They did not feel any more warmly towards Protestant society; it is frigid, stuck up, gives money only to its own poor, and is exclusively composed of pastors. Protestant churches look too much like their homes, and their homes are as gloomy as their churches. They always have a pastor round for lunch; the servants remonstrate with their masters by quoting chapter and verse from the Bible; they are too afraid of gaiety to have anything to hide, and when conversing with Catholics they keep alluding to their perpetual grudge over the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes and the Massacre of St Bartholomew.*
The world of the arts, while just as homogeneous, is quite different; every artist is a practical joker who has quarrelled with his family, never wears a top hat and speaks a special language. They spend their lives dodging the bailiffs who come to distrain their goods, and inventing grotesque disguises for masked balls.
Nonetheless, they produce a constant stream of masterpieces, and for most of them the abuse of alcohol and women is the very condition of their inspiration, if not of their genius; they sleep during the day, go out for a walk at night, work Heaven knows when, with their heads thrown back, letting their loosely knotted cravats float in the wind while they perpetually roll cigarettes.
The world of the theatre is hardly distinguishable from the world of artists; family life is never paid its proper respect; theatre people are eccentric and inexhaustibly generous. Actors, despite being vain and jealous, always help out their comrades, applaud their successes, adopt the children of actresses suffering from tuberculosis or misfortune, and are inclined to be affected in society, even though, never having received any education, they are often devout and always superstitious.
Those who work in the subsidized theatres are a case apart, entirely worthy of our admiration, and they would deserve to be seated at table before a general or a prince; their souls are filled with the sentiments expressed in the masterpieces they perform in our great playhouses. Their memories are prodigious and they are always immaculately turned out.
As for the Jews, Bouvard and Pécuchet, without entirely proscribing them (you have to be a liberal, after all), admitted that they hated finding themselves in their company; they had all sold pince-nez in Germany in their youth, and even in Paris they insisted on preserving – with a piety which, as impartial spectators, our heroes handsomely acknowledged – special practices, an unintelligible vocabulary and butchers from their own race.
They all have hooked noses, an exceptional intelligence and base souls intent only on seeking their own advantage; their women, on the other hand, are beautiful, a little on the flabby side, but capable of the deepest feelings. How many Catholics ought to imitate them! But why are their fortunes always incalculable and hidden? In addition, they formed a sort of vast secret society, like the Jesuits and the Freemasons. They had inexhaustible treasures stowed away, nobody knew where, at the service of unspecified enemies, always available for some terrible and mysterious purpose.
2
Music
Already tired of cycling and painting, Bouvard and Pécuchet set out to make a serious study of music. But whereas Pécuchet, that eternal friend of tradition and order, allowed himself to be hailed as the last devotee of bawdy songs and the Domino noir,* Bouvard, a revolutionary if ever there was one, showed himself to be, we have to confess, “a staunch Wagnerian”. In point of fact, he did not know a single score by the “Berlin bawler” (as Pécuchet, always patriotic and ill-informed, cruelly nicknamed him),* since they could not be heard in France, where the Conservatory stagnates in its routine, between Colonne who stammers and Lamoureux* who stutters, nor in Munich, where the tradition has not been preserved, nor in Bayreuth, which has been overrun by snobs to an intolerable degree. It’s nonsensical to try and play them on the piano: the illusion of the stage is necessary, as is putting the orchestra in a buried pit and insisting on darkness in the auditorium. However, always on view to make visitors reel with surprise, the prelude to Parsifal* lay permanently open on the music stand of his piano, between the photographs of César Franck’s penholder and the Primavera of Botticelli.
From the score of The Valkyrie, the “spring scene” had been carefully ripped out. In the table of contents of Wagner’s operas, on the first page, an indignant stroke of red pencil had struck out Lohengrin and Tannhäuser. Rienzi alone of the first operas still survived. To deny its merits was commonplace, and the time had come – Bouvard sensed with his subtle flair – to start promoting the opposite view. Gounod made him laugh, and Verdi made him scream. He was less good, admittedly, than Erik Satie* – who could deny it? Beethoven, however, seemed to him as considerable a figure as some Messiah. Bouvard himself could, without undue false modesty, salute Bach as a precursor. Saint-Saëns has no content and Massenet* no form, he kept saying to Pécuchet, in whose eyes, on the contrary, Saint-Saëns was all content and Massenet all form.
“That’s the reason why the one educates us and the other delights us, but without elevating us,” insisted Pécuchet.
For Bouvard, both of them were equally contemptible. Massenet could come up with a few ideas, but they were vulgar ones – anyway, we’ve had quite enough of ideas. Saint-Saëns had some sense of shape, but it was old-fashioned. They did not know very much about Gaston Lemaire, but they enjoyed making comparisons from time to time, and so they eloquently contrasted Chausson with Chaminade.* Pécuchet, in any case, despite the reticence dictated by his aesthetic code, and even Bouvard himself (for every Frenchman is chivalrous and always puts women first) gallantly awarded to the latter the first place among the composers of the day.
In Bouvard, it was the democrat even more than the musician who condemned the music of Charles Levadé; lingering over the poetry of Mme de Girardin* in the century of steam, universal suffrage and the bicycle is surely tantamount to opposing progress? In any case, since he was a proponent of art for art’s sake, of playing without nuance and singing without inflexion, Bouvard declared that he could not bear to hear him sing. He found that he looked like a musketeer, with mockingly flamboyant manners and the facile elegance of a superannuated sentimentality.
But the subject of their liveliest debates was Reynaldo Hahn.* While his close friendship with Massenet, bringing the cruel and unremitting sarcasm of Bouvard down on his head, also marked him out as a prey to the passionate predilections of Pécuchet, he nonetheless contrived to exasperate the latter through his admiration for Verlaine, an admiration which Bouvard shared. “Set Jacques Normand to music, or Sully Prudhomme, or the Vicomte de Borelli!*
Thank God, in the land of the troubadours, there is no lack of poets,” he would add patriotically. And, torn between the Teutonic sonorities of the name of Hahn and the southern ending of his first name Reynaldo, preferring to condemn him out of hatred for Wagner rather than to absolve him because of Verdi, he would conclude, with perfect logic, as he turned to Bouvard:
“Despite the effort of all your fine gentlemen, our lovely land of France is a land of clarity, and French music will be clear or will not be at all,” whereupon he emphasized his verdict by banging on the table to give extra force to his words.
“I pour scorn on your eccentricities from beyond the English Channel and your mists from beyond the Rhine – stop looking to the other side of the Vosges!” he added, gazing at Bouvard with a stern and fixed expression filled with unspoken implications – “Unless it is for the defence of our fatherland! That the Valkyrie can ever give pleasure even in Germany, I very much doubt… But for French ears, it will always be the most infernal torment – and the most cacophonous, not to say the most humiliating for our national pride! Anyway, doesn’t that opera combine the most revolting kind of incest with the most atrocious forms of dissonance?
Your music, Monsieur, is full of monsters, and you never know what people will dream up next! Even in nature – even though she is the mother of simplicity – only what is horrible gives you any pleasure. Doesn’t Monsieur Delafosse* write songs about bats, in which the composer’s extravagance is bound to compromise the pianist’s long-standing reputation? Why couldn’t he choose some nice little bird?
Songs about sparrows would at least be perfectly Parisian; the swallow has lightness and grace, and the lark is so thoroughly French that Caesar, they say, had his soldiers roast them and stick them on their helmets. But bats!!! The French, always athirst for openness and clarity, will always detest that animal of darkness. In the poetry of Monsieur de Montesquiou, maybe… we can just about allow him that: it’s the whim of a rather blasé grand seigneur – but in music! It won’t
