My career as a litterateur began the next day, and I received a short editorial summons from the office of “La Tempête” to furnish a feuilleton of a hundred and twenty-four lines; the postscript adding that as Admiral Du Guesclin had just arrived from Macao, some “esquisses des moeurs Chinoises” would be well timed. Of China I only knew what a lacquered tea-tray and the willow pattern could teach me; but I set to work at once, and by assuming my sketches to be personal adventures and experiences, made up a most imposing account of Chinese domesticity.
The article had an immense success: the air of veracity was perfect; and the very officers of the fleet were so deluded by the imposition as to believe they must have frequently met me at Shang-kee-shing or Fong-wong-loo.
Thus was I launched into a career, of all others the most amusing, the most exciting, and, I must also add, the most dissipated. Living apart from all mankind in a little circle of our own, where we only recognized the world as we ourselves were pleased to paint it, our whole lives were one long scoff and sneer at everybody and everything. Friendship meant the habit of meeting at dinner; the highest nobility of soul was his who paid the reckoning.
If there was little actual happiness among us, there was certainly no care nor any touch of sorrow. A great picture condemned, a poem cut to pieces, a play hissed off, only suggested a “souper de consolation,” when the unlucky author would be the first to cut jokes upon his own failure, and ridicule the offspring of his own brains. Who could look for sympathy where men had no feeling for themselves? Even thieves, the proverb tells us, observe “honor” with each other; but we were worse than thieves, since we actually lived and grew fat upon each other's mishaps. If one exhibited a statue at the Louvre, another was sure to caricature it for the Passage de l'Opéra. If one brought out a grand drama at the Français, a burlesque was certain to follow it at the Palais-Royal. Every little trait that near intercourse and familiarity discloses, every weakness that is laid bare in the freedom of friendly association, were made venal, and worth so much a line for “Le Voleur” or “L'Espion.”
As to any sulking, or dreaming of resenting these infractions, he might as well try to repress the free-and-easy habits of a midshipman's berth. They were the “masonry of the craft,” which each tacitly subscribed to when he entered it.
All intercourse was completely gladiatorial, not for display, but for defence. Everlasting badinage on every subject and on everybody was the order of each day; and as success was to the full as much quizzed as failure, any exhibition of vanity or self-gratulation met a heavy retribution. Woe unto him whose romance went through three editions in a fortnight, or whom the audience called for at the conclusion of his drama!
As for the fairer portion of our guild, being for the most part ostracized in general society, they bore a grudge against their sex, and affected a thousand airs of mannishness. Some always dressed in male attire; many sported little moustaches and chin-tufts, rode man-fashion in the Bois de Boulogne, fought duels; and all smoked. Like other converts, they went farther in their faith than the old believers, and talked Communism, Socialism, and Saint Simonianism, with a freedom that rose high above all the little prejudices ordinary life fosters.
If great crimes, such as shock the world by their enormity, were quite unknown among us, all the vices practicable within the Law and the Code Napoléon were widely popular; and the worst of it all was, none seemed to have the remotest conception that he was not the beau-ideal of morality. The simple fact was, we assumed a very low standard of right, and chose to walk even under that.
With Paris and all its varied forms of life I soon became perfectly familiar,—not merely that city which occupies the Faubourg St. Honoré, or St. Germain, not the Paris of the Boulevards or the Palais-Royal only, but with Quartier St. Denis, the Batignolles, the Cité, and the Pays Latin. I knew every dialect, from the slang of fashion to the conventional language of its lowest populace. I heard every rumor, from the cabinet of the Minister down to the latest gossip of the “Coulisses:” what the world said and thought, in each of its varying and dissimilar sections; how each political move was judged; what was the public feeling for this or that measure; how the “many-headed” were satisfied or dissatisfied, whether with the measures of the Ministry, or the legs of the new danseuse; and thus I became the very perfection of a feuilletoniste. There is but one secret in this species of literature,—the ever-watchful observation of the public; and when it is considered that this is a Parisian public, the task is not quite so easy as some would deem it. This watchfulness, and a certain hardihood that never shrinks from any theme, however sacred to the conventional reserves of the general world, are all the requisites.
I have said it was a most amusing life; and if eternal excitement, if the onward rush of new emotions, the never-ceasing flow of stimulating thoughts, could have sufficed for happiness, I might have been, and ought to have been, contented. Still, the whole was unreal. Not only was the world we had made for ourselves unreal, but all our judgments, all our speculations, our hopes, fears, anticipations, our very likings and dislikings! Our antipathies were mock, and what we denounced with all the pretended seriousness of heartfelt conviction in one journal, we not unfrequently pronounced to be a heaven-sent blessing in another. Bravos of the pen, we had no other principle than our pay, and were utterly indifferent at whom we struck, even though the blow should prove fatal. That we should become sceptical on every subject; that we should cease to bestow credence on anything, believing that all around was false, hypocritical, and unreal as ourselves, was natural enough; but this frame of mind bears its own weighty retribution, and not even the miserable victim of superstitious fear dreads solitude like him whose mind demands the constant stimulant of intercourse, the torrent of new ideas, that whirls him along, unreflecting and unthinking.