Frequent mention has already been made of Petrus Borel, whose simple home was long the headquarters of Victor Hugo's young friends. Borel was both artist and author; he painted in Dévéria's studio and wrote defiant poems under the nom de plume of "Le Lycanthrope." He inspired the others with great respect. In appearance he resembled a Spaniard or Arab of the fifteenth century; and when his comrades returned from the theatre after seeing Firmin (an actor accustomed to the rôles in Delavigne's and Scribe's plays) play Hernani, they always lamented that the part of that ideal bandit could not be given to Petrus. He would have swooped down on the stage like a falcon; and how magnificent he would have looked in the red head-covering and the leather jerkin with the green sleeves. Naturally he would, for he and such as he were the spiritual prototypes of Hernani.
Rapsodies, Borel's volume of poems, is a very youthful and immature work; it contains some really fine poetry mixed up with childish protests and imprecations. One thing it proves, that no prouder heart than its author's beat in the whole Romantic group. His verses breathe the despair engendered by poverty, the loneliness, the ardent love of liberty and consuming thirst for justice, which fill the poet's heart. Read such a verse as the following, taken from the poem "Désespoir":
"Comme une louve ayant fait chasse vaine,
Grinçant les dents, s'en va par le chemin;
Je vais, hagard, tout chargé de ma peine,
Seul avec moi, nulle main dans ma main;
Pas une voix qui me dise: À demain."
and you have the reality of the emotional life which Dumas put on the stage in Antony. Even the get-up of the book is significant. The frontispiece represents Borel himself sitting at his table with bared neck and arms, a Phrygian cap on his head, and in his hands a broad-bladed dagger, at which he is gazing, deep in thought. The preface gives us a vivid impression of the tone prevailing in the republican group of young Romanticists in 1832. In it Borel writes:
"I answer the question before it is asked, and say frankly: Yes, I am a Republican! Ask the Duke of Orleans (the King) if he remembers the voice that pursued him on the 9th of August, when he was on his way to take the oath to the ex-Chamber, shouting into his face: Liberté et Republique! while the deceived populace was cheering loudly?... But if I speak of Republic it is only because this word represents to me the greatest possible degree of independence which society and civilisation permit. I am a Republican because I cannot be a Caribbean. I require an immense amount of liberty ... and a man with a lot like mine, a man irritated by numberless evils, would deserve only approbation if he dreamed of absolute equality, if he demanded an agrarian law.... To those who say that there is something offensively vulgar about the book I reply that its author is certainly not the King's bedmaker. Is he not, nevertheless, on the level of an age in which the country is governed by stupid bankers and by a monarch whose motto is: 'Dieu soit loué et mes boutiques aussi?'"
It is hardly necessary to mention that rapid promotion did not come the way of a young man who wrote in this style. Borel lived in great poverty; he knew what starvation meant, and more than once, without a roof to cover his head, was driven to seek shelter for the night in some half-finished building. His youthful hatred of wrong was also detrimental to him as an author. In his two-volume novel, Madame Putiphar, the character of the heroine, Madame Pompadour, is distorted by the writer's republican indignation and aversion. The dissolute, art-loving Muse of the rococo period, who had a frivolous little leaning to free thought, who patronised the Encyclopedists, and took lessons in etching from Boucher, is transformed into a Megæra, who throws herself at the head of a strange man, and when he refuses to have anything to do with her, punishes him for his indifference with imprisonment in an underground cell of the Bastille. Towards the end the book improves. The storming of the Bastille, a subject which suited Borel's pen, is described in a vivid, fiery style which reeks of gunpowder.
His third book, Champavert, Contes immoraux, was published in 1833. It attracted no attention, and he made nothing by it—an injustice of fate which is not altogether incomprehensible, seeing that several of the stories are written in their author's earliest, unpleasantly ferocious style. But in the best of them the indignation is mastered, is treated artistically, as lava is treated by the cameo-cutter. All the tales deal with horrors, with deeds which, precisely because they are so frightful and unmentionable, are possible, since no criminal escapes punishment so easily as he who has committed a crime in which no one will believe. And they are such horrors as fiction seldom deals with, since one of the author's main aims generally is to produce a saleable book, if possible one suited for reading aloud in the family circle.
The scene of the tale entitled Dina, la belle Juive, is laid in Lyons, in 1661. A manly, unprejudiced young nobleman has fallen in love with a beautiful young Jewess, and goes off to his country home to try and obtain his father's consent to their marriage. The father curses his son, and, in his fury, actually tries to shoot him, but misses him. One day, during Aymar's absence, Dina takes a walk by the banks of the Saône. Seized with a desire to go on the river, she hails a boat, steps on board, and lies down to dream under the awning as the boat glides down the stream. The boatman robs the beautiful Jewess of her rings and other ornaments, ties her arms, gags her, violates her, throws her into the river, and after the gag slips out of her mouth plunges his spear into her body every time it comes to the surface. Then he fishes up the corpse, and takes it to the hôtel de ville to claim the two ducats which are given as a reward to any one who recovers a body from the river. The magistrate asks:
"—Le cadavre a-t-il été reconnu?
—Oui, messire, c'est une jeune fille, nommée Dina, enfant d'un nommé Israël Judas, un lapidaire.
—Une juive?
—Oui, messire, une hérétique, une huguenotte ... une juive....
—Une juive!... Tu vas pêcher des juifs, marsoufle! et tu as le front, après cela, de venir demander récompense? Holà! valet! Holà! Martin! holà! Lefabre! mettez-moi ce butor à la porte! ce paltoquet!"
The scenes in the Jewish quarter and the scene in the boat are unsurpassable in their cruel realism. Borel's picture of Jewish life in the Middle Ages is equal to anything Heine has given us.