The third was an invective to “An author who sold his poems”:
Why seek a famished passion to revive?
After thy rustic love through green fields strive
On flowery banks beside the rosy stream
Archangel, drink to drunkenness the sunny beam,
Under the willows chant etotic dreams,
Though Brutus’ sins upon thy shoulders weigh
Doubtless thy simple soul and heart inveigh
Against the Destiny that took from thee.
“ ’Tis the greedy Plutus, with his purse full, who quotes smiling, human honesty!”
“Destiny is the bag full of gold into which we plunge our greedy hands with rapture! It is corruption which flaunts before our eyes its alluring breast! It is fear, the silent spectre that disturbs the coward in the hour of danger!”
“Your prudent Apollo, no doubt, passed through the stock exchange to reach the Parnassus? We often see, in the political sky, the morning sun die out before night. Look through your telescope, do you not see Guizot waning and Thiers coming to light? Do you base your changeable faith and your flexible probity on the mobility of the weather?”
“Avaunt! Greek, whose servile words lauded Xerxes the night before Thermopylæ!” He continued in the same rough tone against the administration. He sent his play to the Reforme, hoping they would print it; but they refused peremptorily, not wishing to expose themselves to a law suit—for mere literature.
It was near the end of 1845, when my father died, that Bouilhet gave up the practice of medicine. But he continued to teach, and, with the aid of a partner, obtained bachelorships for their pupils. The events of 1848 disturbed his republican faith. He now became a confirmed littérateur, fond of metaphors and comparisons, but indifferent to all else.
His thorough knowledge of Latin (he wrote as fluently in Latin as in French) inspired the few Roman sketches, as in Festons et Astragales and the poem Melœnis, published in the Revue de Paris, on the eve of a political crisis. The moment was badly chosen. The public’s fancy and courage were considerably cooled, and it was not disposed, neither were the powers, to accept independent genius; besides, individual style always seems insurrectionary to governments and immoral to commoners. The exaltation of vulgarism, the banishment of poetry, became more than ever the rage. Wishing to show good judgment, they rushed headlong into stupidity; anything above the ordinary bored them.
As a protest, he took refuge in forgotten places and in the far East; and thence came the Fossiles and different Chinese plays.
However, the provincial atmosphere stifled him; he needed a vaster field; and severing his connections, he came to Paris; but at a certain age one can no longer acquire the Parisian judgment; the things that seem simple to a native of the boulevards, are impracticable to a man of thirty-three arriving in the great city, having few acquaintances and no income, and unaccustomed to solitude. Then his bad days began.