The Girl With the Golden Eyes Read Free Page B

whom the King makes a peer of France, perhaps to get back at the nobility; or some notary who gets to become mayor of his arrondissement: All of them have been exhausted by business affairs and, if they reach their goal, are
killed
doing so. In France, it is customary to honor grey hair. But Napoleon, Louis XIV, the truly great monarchs always wanted young people to carry out their plans.
    Above this sphere lives the artistic world. But here again the faces, marked by the seal of originality, are sublimely broken, but broken they are, weary, haggard. Overwhelmed by the need to keep producing, overwhelmed by their costly imaginations, wearied by a devouring genius, starved for pleasure, the artists of Paris all want to recover through excessive labor the depletions leftby laziness, and seek vainly to reconcile the world and glory, money and art. From the start, the artist is ceaselessly panting beneath the creditor; his needs engender debts, and his debts take his nights away from him. After work, pleasure. The actor plays till midnight, studies in the morning, rehearses at noon; the sculptor bends beneath his statue; the journalist is a thought on the march, like the soldier at war; the fashionable painter is overwhelmed with work, the painter without commissions is eaten away if he feels he is a man of genius. Competition, rivalries, calumnies murder talent. Some, desperate, roll into the abysses of vice, others die young and unknown because of having counted too soon on their future. Few of these faces, sublime to begin with, remain handsome. Moreover, the flamboyant beauty of their heads remains misunderstood. An artist’s face is always extravagant, it is always above or below the conventional lines of what imbeciles call
ideal beauty
. What power destroys them? Passion. All passion in Paris is focused on two goals: gold and pleasure.
    Now, can’t you breathe more easily? Can’t you feel that the spacious atmosphere has been purified? Here, no labor or suffering. The spiral of gold has reached the summit. From the bottom of basement windows where its rivulets begin, from the depths of shops where meager dykes constrain its flow,from the heart of neighborhood branch offices and big headquarters where it lets itself be made into bars, gold, in the form of dowries or inheritances, brought by the hands of young women or by the big-knuckled hands of old men, gushes towards the race of aristocrats where it gleams, spreads out, flows. But before we leave the four regions on which upper-class Paris relies, shouldn’t we, after the aforementioned moral causes, deduce the physical causes, and call attention to a plague, which we could term as underlying, that is constantly acting on the faces of the porter, the shopkeeper, the laborer; shouldn’t we point out a noxious influence whose corruptive power equals that of the Parisian administrators who complacently allow it to subsist! If the air of houses where most of the middle-class live is foul, if the atmosphere of the streets spits out cruel fumes in back-alley-shops where air is scarce, be aware that besides this pestilence, the 40,000 houses of this great city bathe their feet in ordure that the authorities have not yet seriously considered encircling with concrete walls that might prevent the most fetid mud from seeping through the ground, poisoning the wells, and continuing underground its famous name, Lutetia, place of the swamps. Half of Paris lies in the putrid exhalations of backyards, streets, and outhouses.
    But now let us approach the grand, airy, gilded drawing-rooms, the mansions with gardens, the world of the rich and idle of private means. Here the faces are pallid, eaten away by vanity. Here there is nothing real. Doesn’t the search for pleasure imply finding boredom? People in high society early on exhausted their true nature. Concerned only with creating joy for themselves, they quickly abused their senses, just as the common laborer abuses strong drink.