The writer of fables paid a polite call upon Rabbe; they shook hands and all was forgotten.
However, the Phocéen had been suspended the very day its chief editor was arrested. Rabbe was set free after a narrow escape of being assassinated by those terrible Marseillais Royalists who, during the early years of the Restoration, left behind them such wide traces of bloodshed. He went to Paris, where his two friends, Thiers and Mignet, had already won a high position in the hôtels of Laffite and of Talleyrand. If Rabbe had preserved the features of Apollo and the form of Antinous, he would have won all Parisian society by his charm of manner and his delightful winning mental attainments; but his mirror condemned him to seclusion more than ever. His sole, his only, friend was his pipe; Rabbe smoked incessantly. We have read the magnificent prose ode he addressed to his dagger; let us see how, in another style, he spoke to his pipe, or, rather, of his pipe.
MA PIPE
"Young man, light my pipe; light it and give it to me, so that I can chase away a little of the weariness of living, and give myself up to forgetfulness of everything, whilst this imbecile people, eager after gross emotions, hastens its steps towards the pompous ceremony of the Sacred-Heart in opulent and superstitious Marseilles.
"I myself hate the multitude and its stupid excitement; I hate these fairs either sacred or profane, these festivals with all their cheating games, at the cost of which an unlucky people consents readily to forget the ills which overwhelm it; I hate these signs of servile respect which the duped crowd lavishes on those who deceive and oppress it; I hate that worship of error which absolves crime, afflicts innocence and drives the fanatic to murder by its inhuman doctrines of exclusiveness!
"Let us forgive the dupes! All those who go to these festivals are promised pleasure. Unfortunate human beings! We pursue this alluring phantom along all kinds of roads. To be elsewhere than one is, to change place and affections, to leave the supportable for worse, to go after novelty upon novelty, to obtain one more sensation, to grow old, burdened with unsatisfied desires, to die finally without having lived, such is our destiny!
"What do I myself look for at the bottom of thy little bowl, O my pipe! Like an alchemist, I am searching how to transmute the woes of the present into fleeting delights; I inhale thy smoke with hurried draughts in order to carry happy confusion to my brain, a quick delirium, that is preferable to cold reflection; I seek for sweet oblivion from what is, for the dream of what is not, and even for that which cannot be.
"Thou makest me pay dear for thy easy consolations; the brain is possibly consumed and weakened by the daily repetition of these disordered emotions. Thought becomes idle, and the imagination runs riot from the habit of depicting such wandering agreeable fictions.
"The pipe is the touch-stone of the nerves, the true dynamometer of slender tissues. Young people who conceal a delicate and feminine organisation beneath a man's clothing do not smoke, for they dread cruel convulsions, and, what would be still more cruel, the loss of the favours of Venus. Smoke, on the contrary, unhappy lovers, ardent and restless spirits tormented with the weight of your thoughts.
"The savants of Germany keep a pipe on their desks; it is through the waves of tobacco smoke that they search after truths of the intellectual and the spiritual order. That is why their works, always a little nebulous, exceed the reach of our French philosophers, whom fashion, and the salons, compel to inhale more urbane and gracious perfumes.
"When Karl Sand, the delegate of the Muses of Erlangen, came to Kotzebue's house, the old man, before joining him, had him presented with coffee and a pipe. This token of touching hospitality did not in the least disarm the dauntless young man: a tear moistened his eyelid; but he persisted. Why? He sacrificed himself for liberty!
"The unhappy man works during the day; and, at night, his bread earned, with arms folded, before his tumble-down doorway, with the smoke of his pipe he drives away the few remaining thoughts that the repose of his limbs may leave him.
"O my pipe! what good things I owe to thee! If an importunate person, a foolish talker, a despicable fanatic, comes and addresses me, I quickly draw a cigar from my case and begin to smoke, and, henceforth, if I am condemned to the affliction of listening, I at least escape the penalty of replying to him. At intervals, a bitter smile compresses my lips, and the fool flatters himself that I approve him! He attributes to the effect of the rash cigar the equivocal heed I pay to his babble.... He redoubles his loquacity; but, stifled by his impertinence, I suddenly emit the clouds of thick smoke which I have collected in my mouth, like the scorn within my breast.
"I exhale both at once, burning vapour and repressed indignation. Oh! how nauseating is the idiocy of others to him who is already out of love with, and wearied of, his own burdens!... I smother him with smoke! If only I could asphyxiate the fool with the lava from my tiny volcano!
"But when a friend who is lovable alike in mind and heart comes to me, the pleasure of the pipe quickens the happiness of the meeting. After the first talk, which rapidly flows along, whilst the lighted punch scatters the spirituous particles which abound in the sparkling flame of the liqueur, the glasses clink together: Friend, from this day and for a year hence, let us drain the brotherly cup under the happiest auspices!
"Then we light two cigars, just alike; incited by my friend to talk on a thousand different topics, I often let mine go out, and he gives me a light again from his own.... I am like an old husband who relights a score of times from the lips of a young beauty the flame of his passion, as impotent as many times over. O my friend! when, then, will happier days shine forth?
"Tell me, my friend, in those parts from whence thou comest, are men filled with hope and courage? Do they keep constant and faithful to the worship of our great goddess, Liberty? ... Tell me, if thou knowest, how long we must still chafe at the humiliating bit which condemns us to silence?...
"How it hinders me from flinging down my part of servitude! How it delays me from seeing the vain titles of tyranny, which oppress us, reduced to powder; from seeing the ashes of a dishonoured diadem scattered at the breath of patriots as the ashes of my pipe are scattered by mine! My soul is weary of waiting, friend; I warn thee, and with horror I meditate upon the doings of such sad waywardness. See how this people, roused wholly by the infamous sect of Loyola, rushes to fling itself before their strange processions! Young and old, men and women, all hasten to receive their hypocritical and futile benedictions! The fools! if the plague passed under a canopy they would run to see it pass by and kneel before it! Tell me, friend, is such a people fit for liberty? Is it not rather condemned to grow old and still be kept in the infantine swaddling clothes of a two-fold bondage?
"Men are still but children. Nevertheless, the human race increases and goes on progressing continually, and meanwhile stretches its bonds till they break. The time draws near when it will no longer listen to the lame man who calls upon it to stop, when it will no longer ask its way of the blind. May the world become enlightened! God desires it!... And we, my friend, we will smoke whilst we watch for the coming dawn. Happily, friend, liberty has her secrets, her resources. This people, which seems to us for ever brutalised, is, however, educating itself and every day becomes more enlightened! Friend, we will forgive the slaves for running after distractions; we will bear with the immodest mother who prides herself that her daughters will pass for virgins when they have been blessed. We will not be surprised that old scoundrels hope to sweat out the seeds of their crimes, exhausting themselves to carry despicable images.
"O my pipe! every day do I owe thee that expressive emblem of humility which religion only places once a year on the brow of the adoring Christian: Man is but dust and ashes.... That, in fact, is all which remains at the last of the tenderest or most magnanimous heart, of hearts over-intoxicated with joy or pride, or those consumed with the bitterest pains.
"These small remnants of men, these ashes, the lightest zephyr scatter into the empty air.... Where, then, is the dust of Alexander, where the ashes of Gengis? They are nothing more than vain historic phantoms; those great subduers of nations, those terrible oppressors of men, what are they but fine-sounding names, objects of vain enthusiasm or of useless malediction!
"I, too, shall soon perish; all that makes up my being, my very name, will disappear like light smoke.... In a few days' time, perhaps at the very spot where I now write, it will not even be known that I have ever existed.... Now, does something imperishable breathe forth and rise up on high from this perishable body? Does there dwell in man one spark worthy to light the calumet of the angels upon the pavements of the heavens?... O my pipe! chase away, banish this ambitious and baneful desire after the unknown and the impenetrable!"
We may be mistaken, but it seems to us that one would search in vain for anything more melancholy in Werther or more bitter in Don Juan, than the pages we have just read.
[CHAPTER X]
Rabbe's friends—La Sœur grise—The historical résumés—M. Brézé's advice—An imaginative man—Berruyer's style—Rabbe with his hairdresser, his concierge and confectioner—La Sœur grise stolen—Le Centaure.