Chapter Chapter 52 · THE DISCUSSION

. THE DISCUSSION

The republic:--For one man to day who will sacrifice

everything for the public welfare, there are thousands

and millions who think of nothing except their

enjoyments and their vanity. One is requested in Paris

by reason of the qualities not of one's self but of

one's carriage.

--NAPOLEON, Memorial.

The footman rushed in saying "Monsieur the duke de ----"

"Hold your tongue, you are just a fool," said the duke as he entered.

He spoke these words so well, and with so much majesty, that Julien

could not help thinking this great person's accomplishments were

limited to the science of snubbing a lackey. Julien raised his

eyes and immediately lowered them. He had so fully appreciated the

significance of the new arrival that he feared that his look might be

an indiscretion.

The duke was a man of fifty dressed like a dandy and with a jerky

walk. He had a narrow head with a large nose and a face that jutted

forward; it would have been difficult to have looked at the same time

more insignificant. His arrival was the signal for the opening of the

meeting.

Julien was sharply interrupted in his physiognomical observations by

de la Mole's voice. "I present to you M. the abbé Sorel," said the

Marquis. "He is gifted with an astonishing memory; it is scarcely an

hour ago since I spoke to him of the mission by which he might be

honoured, and he has learned the first page of the _Quotidienne_ by

heart in order to give proof of his memory."

"Ah! foreign news of that poor N--" said the master of the house. He

took up the paper eagerly and looked at Julien in a manner rendered

humorous by its own self-importance. "Speak, monsieur," he said to him.

The silence was profound, all eyes were fixed on Julien. He recited

so well that the duke said at the end of twenty lines, "That is

enough." The little man who looked like a boar sat down. He was the

president, for he had scarcely taken his place before he showed Julien

a card-table and signed to him to bring it near him. Julien established

himself at it with writing materials. He counted twelve persons seated

round the green table cloth.

"M. Sorel," said the Duke, "retire into next room, you will be called."

The master of the house began to look very anxious. "The shutters

are not shut," he said to his neighbour in a semi-whisper. "It is no

good looking out of the window," he stupidly cried to Julien--"so

here I am more or less mixed up in a conspiracy," thought the latter.

"Fortunately it is not one of those which lead to the Place-de-Grève.

Even though there were danger, I owe this and even more to the marquis,

and should be glad to be given the chance of making up for all the

sorrow which my madness may one day occasion him."

While thinking of his own madness and his own unhappiness he regarded

the place where he was, in such a way as to imprint it upon his memory

for ever. He then remembered for the first time that he had never heard

the lackey tell the name of the street, and that the marquis had taken

a fiacre which he never did in the ordinary way. Julien was left to

his own reflections for a long time. He was in a salon upholstered in

red velvet with large pieces of gold lace. A large ivory crucifix was

on the console-table and a gilt-edged, magnificently bound copy of M.

de Maistre's book _The Pope_ was on the mantelpiece. Julien opened it

so as not to appear to be eavesdropping. From time to time they talked

loudly in the next room. At last the door was opened and he was called

in.

"Remember, gentlemen," the president was saying "that from this moment

we are talking in the presence of the duke of ----. This gentleman,"

he said, pointing to Julien, "is a young acolyte devoted to our sacred

cause who by the aid of his marvellous memory will repeat quite easily

our very slightest words."

"It is your turn to speak, Monsieur," he said pointing to the paternal

looking personage who wore three or four waistcoats. Julien thought it

would have been more natural to have called him the gentleman in the

waistcoats. He took some paper and wrote a great deal.

(At this juncture the author would have liked to have put a page of

dots. "That," said his publisher, "would be clumsy and in the case of

so light a work clumsiness is death."

"Politics," replies the author, "is a stone tied round the neck of

literature which submerges it in less than six months. Politics in the

midst of imaginative matter is like a pistol shot in the middle of a

concert. The noise is racking without being energetic. It does not

harmonise with the sound of any instrument. These politics will give

mortal offence to one half of the readers and will bore the other half,

who will have already read the ideas in question as set out in the

morning paper in its own drastic manner."

"If your characters don't talk politics," replied the publisher, "they

cease to be Frenchmen of 1830, and your book is no longer a mirror as

you claim?")

Julien's record ran to twenty-six pages. Here is a very diluted

extract, for it has been necessary to adopt the invariable practice of

suppressing those ludicrous passages, whose violence would have seemed

either offensive or intolerable (see the _Gazette des Tribunaux_).

The man with the waistcoats and the paternal expression (he was perhaps

a bishop) often smiled and then his eyes, which were surrounded with

a floating forest of eyebrows, assumed a singular brilliance and an

unusually decided expression. This personage whom they made speak first

before the duke ("but what duke is it?" thought Julien to himself) with

the apparent object of expounding various points of view and fulfilling

the functions of an advocate-general, appeared to Julien to fall into

the uncertainty and lack of definiteness with which those officials

are so often taxed. During the course of the discussion the duke went

so far as to reproach him on this score. After several sentences of

morality and indulgent philosophy the man in the waistcoats said,

"Noble England, under the guiding hand of a great man, the immortal

Pitt, has spent forty milliards of francs in opposing the revolution.

If this meeting will allow me to treat so melancholy a subject with

some frankness, England fails to realise sufficiently that in dealing

with a man like Buonaparte, especially when they have nothing to

oppose him with, except a bundle of good intentions there is nothing

decisive except personal methods."

"Ah! praising assassination again!" said the master of the house

anxiously.

"Spare us your sentimental sermons," cried the president angrily. His

boarlike eye shone with a savage brilliance. "Go on," he said to the

man with the waistcoats. The cheeks and the forehead of the president

became purple.

"Noble England," replied the advocate-general, "is crushed to-day:

for each Englishman before paying for his own bread is obliged to pay

the interest on forty milliards of francs which were used against the

Jacobins. She has no more Pitt."

"She has the Duke of Wellington," said a military personage looking

very important.

"Please, gentlemen, silence," exclaimed the president. "If we are still

going to dispute, there was no point in having M. Sorel in."

"We know that monsieur has many ideas," said the duke irritably,

looking at the interrupter who was an old Napoleonic general. Julien

saw that these words contained some personal and very offensive

allusion. Everybody smiled, the turncoat general appeared beside

himself with rage.

"There is no longer a Pitt, gentlemen," went on the speaker with all

the despondency of a man who has given up all hope of bringing his

listeners to reason. "If there were a new Pitt in England, you would

not dupe a nation twice over by the same means."

"That's why a victorious general, a Buonaparte, will be henceforward

impossible in France," exclaimed the military interrupter.

On this occasion neither the president nor the duke ventured to get

angry, though Julien thought he read in their eyes that they would

very much like to have done so. They lowered their eyes, and the duke

contented himself with sighing in quite an audible manner. But the

speaker was put upon his mettle.

"My audience is eager for me to finish," he said vigorously, completely

discarding that smiling politeness and that balanced diction that

Julien thought had expressed his character so well. "It is eager for

me to finish, it is not grateful to me for the efforts I am making to

offend nobody's ears, however long they may be. Well, gentlemen, I will

be brief.

"I will tell you in quite common words: England has not got a sou with

which to help the good cause. If Pitt himself were to come back he

would never succeed with all his genius in duping the small English

landowners, for they know that the short Waterloo campaign alone cost

them a milliard of francs. As you like clear phrases," continued the

speaker, becoming more and more animated, "I will say this to you: Help

yourselves, for England has not got a guinea left to help you with,

and when England does not pay, Austria, Russia and Prussia--who will

only have courage but have no money--cannot launch more than one or two

campaigns against France.

"One may hope that the young soldiers who will be recruited by the

Jacobins will be beaten in the first campaign, and possibly in the

second; but, even though I seem a revolutionary in your prejudiced

eyes, in the third campaign--in the third campaign I say--you will have

the soldiers of 1794 who were no longer the soldiers enlisted in 1792."

At this point interruption broke out simultaneously from three or four

quarters.

"Monsieur," said the president to Julien, "Go and make a précis in the

next room of the beginning of the report which you have written out."

Julien went out to his great regret. The speaker was just dealing

with the question of probabilities which formed the usual subject

for his meditations. "They are frightened of my making fun of them,"

he thought. When he was called back, M. de la Mole was saying with a

seriousness which seemed quite humorous to Julien who knew him so well,

"Yes, gentlemen, one finds the phrase, 'is it god, table or tub?'

especially applicable to this unhappy people. '_It is god_' exclaims

the writer of fables. It is to you, gentlemen, that this noble and

profound phrase seems to apply. Act on your own initiative, and noble

France will appear again, almost such as our ancestors made her, and as

our own eyes have seen her before the death of Louis XVI.

"England execrates disgraceful Jacobinism as much as we do, or at any

rate her noble lords do. Without English gold, Austria and Prussia

would only be able to give battle two or three times. Would that be

sufficient to ensure a successful occupation like the one which M. de

Richelieu so foolishly failed to exploit in 1817? I do not think so."

At this point there was an interruption which was stifled by the hushes

of the whole room. It came again from the old Imperial general who

wanted the blue ribbon and wished to figure among the authors of the

secret note.

"I do not think so," replied M. de la Mole, after the uproar had

subsided. He laid stress on the "I" with an insolence which charmed

Julien.

"That's a pretty piece of acting," he said to himself, as he made his

pen almost keep pace with the marquis' words.

M. de la Mole annihilated the twenty campaigns of the turncoat with a

well turned phrase.

"It is not only on foreign powers," continued the marquis in a more

even tone, "on whom we shall be able to rely for a new military

occupation. All those young men who write inflammatory articles

in the _Globe_ will provide you with three or four thousand young

captains among whom you may find men with the genius, but not the good

intentions of a Kléber, a Hoche, a Jourdan, a Pichegru."

"We did not know how to glorify him," said the president. "He should

have been immortalized."

"Finally, it is necessary for France to have two parties," went on M.

de la Mole; "but two parties not merely in name, but with clear-cut

lines of cleavage. Let us realise what has got to be crushed. On

the one hand the journalists and the electors, in a word, public

opinion; youth and all that admire it. While it is stupefying itself

with the noise of its own vain words, we have certain advantages of

administrating the expenditure of the budget."

At this point there was another interruption.

"As for you, monsieur," said M. de la Mole to the interrupter, with an

admirable haughtiness and ease of manner, "you do not spend, if the

words chokes you, but you devour the forty thousand francs put down to

you in the State budget, and the eighty thousand which you receive from

the civil list."

"Well, monsieur, since you force me to it, I will be bold enough to

take you for an example. Like your noble ancestors, who followed Saint

Louis to the crusade, you ought in return for those hundred and twenty

thousand francs to show us at any rate a regiment; a company, why, what

am I saying? say half a company, even if it only had fifty men, ready

to fight and devoted to the good cause to the point of risking their

lives in its service. You have nothing but lackeys, who in the event of

a rebellion would frighten you yourselves."

"Throne, Church, Nobility are liable to perish to-morrow, gentlemen,

so long as you refrain from creating in each department a force of

five hundred devoted men, devoted I mean, not only with all the French

courage, but with all the Spanish constancy.

"Half of this force ought to be composed of our children, our nephews,

of real gentlemen, in fact. Each of them will have beside him not a

little talkative bourgeois ready to hoist the tricolor cockade, if 1815

turns up again, but a good, frank and simple peasant like Cathelineau.

Our gentleman will have educated him, it will be his own foster brother

if it is possible. Let each of us sacrifice the fifth of his income in

order to form this little devoted force of five hundred men in each

department. Then you will be able to reckon on a foreign occupation.

The foreign soldier will never penetrate even as far as Dijon if he

is not certain of finding five hundred friendly soldiers in each

department.

"The foreign kings will only listen to you when you are in a position

to announce to them that you have twenty thousand gentlemen ready to

take up arms in order to open to them the gates of France. The service

is troublesome, you say. Gentlemen, it is the only way of saving our

lives. There is war to the death between the liberty of the press and

our existence as gentlemen. Become manufacturers, become peasants, or

take up your guns. Be timid if you like, but do not be stupid. Open

your eyes.

"'_Form your battalions_,' I would say to you in the words of the

Jacobin songs. Some noble Gustavus Adolphus will then be found who,

touched by the imminent peril of the monarchical principle, will make

a dash three hundred leagues from his own country, and will do for

you what Gustavus did for the Protestant princes. Do you want to go

on talking without acting? In fifty years' time there will be only

presidents or republics in Europe and not one king, and with those

three letters R. O. I. you will see the last of the priests and the

gentlemen. I can see nothing but candidates paying court to squalid

majorities.

"It is no use your saying that at the present time France has not

a single accredited general who is universally known and loved,

that the army is only known and organised in the interests of the

throne and the church, and that it has been deprived of all its old

troopers, while each of the Prussian and Austrian regiments count fifty

non-commissioned officers who have seen fire.

"Two hundred thousand young men of the middle classes are spoiling for

war--"

"A truce to disagreeable truths," said a grave personage in a pompous

tone. He was apparently a very high ecclesiastical dignitary, for M.

de la Mole smiled pleasantly, instead of getting angry, a circumstance

which greatly impressed Julien.

"A truce to unpleasant truths, let us resume, gentlemen. The man who

needs to have a gangrened leg cut off would be ill advised to say to

his surgeon, 'this disease is very healthy.' If I may use the metaphor,

gentlemen, the noble duke of ---- is our surgeon."

"So the great words have at last been uttered," thought Julien. "It is

towards the ---- that I shall gallop to-night."