The DiscussionThe republic—for every person today willing to sacrifice all to thecommon good, there are thousands and millions who know onlytheir own pleasures and their vanity. One is esteemed in Paris forone's carriage, not for one's virtue.
NAPOLEON, MemorialThe footman burst in, announcing: 'Monsieur le Duc de ——.'
'Hold your tongue, you fool,' said the Duke as he entered the room. Hesaid this so well, and with such majesty that Julien could not help thinking that knowing how to lose his temper with a footman was the wholeextent of this great personage's knowledge. Julien raised his eyes and atonce lowered them again. He had so clearly divined the importance ofthis new arrival that he trembled lest his glance should be thought anindiscretion.
This Duke was a man of fifty, dressed like a dandy, and treading asthough on springs. He had a narrow head with a large nose, and acurved face which he kept thrusting forward. It would have been hardfor anyone to appear at once so noble and so insignificant. His comingwas a signal for the opening of the discussion.
Julien was sharply interrupted in his physiognomical studies by thevoice of M. de La Mole. 'Let me present to you M. l'abbe Sorel,' said theMarquis. 'He is endowed with an astonishing memory; it was only anhour ago that I spoke to him of the mission with which he might perhapsbe honoured, and, in order to furnish us with a proof of his memory, hehas learned by heart the first page of the Quotidienne.'
'Ah! The foreign news, from poor N ——,' said the master of thehouse. He picked up the paper eagerly and, looking at Julien with awhimsical air, in the effort to appear important: 'Begin, Sir,' he said tohim.
The silence was profound, every eye was fixed on Julien; he repeatedhis lesson so well that after twenty lines: 'That will do,' said the Duke.
The little man with the boar's eyes sat down. He was the chairman for, assoon as he had taken his place, he indicated a card table to Julien, andmade a sign to him to bring it up to his side. Julien established himselfthere with writing materials. He counted twelve people seated round thegreen cloth.
'M. Sorel,' said the Duke, 'retire to the next room. We shall send foryou.'
The master of the house assumed an uneasy expression. 'The shuttersare not closed,' he murmured to his neighbour. 'It is no use your lookingout of the window,' he foolishly exclaimed to Julien. 'Here I am thrust into a conspiracy at the very least,' was the latter's thought. 'Fortunately, itis not one of the kind that end on the Place de Greve. Even if there weredanger, I owe that and more to the Marquis. I should be fortunate, wereit granted me to atone for all the misery which my follies may one daycause him!'
Without ceasing to think of his follies and of his misery, he studied hissurroundings in such a way that he could never forget them. Only thendid he remember that he had not heard the Marquis tell his footman thename of the street, and the Marquis had sent for a cab, a thing he neverdid.
Julien was left for a long time to his reflections. He was in a parlourhung in green velvet with broad stripes of gold. There was on the side-table a large ivory crucifix, and on the mantelpiece the book Du Pape, byM. de Maistre, with gilt edges, and magnificently bound. Julien opened itso as not to appear to be eavesdropping. Every now and then there was asound of raised voices from the next room. At length the door opened,his name was called.
'Remember, Gentlemen,' said the chairman, 'that from this moment weare addressing the Duc de ——. This gentleman,' he said, pointing toJulien, 'is a young Levite, devoted to our sacred cause, who will have nodifficulty in repeating, thanks to his astonishing memory, our most trivial words.
'Monsieur has the floor,' he said, indicating the personage with thefatherly air, who was wearing three or four waistcoats. Julien felt that itwould have been more natural to call him the gentleman with the waistcoats. He supplied himself with paper and wrote copiously.
(Here the author would have liked to insert a page of dots. 'That willnot look pretty,' says the publisher, 'and for so frivolous a work not tolook pretty means death.'
'Politics,' the author resumes, 'are a stone attached to the neck of literature, which, in less than six months, drowns it. Politics in the middle ofimaginative interests are like a pistol-shot in the middle of a concert. Thenoise is deafening without being emphatic. It is not in harmony with thesound of any of the instruments. This mention of politics is going to givedeadly offence to half my readers, and to bore the other half, who havealready found far more interesting and emphatic politics in their morning paper.'
'If your characters do not talk politics,' the publisher retorts, 'they areno longer Frenchmen of 1830, and your book ceases to hold a mirror, asyou claim… .')Julien's report amounted to twenty-six pages; the following is a quitecolourless extract; for I have been obliged, as usual, to suppress the absurdities, the frequency of which would have appeared tedious or highlyimprobable. (Compare the Gazette des Tribunaux. )The man with the waistcoats and the fatherly air (he was a Bishop,perhaps), smiled often, and then his eyes, between their tremulous lids,assumed a strange brilliance and an expression less undecided than washis wont. This personage, who was invited to speak first, before theDuke ('but what Duke?' Julien asked himself), apparently to expressopinions and to perform the functions of Attorney General, appeared toJulien to fall into the uncertainty and absence of definite conclusionswith which those officers are often reproached. In the course of the discussion the Duke went so far as to rebuke him for this.
After several phrases of morality and indulgent philosophy, the manwith the waistcoats said:
'Noble England, guided by a great man, the immortal Pitt, spent fortythousand million francs in destroying the Revolution. If this assemblywill permit me to express somewhat boldly a melancholy reflection, England does not sufficiently understand that with a man like Bonaparte, especially when one had had to oppose to him only a collection of good intentions, there was nothing decisive save personal measures … '
'Ah! Praise of assassination again!' said the master of the house with anuneasy air.
'Spare us your sentimental homilies,' exclaimed the chairman angrily;his boar's eye gleamed with a savage light. 'Continue,' he said to the manwith the waistcoats. The chairman's cheeks and brow turned purple.
'Noble England,' the speaker went on, 'is crushed today, for every Englishman, before paying for his daily bread, is obliged to pay the intereston the forty thousand million francs which were employed against theJacobins. She has no longer a Pitt … '
'She has the Duke of Wellington,' said a military personage who assumed an air of great importance.
'Silence, please, Gentlemen,' cried the chairman; 'if we continue to disagree, there will have been no use in our sending for M. Sorel.'
'We know that Monsieur is full of ideas,' said the Duke with an air ofvexation and a glance at the interrupter, one of Napoleon's Generals.
Julien saw that this was an allusion to something personal and highly offensive. Everyone smiled; the turncoat General seemed beside himselfwith rage.
'There is no longer a Pitt,' the speaker went on, with the discouragedair of a man who despairs of making his hearers listen to reason. 'Werethere a fresh Pitt in England, one does not hoodwink a nation twice bythe same means … '
'That is why a conquering General, a Bonaparte is impossible now inFrance,' cried the military interrupter.
On this occasion, neither the chairman nor the Duke dared show annoyance, though Julien thought he could read in their eyes that theywere tempted to do so. They lowered their eyes, and the Duke contentedhimself with a sigh loud enough to be audible to them all.
But the speaker had lost his temper.
'You are in a hurry for me to conclude,' he said with heat, entirely discarding that smiling politeness and measured speech which Julien hadassumed to be the natural expression of his character: 'you are in a hurryfor me to conclude; you give me no credit for the efforts that I am making not to offend the ears of anyone present, however long they may be.
Very well, Gentlemen, I shall be brief.
'And I shall say to you in the plainest of words: England has not a halfpenny left for the service of the good cause. Were Pitt to return in person,with all his genius he would not succeed in hoodwinking the smalllandowners of England, for they know that the brief campaign of Waterloo cost them, by itself, one thousand million francs. Since you wish for plain speaking,' the speaker added, growing more and more animated, 'Ishall say to you: Help yourselves, for England has not a guinea for yourassistance, and if England does not pay, Austria, Russia, Prussia, whichhave only courage and no money, cannot support more than one campaign or two against France.
'You may hope that the young soldiers collected by Jacobinism will bedefeated in the first campaign, in the second perhaps; but in the third(though I pass for a revolutionary in your prejudiced eyes), in the thirdyou will have the soldiers of 1794, who were no longer the recruitedpeasants of 1792.'
Here the interruption broke out in three or four places at once.
'Sir,' said the chairman to Julien, 'go and make a fair copy in the nextroom of the first part of the report which you have taken down.' Julienleft the room with considerable regret. The speaker had referred to probabilities which formed the subject of his habitual meditations.
'They are afraid of my laughing at them,' he thought. When he was recalled, M. de La Mole was saying, with an earnestness, which, to Julien,who knew him, seemed highly amusing:
'Yes, Gentlemen, it is above all of this unhappy race that one can say:
"Shall it be a god, a table or a bowl?"'"It shall be a god!" cries the poet. It is to you, Gentlemen, that this saying, so noble and so profound, seems to apply. Act for yourselves, andour noble France will reappear more or less as our ancestors made herand as our own eyes beheld her before the death of Louis XVI.
'England, her noble Lords at least, curses as heartily as we ignoble Jacobinism: without English gold, Austria, Russia, Prussia cannot fightmore than two or three battles. Will that suffice to bring about a gloriousoccupation, like that which M. de Richelieu squandered so stupidly in1817? I do not think so.'
At this point an interruption occurred, but it was silenced by a generalmurmur. It arose once more from the former Imperial General, who desired the Blue Riband, and was anxious to appear among the compilersof the secret note.
'I do not think so,' M. de La Mole resumed after the disturbance. Hedwelt upon the word 'I' with an insolence which charmed Julien. 'That iswell played,' he said to himself as he made his pen fly almost as fast asthe Marquis's utterance. With a well-placed word, M. de La Mole annihilated the twenty campaigns of the turncoat.
'It is not to foreigners alone,' the Marquis continued in the most measured tone, 'that we can remain indebted for a fresh military occupation.
That youthful band who contribute incendiary articles to the Globe willprovide you with three or four thousand young captains, among whommay be found a Kleber, a Hoche, a Jourdan, a Pichegru, but less well-intentioned.'
'We did wrong in not crowning him with glory,' said the chairman,'we ought to have made him immortal.'
'There must, in short, be two parties in France,' went on M. de LaMole, 'but two parties, not in name only, two parties clearly defined,sharply divided. Let us be certain whom we have to crush. On one sidethe journalists, the electors, public opinion; in a word, youth and allthose who admire it. While it is dazed by the sound of its own idlewords, we, we have the certain advantage of handling the budget.'
Here came a fresh interruption.
'You, Sir,' M. de La Mole said to the interrupter with a superciliousease that was quite admirable, 'you do not handle, since the word appears to shock you, you devour forty thousand francs borne on the statebudget and eighty thousand which you receive from the Civil List.
'Very well, Sir, since you force me to it, I take you boldly as an example. Like your noble ancestors who followed Saint Louis to the Crusade, you ought, for those hundred and twenty thousand francs, to let ussee at least a regiment, a company, shall I say a half-company, were itcomposed only of fifty men ready to fight, and devoted to the goodcause, alive or dead. You have only footmen who, in the event of a revolt, would frighten nobody but yourself.
The Throne, the Altar, the Nobility may perish any day, Gentlemen, solong as you have not created in each Department a force of five hundreddevoted men; devoted, I mean, not only with all the gallantry of Francebut with the constancy of Spain.
'One half of this troop will have to be composed of our sons, our nephews, in short of true gentlemen. Each of them will have by his side, not aglib little cockney ready to hoist the striped cockade if another 1815should arrive, but an honest peasant, simple and open like Cathelineau;our gentleman will have trained him, it should be his foster-brother, ifpossible. Let each of us sacrifice the fifth part of his income to form thislittle devoted troop of five hundred men to a Department. Then you maycount upon a foreign occupation. Never will the foreign soldier cross our borders as far as Dijon even, unless he is certain of finding five hundredfriendly soldiers in each Department.
'The foreign Kings will listen to you only when you can inform themthat there are twenty thousand gentlemen ready to take up arms to opento them the gates of France. This service is arduous, you will say. Gentlemen, it is the price of our heads. Between the liberty of the press and ourexistence as gentlemen, there is war to the knife. Become manufacturers,peasants, or take up your guns. Be timid if you like, but do not be stupid.
Open your eyes.
'Form your battalions, I say to you, in the words of the Jacobin song;then there will appear some noble Gustavus-Adolphus, who, moved bythe imminent peril to the monarchical principle will come flying threehundred leagues beyond his borders, and do for you what Gustavus didfor the Protestant princes. Do you propose to go on talking without acting? In fifty years there will be nothing in Europe but Presidents of Republics, not one King left. And with those four letters K-I-N-G, go thepriests and the gentlemen. I can see nothing but candidates paying courtto draggletailed majorities.
'It is no use your saying that France has not at this moment a trustworthy General, known and loved by all, that the army is organised onlyin the interests of Throne and Altar, that all the old soldiers have beendischarged from it, whereas each of the Prussian and Austrian regimentsincludes fifty non-commissioned officers who have been under fire.
'Two hundred thousand young men of the middle class are in lovewith the idea of war… .'
'Enough unpleasant truths,' came in a tone of importance from a gravepersonage, apparently high on the ladder of ecclesiastical preferment, forM. de La Mole smiled pleasantly instead of showing annoyance, whichwas highly significant to Julien.
'Enough unpleasant truths; Gentlemen, to sum up: the man withwhom it was a question of amputating his gangrened leg would be ill-advised to say to his surgeon: this diseased leg is quite sound. Pardonme the simile, Gentlemen, the noble Duke of —— is our surgeon.' 15'There is the great secret out at last,' thought Julien; 'it is to the ——that I shall be posting tonight.'
15.The Duke of Wellington. C. K. S. M.