"A cette époque florissait une société de jeunes gens, riches et pauvres, tous désœuvrés, appelés viveurs, et qui vivaient en effet avec une incroyable insouciance, intrépides mangeurs, buveurs plus intrépides encore. Tous bourreaux d'argent et mêlant les plus rudes plaisanteries à cette existence, non pas folle, mais enragée, ils ne reculaient devant aucune impossibilité, faisaient gloire de leurs méfaits, contenus néanmoins en de certaines bornes: l'esprit le plus original couvrait leurs escapades, il était impossible de ne pas les leur pardonner. Aucun fait n'accuse si hautement l'ilotisme auquel la Restauration avait condamné la jeunesse. Les jeunes gens, qui ne savaient à quoi employer leurs forces, ne les jetaient pas seulement dans le journalisme, dans les conspirations, dans la littérature et dans l'art, ils les dissipaient dans les plus étranges excès, tant il y'avait de sève et de luxuriantes puissances dans la jeune France. Travailleuse, cette belle jeunesse voulait le pouvoir et le plaisir; artiste, elle voulait des trésors; oisive, elle voulait animer ses passions; de toute manière elle voulait une place, et la politique ne lui en faisait nulle part."
Balzac gives his own character, Rastignac, as an instance of the typical viveur, but Rastignac had a purpose in his heart, while some of the most prominent among the viveurs had none but to amuse themselves. These I name first, for, having no other preoccupations, they set the tone of the whole society. They were chiefly members of the aristocracy who found no place for their energies in a bourgeois State which sought no military glory. One of their leaders, the Duc d'Aulnis, who settled down afterwards to serve the State worthily, gives in his memoirs the reason why so many young men of good family gave themselves up to riotous living, as he did under his nom de plaisir of Alton-Shee. He and other young legitimists resigned their commissions in 1831 on finding that Louis Philippe, le roi des barricades, sided with the insurrectionists, so that, as he says, "the class of idlers was increased by a large number of legitimists who had resigned their commissions and by a contingent of refugees belonging to the Italian, Polish, and Spanish aristocracies. To distract their minds from the thoughts of so many broken careers, so many hopes disappointed, they dashed with an irresistible rush into the pursuit of enjoyment and sought to appease their generous aspirations in an unbridled love of pleasure."
These were the young men who spent all their time in imitating Brummell or the Comte d'Orsay, paying minute attention to every curve of their voluminous frock-coats, the patterns of their waistcoats, and the folding of their cravats; who drove and rode irreproachable horses imported from England, and founded the French Jockey Club under the auspices of Lord Seymour; who dined copiously at the Café de Paris and adjourned to lounge at the Opéra in the loge infernale, where the cream of Parisian dandyism paraded with its lorgnette for the edification of the public. In racing and gambling they found their excitement; their consolation was the venal love of a ballet dancer. For no moment of the day did they pursue a worthy ambition, and their only excuse was that, being idle perforce, they attained a certain exquisiteness even in pleasure. Sadly the Duc d'Aulnis sums them up:
"Our generation had the love of liberty, passion, gaiety, an artistic nature, little vanity, the desire to be rather than to appear; then came discouragement, scepticism, the pursuit of amusement, the habit of smoking which fills the intervals, the taste for intoxication, that fugitive poetry of vulgar enjoyments, and every prodigality to satisfy our desires. If one considers what we leave behind us, our baggage is light: the folly of the carnival, the invention of the cancan, the generalization of the cigar, the acclimatization of clubs and races, will be merits of small value in the eyes of posterity.... Of these joyous enfants du siècle brought by ruin to face pitiless reality, some escaped from their embarrassments by suicide, others found death or promotion in Africa, others shared their names with rich heiresses; others, persevering at all hazards, swallowing affronts and braving humiliations, lived on the precarious resources of gambling, borrowing, toadying, and parasitism; the most wretched of all fell step by step into the depths of infamy; only a very small number tried to save themselves by hard work."
These men set the pace among the viveurs: they were seconded by the more ambitious young men of whom Balzac's Rastignac is the type, who were determined to succeed and uttered in their hearts his famous threat to Paris by the grave of old Goriot, "Maintenant c'est entre nous." These men became viveurs, not as a pastime, but as a means. Rastignac, shocked to see that virtuous devotion would not save Père Goriot from a broken heart, and sick of the Maison Vauquer's squalor, determines to play society at its own game and make profit out of its corruption. He becomes the lover of Madame de Nucingen, one of Goriot's ungrateful daughters, and by allowing himself to become a tool in the crafty Baron Nucingen's third liquidation lays the foundation of his own fortunes. Such a man could not live in seclusion—he was forced into the ranks of the viveurs, in order to become a conspicuous figure. A smart tilbury and clothes from a first-class tailor were part of his stock-in-trade; he could not afford to run the risk of humiliation before his lady by laying himself open to affront by a more exquisite "dandy" than himself. A Rastignac had to shine to compass his ends, and he shone most brilliantly as a viveur, playing at idleness and debauch to cloak his subtle schemes, and drowning the shame of his parasitism in a passionate self-indulgence. Thanks to a strong will he is entirely successful, and out of the wreck of his illusions and his generous impulses builds himself a career as a politician.
Rastignac is one of the most wonderful characters created by Balzac's penetrating pessimism; that he had a special place in his creator's heart is proved, I think, by his frequent appearance on the stage. Those who delight in the fascinating pastime of following Balzac's characters through the whole extent of the "Comédie Humaine" will know that it is impossible to understand Rastignac without reading "La Maison Nucingen," a story which, for pure virtuosity, is second to none of Balzac's masterpieces. They will remember that the scene is set in the year 1836 in a private room at Véry's restaurant, where the impersonal narrator, by overhearing the conversation in the adjoining room, is entertained by the thrilling account of how Rastignac profited by Baron Nucingen's third fraudulent liquidation. The shady financial proceedings of the astute Alsatian—as exciting as a dashing campaign—are related in a marvellous series of boutades by Balzac's favourite grotesque, Bixiou, the own brother of Panurge. Now Bixiou and the three friends with whom he is dining are Balzac's examples of the third party among the viveurs, that party to which the title la haute Bohème is most peculiarly applicable. They were neither aristocratic and wealthy, like a Duc d'Aulnis, nor aristocratic and poor, like a Rastignac, but men of obscure origin and unusual intelligence. They joined the ranks of the viveurs neither to banish the ennui of enforced idleness, nor out of cold calculation for a diplomatic end—for they were inevitably debarred from attaining any position in the beau monde—but simply as a distraction from their pursuit of worldly success as journalists, artists, speculators, and general exploiters of society. They were not single-hearted warriors for an ambition; their aim in life was not purely diversion, it was merely to obtain the maximum of selfish enjoyments, which included a satisfied vanity, a full purse, good food, rare wine, and a pretty mistress. Of them Barbey d'Aurévilly's remark was true: "Qui dit journalistes dit femmes entretenues. Cela veut souper."
They had been pure Bohemians, most of them, in their earlier youth, with higher ideals and more restricted enjoyments; but their gorge, too, had risen at the squalor of their Maison Vauquer, and they had parleyed with the devil. Discovering in themselves some talent for making money, they had exploited it to the exclusion of all others. They traded either in their own art or in that of others. On the boulevard they held their own by their engaging sallies of malicious gossip, by their prodigal extravagance, and, above all, by the fear which their power as journalists, critics, caricaturists, or newspaper proprietors inspired. They were Bohemians at heart, carrying the more pardonable disorders of Bohemia into less exacting circumstances, spending their gifts and their money without a thought, luxurious, venal, insatiable. Their type is to be found to-day in the rich mercantile, especially Jewish, society of all large cities; but in Paris of the thirties and forties they were more powerful and more conspicuous. Though they could never hope to enter the Jockey Club, they were hail-fellow-well-met with the viveurs of blue blood; they served the Rastignacs when it was worth their while, and they were so near to the true Bohemia that their example was at once its temptation and its despair. Balzac himself sums up the four friends, Bixiou, Finot, Blondet, and Couture, in a passage which, having myself said so much, I quote in the original:
"C'était quatre des plus hardis cormorans éclos dans l'écume qui couronne les flots incessamment renouvelés de la génération présente; aimables garçons dont l'existence est problématique, à qui l'on connaît ni rentes ni domaines, et qui vivent bien. Ces spirituels condottieri de l'industrie moderne, devenue la plus cruelle des guerres, laissent les inquiétudes à leurs créanciers, gardent les plaisirs pour eux, et n'ont de souci que de leur costume. D'ailleurs, braves à fumer, comme Jean Bart, leur agare sur un baril de poudre, peut-être pour ne pas faillir à leur rôle; plus moqueurs que les petits journaux, moqueurs à se moquer d'eux-mêmes, perspicaces et incrédules, fureteurs d'affaires, avides et prodigues, envieux d'autrui, mais contents d'eux-mêmes; profonds politiques par saillies, analysant tout, devinant tout, ils n'avaient pas encore pu se faire jour dans le monde où ils voudraient se produire."
Andoche Finot had risen by his acute perception of the commercial future of journalism. We meet him in his early days in "César Birotteau," abandoning the puffing of actresses and writing of articles to less perspicuous journalists, and devoting himself to what is now grandly called "publicity." It was he who helped the worthy young Anselme Popinot to push the huile céphalique which repaired Birotteau's shattered fortunes. In "Illusions Perdues" we find him again, first proprietor of a small paper, then spending his profits and straining his credit in buying a larger one—one of the spiders into whose web poor Lucien fell. By 1836 he is a lord of the Press, a fictitious counterpart of Emile de Girardin, who with Lautour-Mézéray, another viveur, made a fortune by selling La Presse at half the price of other newspapers. Couture is a very minor character, a financial speculator, who only hung on the fringe of the viveurs. Blondet and Bixiou are more important. The former had many counterparts in Paris of the day. He was "a newspaper editor, a man of much intelligence, but slipshod, brilliant, capable, lazy, knowing, but allowing himself to be exploited, equally faithless and good-natured by caprice; one of those men one likes, but does not respect. Sharp as a stage soubrette, incapable of refusing his pen to anyone who asked for it or his heart to anyone who would borrow it."