stature to other people that what could in the ordinary way be considered rash might well in his case prove to be reasonable. Gradually the discussion turned to the actual personality of Garibaldi. His qualities were enumerated and the final judgement was rather favourable for the Italian hero.
“Now, there is just one quality in him that amazes me,” exclaimed a
Frenchman loudly. He was a pleasant, impressive-looking man, aged about thirty and with that extraordinary nobility of expression in his face which verges on the impudent and which strikes you in all Frenchmen. “There is just one fact about him which amazes me most of all.”
Everyone, of course, turned to the speaker, their curiosity aroused by his statement.
The quality discovered in Garibaldi was intended to interest everyone.
“For a short time in 1860 he enjoyed unlimited and completely uncontrolled power in Naples. In his hands he held the sum of twenty million francs of public money. He was accountable to no one for that sum. He could have appropriated for himself any amount of it and no one would have held him responsible. He appropriated nothing and handed it all back to the government to the last sou. This is almost incredible!!”
Even his eyes sparkled when he spoke of the twenty million francs.
You can, of course, say what you will about Garibaldi; but to put Garibaldi’s name side by side with common embezzlers of public funds – that obviously only a Frenchman can do.
And how naively, how sincerely he said it! Everything, of course, may be forgiven for the sake of sincerity, even the loss of the capacity to understand and of the feeling for genuinely honourable behaviour; but as I glanced at the face which lit up at the mention of the twenty million francs, the thought quite involuntarily came into my head:
“And what if you, my dear fellow, had held some public office at the time, in place of Garibaldi?”
You will tell me that this again is untrue, that all these are individual cases, that precisely the same sort of thing happens in our own country and that I cannot really speak for Frenchmen. Quite, but I am not, in fact, speaking of all of them. Unutterable nobility of character exists everywhere, while maybe much worse things have occurred in our country. But why, why should this sort of thing be raised up into a virtue? You know what?
One can even be despicable in one’s moral standards, but not lose one’s sense of honour; and in France honest people are very numerous, but they have completely lost their sense of honour, and therefore behave despicably and know not what they do to virtue. The former is, of course, more vicious, but the latter, say what you will, is more contemptible. Such an attitude to virtue bodes no good for the life of a nation. And as to individual cases, I don’t want to argue with you. Even a whole nation consists of nothing but individual cases, does it not?
I even thought as follows: perhaps I was mistaken in saying that the bourgeois tries to shrink back and is still constantly afraid of something. He does shrink back, that is true enough, and he is nervous, but taking it all in all the bourgeois thrives and prospers.
Though he tries to deceive himself and though he constantly tells himself that everything is all right, this does not interfere with his outward self-confidence. Not only that, but even inwardly he is self-confident when he gets going. How all this can exist together within him is indeed a problem, but in fact it does.
In general, the bourgeois is very far from being stupid, but his intelligence is a short-term one somehow, and works by snatches. He has a great many ready-made conceptions stored up, like fuel for the winter, and he seriously intends to live with them for a thousand years, if necessary. However, why mention a thousand years? The bourgeois rarely talks in terms of a thousand years, except perhaps when he waxes eloquent. “Après moi le déluge”* is far more often used and more frequently applied in practice.
And what indifference to everything, what short-lived, empty interests! I had occasion in Paris to visit some people whose house had in my day a constant stream of visitors. They seemed all to be afraid of beginning a conversation about anything unusual, anything which was not petty, and subjects of general interest, you know – social and political problems or something. It could not, in this case, it seems to me, be fear of spies, it was simply that people no longer knew how to speak on the more serious subjects.
There were people among them, however, who were terribly interested to know what impression Paris had made on me, how awe-struck I had been, how amazed, crushed, annihilated. The Frenchman still thinks himself capable of morally crushing and annihilating. This, too, is rather an amusing symptom. I remember particularly one very charming, very polite, very kind old man to whom I took a sincere liking.
He kept his eyes glued on my face as he questioned me on my opinion of Paris and was terribly hurt whenever I failed to express any particular enthusiasm. His kind face even reflected suffering – literally suffering, I am not exaggerating. Oh, dear Monsieur Le M***re! One can never convince a Frenchman, i.e. a Parisian (because at bottom all Frenchmen are Parisians) that he is not the greatest man in the whole wide world. As a matter of fact, he knows very little about the wide world, apart from Paris, and does not want to know either. That’s his national trait and a very characteristic one at that.
But the Frenchman’s most characteristic trait is eloquence. Nothing can extinguish his love of eloquence, which increases more and more as the years go by. I should terribly much like to know when precisely this love of eloquence began in France. Naturally it started mainly at the time of Louis XIV.*
It is a remarkable fact – it is indeed – that everything in France started at the time of Louis XIV. But the most remarkable thing is that in the whole of Europe too, everything started at the time of Louis XIV.
