“I don’t see,” said Joseph Bridau, “why this savage inclination for solitude should be so bad for an artist. What does a sculptor gain by frequenting salons where gentlemen and ladies have taken to a habit of wearing clothes?”
“Well, in the first place, a sculptor can amuse himself in a salon; and that will keep him from taking up a mania, or becoming a visionary; besides, he sees the world as it is, and learns that 1839 is not the fifteenth nor the sixteenth century.”
“Has Dorlange any such delusions?” asked Emile Blondet.
“He? he will talk to you by the hour of returning to the life of the great artists of the middle ages with the universality of their studies and their knowledge, and that frightfully laborious life of theirs; which may help us to understand the habits and ways of a semi-barbarous society, but can never exist in ours. He does not see, the innocent dreamer, that civilization, by strangely complicating all social conditions, absorbs for business, for interests, for pleasures, thrice as much time as a less advanced society required for the same purposes. Look at the savage in his hut; he hasn’t anything to do. Whereas we, with the Bourse, the opera, the newspapers, parliamentary discussions, salons, elections, railways, the Cafe de Paris and the National Guard—what time have we, if you please, to go to work?”
“Beautiful theory of a do-nothing!” cried Emile Blondet, laughing.
“No, my dear fellow, I am talking truth. The curfew no longer rings at nine o’clock. Only last night my concierge Ravenouillet gave a party; and I think I made a great mistake in not accepting the indirect invitation he gave me to be present.”
“Nevertheless,” said Joseph Bridau, “it is certain that if a man doesn’t mingle in the business, the interests, and the pleasures of our epoch, he can make out of the time he thus saves a pretty capital. Independently of his orders, Dorlange has, I think, a little competence; so that nothing hinders him from arranging his life to suit himself.”
“But you see he goes to the opera; for it was there he found his duel. Besides, you are all wrong in representing him as isolated from this contemporaneous life, for I happen to know that he is just about to harness himself to it by the most rattling and compelling chains of the social system—I mean political interests.”
“Does he want to be a statesman?” asked Emile Blondet, sarcastically.
“Yes, no doubt that’s in his famous programme of universality; and you ought to see the consistency and perseverance he puts into that idea! Only last year two hundred and fifty thousand francs dropped into his mouth as if from the skies, and he instantly bought a hovel in the rue Saint-Martin to make himself eligible for the Chamber. Then—another pretty speculation—with the rest of the money he bought stock in the ‘National,’ where I meet him every time I want to have a laugh over the republican Utopia. He has his flatterers on the staff of that estimable newspaper; they have persuaded him that he’s a born orator and can cut the finest figure in the Chamber. They even talk of getting up a candidacy for him; and on some of their enthusiastic days they go so far as to assert that he bears a distant likeness to Danton.”