"My dear Count, I willingly accept your proposition. Monsieur Legouvé reads admirably, and his plays are all agreeable. Nevertheless, let me tell you that this trial will prove nothing. Our poor society is like Sganarelle's wife, who liked to be thrashed. It has borne smiling, and repaid with wealth and fame, much more ardent attacks than Monsieur Legouvé can make."
Count de —— and I shook hands, and parted. A few evenings afterwards the reading took place. It was just what I expected. There were as many marquises and duchesses (real duchesses) as there were kings to applaud Talma in the Erfurt pit. The noble assembly listened to Monsieur Legouvés's comedy with that rather absent-minded urbanity and with those charming exclamations of admiration which have been constantly given to everybody who has read a piece in a drawing-room, from the days of the Viscount d'Arlincourt and his "Le Solitaire," to the days of Monsieur Viennet, of the French Academy, and his "Arbogaste." Monsieur Legouvé's play, which was then called "Le Nom du Mari," and which has since been played under the title of "Par Droit de Conquête," was pleasing. My ears were not so much offended by the antagonism of poor nobility and wealthy upstarts, which Monsieur Legouvé treated neither better nor worse than any other has done, as by the details of roads, bridges, marsh-draining, canals, railways, coal, coke, and the like, which were dead-weights on Thalia's light robe; and the improbability of the plot was not so much the marriage of a noble girl to the son of an apple-dealer as was the perfection given to the young engineer: every virtue and every grace were showered on him. The piece was unanimously pronounced successful. The aristocratic audience applauded Monsieur Legouvé with their little gloved hands, which never make much noise. He was complimented so delicately that he was sincerely touched. There was not the slightest objection, the lightest murmur made to the piece, and there trembled in my eye that little tear Madame de Sévigné speaks of.
But let us quit this drawing-room, and turn our steps towards the Rue du Croissant, where the office of "Le Charivari" is to be found. Balzac has described in "Les Illusions Perdues" the offices of these petty newspapers: the passage divided into two equal portions, one of which leads to the editor's room, and the other to the grated counter where the clerk sits to receive subscribers. Everybody knows the appearance of these old houses, these staircases, these flimsy partitions, with their bad light coming through a window whose panes are veiled with a triple coating of dust, smoke, and soot,—the whitewashed walls bearing innumerable traces of fingers covered with ink, mingled with pencil-caricatures and grotesque inscriptions. Although it was in the month of May that I made this visit, I shivered with cold as I entered this old house, and my gorge rose in disgust at the unaired smell and ignoble scenes which everywhere appeared. The clerk I applied to had the very face one might expect to find in such a place: one of those colorless, hard, sinister faces which are to be seen in nearly all the scenes of Paris reality. All things were in harmony in this shop: the air, and the light, and the house,—the letter as well as the spirit. I asked the clerk to give me the file for the month of April. I soon found and read Monsieur Taxile Delord's article. Monsieur Taxile Delord comes from some one of the southern departments of France. He made his first appearance in public in "Le Sémaphore," the well-known newspaper of Marseilles; but the twilight of a provincial life could not suit this eagle, and in the course of a few years he came up to Paris. Alas! Monsieur Taxile Delord was soon obliged to add the secret sorrows of disappointed ambition to the original gayety of his character. His deepest sorrow was to look upon himself for a grave and thoughtful statesman, and be condemned by fate to a chronic state of fun and to hard labor at pun-making for life. Imagine Junius damned to lead Touchstone's life! He became sourness itself. His puns were lugubrious. His fun grew heavy, and his gayety was funereal. The pretensions of this checked gravity which settled upon his factitious hilarity were enough to melt the hearts even of his enemies, if such a fellow could pretend to have enemies. Once this galley-slave of fun tried to make his escape from the galley. He wrote a play; and as the manager of one of the theatres was his friend, he had it played. The democratic opinions of Monsieur Taxile Delord raised favorable prejudices among the school-boys of the Latin Quarter; but who can escape his fate? The masterpiece was hissed. Its title was "The End of the Comedy"; and a wretched witling pretended that the piece was ill-named, since the pit refused to see the end of the comedy. Thereupon Monsieur Taxile Delord adopted the method of Gulliver's tailor, who measured for clothes according to the rules of arithmetic: he demonstrated that his piece was played three times from beginning to end,—that, as the manager was his particular friend, and as the Odeon was always empty, he might have had it played thirty times,—and therefore that we were all bound to be grateful to him for his moderation. This last argument met no person bold enough to contradict it, and the subscribers to "Le Charivari" (which is the "Punch" of Paris) were seized with holy horror, when they thought, that, but for Monsieur Taxile Delord's moderation, "The End of the Comedy" might have been played seven-and-twenty times more.
What had I done to excite his ire? I had not treated Béranger with sufficient respect, and Monsieur Taxile Delord, though a joker by trade, would not hear of any fun on this subject. His genius had shaped itself exactly on Béranger's, and he resented as a personal affront every insult offered to the songster. Of a truth, Béranger's fate was a hard one, and all my attacks on him were not half so bad as this treatment he received at the hands of Monsieur Taxile Delord. Poor Béranger! So Monsieur Taxile Delord took up the quarrel on his account, and relieved his gall by throwing it on me. When I read his article, I felt humiliated,—but not as the writer desired,—I felt humiliated for the press, and for literature, and for Béranger, who really did not deserve this hard fate. The humid office, full of dirt and dust and printing-ink, disgusted and depressed me, and I involuntarily thought of Count de ——'s drawing-room, and that aristocratic society where everything was flowers, courtesy, perfumes, elegance, where people could not even feel hatred towards their enemies, and where the genial poet, Monsieur Ernest Legouvé, surrounded by the most charming and most sprightly women of Paris, recently obtained so delightful a triumph.
All at once a sympathetic and clear voice, a voice which I thought I had heard in better society than where I was, reached my ears. Hid in the dark corner where I sat, and where nobody could discover me, I saw the door of the editor's room open and Monsieur Taxile Delord appear and escort to the door a visitor. It was Monsieur Ernest Legouvé! They passed close to me, and I heard Monsieur Ernest Legouvé say to Monsieur Delord,—"My dear Sir, I recommend my play, 'Le Nom du Mari,' to you; I hope you will be pleased with it!"
This contrast annoyed me. I was then horribly out of humor from an irritating prelection, and I felt towards Monsieur Legouvé that sort of vexation the unlucky feel towards the lucky, the poor towards the rich, the hunchbacks towards handsome men, and the awkward towards the adroit. I said to myself,—"Armand, my poor Armand, you will never be aught but a most stupid fool!"
We add no commentary to this picture of literary life in Paris. We leave the reader to draw his own conclusions. He needs no assistance,—for the picture is painted in bright colors, and the light is thrown with no parsimonious hand upon every corner. It is a curious exhibition of a most unhealthy state of things. It explains a great many of those literary mysteries, which seem so unaccountable, in the most brilliant capital of the world.
FOOTNOTES:
[24] Elsie Venner, by Oliver Œendell (sic) Holmes.