The Girl With the Golden Eyes Read Free

country, during which his wife and children joyously swallow dust or roast themselves in the sun; his excursion is to some restaurant renowned for its poisonous dinners, or some family ball where you suffocate till midnight. Some simpletons are surprised at the St. Vitus’s dance that seems toafflict the molecules seen through a microscope in a drop of water, but what would Rabelais’ Gargantua say, figure of a sublime misunderstood audacity, what would this giant say, fallen from the celestial spheres, if he were to amuse himself contemplating the movement of this second level of Parisian life, one of whose formulae is presented here? Have you seen those little shacks, cold in summer, with no other hearth than a foot-warmer in winter, beneath the vast copper dome that tops the wheat market? Madame has been there since morning, she is manageress at the market and earns twelve thousand francs per year at this profession, they say. When Madame gets up in the morning, Monsieur goes into an ill-lit back room, where he makes short-term loans to merchants in his neighborhood. By nine o’clock he is at the passport office, where he is one of the chief clerks. At night he’s at the ticket-office of the Théâtre Italien, or any other theater you like to name. The children are left in the care of the nanny, and later on they are sent to high school or boarding school. Monsieur and Madame live on the fourth floor, have only one stove, host dances in a twelve-by-eight-foot room illumined by oil lamps; but they give 150,000 francs to their daughter’s dowry and retire at the age of fifty, when they begin to appear in the third-tier boxes at the Opéra, in a fiacre atLongchamp, or in faded raiment, every sunny day, on the boulevards, the carefully tended fruit of all these labors. Respected in the neighborhood, well-regarded by the government, allied to the upper middle class, Monsieur obtains the Cross of the Legion of Honor at sixty-five years of age, and his son-in-law’s father, the mayor of an arrondissement, invites him to his soirées. These labors of an entire lifetime thus benefit the children whom this lower middle class inevitably tries to lift to the upper middle class. Thus each sphere throws its entire spawn into the sphere above it. The son of the rich grocer is made a notary, the son of the lumber merchant becomes a magistrate. No cog misses its appointed groove, and everything stimulates the upward mobility of money.
    Now we have reached the third circle of this hell, which might someday find its Dante. This third social circle is a kind of Parisian stomach, where the interests of the city are digested and where the crowd of attorneys, doctors, notaries, lawyers, businessmen, bankers, wholesale merchants, speculators, and magistrates are condensed in the form called
business affairs
, and where the mass is moved and stirred up by an acrid and venomous intestinal agitation. Here more than anywhere else are encountered causes for physical and moral destruction. Almost all these people live in squalid dens, in reeking courtrooms,in little barred offices, spending all day bent over beneath the weight of affairs; they get up at dawn to be prepared, to keep from being rooked, to win everything or to lose nothing, to seize hold of a man or of his money, to get a deal going or wrap one up, to take advantage of a fleeting circumstance, to have a man hanged or acquitted. They have an effect on their horses, work them to death, overtax them, aging their horses’ legs long before their time. Time is their tyrant, they never have enough of it, it slips away from them; they can neither stretch it out nor contract it. What soul can remain great, pure, moral, generous, what face can remain handsome in the depraving exercise of a profession that forces you to bear the weight of public miseries, to analyze them, weigh them, gauge them, bleed them systematically? Where do these people keep their hearts? I don’t know; but they leave