Bouvard, more of a sceptic, saw their obsession with titles as merely a more recent fad, but one just as respectable as that of the great lords of old. In any case, in their opinion, the nobility had ceased to exist ever since it had lost its privileges. The nobility supports the clergy, is backward, doesn’t read books, does nothing, just has a good time, just as the bourgeoisie does; they found it absurd to respect it. It was only possible to frequent it because you could still express your contempt while doing so.
Bouvard declared that in order to know where they would pay their social calls, to which suburbs they would venture once a year, and where the arenas of their habits and vices would be located, they first of all needed to draw up an exact plan of Parisian society. It included, in his view, the Faubourg Saint-Germain, the world of finance, that of foreign parvenus, Protestant society, the world of the arts and the theatre, and the official and scholarly world.
The Faubourg, in Pécuchet’s view, concealed beneath its rigid exterior all the libertinage of the Ancien Régime. Every noble has mistresses and a sister who is a nun, and conspires with the clergy. They are brave, run up debts, ruin and abuse moneylenders, and are inevitably the champions of honour. They reign through their elegance, invent extravagant fashions, are exemplary sons, affectionate towards the common people, and hard on bankers. They always have a sword in their hand, or a woman riding behind them; they dream of the restoration of the monarchy, and are dreadfully lazy, but not haughty with ordinary folk; they cause traitors to flee and they insult cowards, and they deserve, thanks to a certain chivalric aura, our unwavering affection.
On the other hand, high finance, dignified and dour, inspires respect but also aversion. The financier is consumed by worries even at the wildest ball. One of his countless clerks is always turning up to bring him the latest news from the Stock Exchange, even at four in the morning; he hides his greatest triumphs and his worst disasters from his wife. No one even knows if he is a potentate or a crook; he is both of them in turn, quite unpredictably, and in spite of his vast fortune, he pitilessly throws out his small tenant when the latter gets behind with his rent, not even giving him an extension unless he wants to use him as a spy or sleep with his daughter. In any case, he is always in his carriage, dresses without elegance and habitually wears a pince-nez.
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
