Kabanata Kabanata 158 · TO SCOFF, TO REIGN

There is no limit to Paris. No city has had that domination which

sometimes derides those whom it subjugates. To please you, O Athenians!

exclaimed Alexander. Paris makes more than the law, it makes the

fashion; Paris sets more than the fashion, it sets the routine. Paris

may be stupid, if it sees fit; it sometimes allows itself this luxury;

then the universe is stupid in company with it; then Paris awakes, rubs

its eyes, says: “How stupid I am!” and bursts out laughing in the face

of the human race. What a marvel is such a city! it is a strange thing

that this grandioseness and this burlesque should be amicable

neighbors, that all this majesty should not be thrown into disorder by

all this parody, and that the same mouth can to-day blow into the trump

of the Judgment Day, and to-morrow into the reed-flute! Paris has a

sovereign joviality. Its gayety is of the thunder and its farce holds a

sceptre.

Its tempest sometimes proceeds from a grimace. Its explosions, its

days, its masterpieces, its prodigies, its epics, go forth to the

bounds of the universe, and so also do its cock-and-bull stories. Its

laugh is the mouth of a volcano which spatters the whole earth. Its

jests are sparks. It imposes its caricatures as well as its ideal on

people; the highest monuments of human civilization accept its ironies

and lend their eternity to its mischievous pranks. It is superb; it has

a prodigious 14th of July, which delivers the globe; it forces all

nations to take the oath of tennis; its night of the 4th of August

dissolves in three hours a thousand years of feudalism; it makes of its

logic the muscle of unanimous will; it multiplies itself under all

sorts of forms of the sublime; it fills with its light Washington,

Kosciusko, Bolivar, Bozzaris, Riego, Bem, Manin, Lopez, John Brown,

Garibaldi; it is everywhere where the future is being lighted up, at

Boston in 1779, at the Isle de Léon in 1820, at Pesth in 1848, at

Palermo in 1860, it whispers the mighty countersign: Liberty, in the

ear of the American abolitionists grouped about the boat at Harper’s

Ferry, and in the ear of the patriots of Ancona assembled in the

shadow, to the Archi before the Gozzi inn on the seashore; it creates

Canaris; it creates Quiroga; it creates Pisacane; it irradiates the

great on earth; it was while proceeding whither its breath urge them,

that Byron perished at Missolonghi, and that Mazet died at Barcelona;

it is the tribune under the feet of Mirabeau, and a crater under the

feet of Robespierre; its books, its theatre, its art, its science, its

literature, its philosophy, are the manuals of the human race; it has

Pascal, Régnier, Corneille, Descartes, Jean-Jacques: Voltaire for all

moments, Molière for all centuries; it makes its language to be talked

by the universal mouth, and that language becomes the word; it

constructs in all minds the idea of progress, the liberating dogmas

which it forges are for the generations trusty friends, and it is with

the soul of its thinkers and its poets that all heroes of all nations

have been made since 1789; this does not prevent vagabondism, and that

enormous genius which is called Paris, while transfiguring the world by

its light, sketches in charcoal Bouginier’s nose on the wall of the

temple of Theseus and writes _Credeville the thief_ on the Pyramids.

Paris is always showing its teeth; when it is not scolding it is

laughing.

Such is Paris. The smoke of its roofs forms the ideas of the universe.

A heap of mud and stone, if you will, but, above all, a moral being. It

is more than great, it is immense. Why? Because it is daring.

To dare; that is the price of progress.

All sublime conquests are, more or less, the prizes of daring. In order

that the Revolution should take place, it does not suffice that

Montesquieu should foresee it, that Diderot should preach it, that

Beaumarchais should announce it, that Condorcet should calculate it,

that Arouet should prepare it, that Rousseau should premeditate it; it

is necessary that Danton should dare it.

The cry: _Audacity! _ is a _Fiat lux_. It is necessary, for the sake of

the forward march of the human race, that there should be proud lessons

of courage permanently on the heights. Daring deeds dazzle history and

are one of man’s great sources of light. The dawn dares when it rises.

To attempt, to brave, to persist, to persevere, to be faithful to one’s

self, to grasp fate bodily, to astound catastrophe by the small amount

of fear that it occasions us, now to affront unjust power, again to

insult drunken victory, to hold one’s position, to stand one’s ground;

that is the example which nations need, that is the light which

electrifies them. The same formidable lightning proceeds from the torch

of Prometheus to Cambronne’s short pipe.