Vie de Bohème: A Patch of Romantic Paris. Orlo Williams
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ô créneaux! ô tourelles! Remparts! fossés aux ponts mouvants! Lourds faisceaux de colonnes frêles! Fiers châteaux! modestes couvents! Cloîtres poudreux, salles antiques, Où gémissaient les saints cantiques, Où riaient les rires joyeux! Églises où priaient nos mères, Tours où combattaient nos aïeux!
or the frenzied descriptions of the witches' dance in "La Ronde du Sabbat," or lines from "La Chasse du Burgrave"—which even Hugo called "un peu trop Gothique de forme"—or with a
Çà, qu'on selle, Ecuyer, Mon fidèle Destrier. Mon cœur ploie Sous la joie Quand je broie L'étrier
proclaimed their attendance at the "Pas d'Armes du Roi Jean."
The star of the Gothic and the medieval was indeed high in the heavens, but it paled before the full sun of Araby and the East. Napoleon had dreamed of a Mohammedan empire, and before his dream could fade Navarino and Missolonghi fired men's minds again. Victor Hugo was also the champion of Oriental rhapsody. Even in 1824 he had seen the possibilities of Oriental colour in French verse, when he wrote "La Fée et la Péri," a poem in which the Peri, who stands for romanticism, says:
J'ai de vastes cités qu'en tous lieux on admire, Lahore aux champs fleuris, Golconde, Cachemire, La guerrière Damas, la royale Ispahan, Bagdad que ses remparts couvrent comme une armure, Alep dont l'immense murmure Semble au pâtre lointain le bruit d'un océan.
His collection of poems entitled "Les Orientales" was published in 1829 and took Paris by storm, provoking passionate enthusiasm and equally passionate protest. In the preface he asserts that Orientalism is a general preoccupation. "The colours of the East have come, as if spontaneously, to impress themselves upon all his [the poet's] thoughts and all his musings; his musings and his thoughts have become, in turn, and almost without his willing it, Hebrew, Turkish, Greek, Persian, Arabic, even Spanish, for Spain, too, is the East." There are fine poems in "Les Orientales"—"Les Djinns," for instance, will always be famous—but it is impossible to read the volume through to-day without considerable amusement, so very full-blooded are they. There are lofty apostrophes to Byron and the Greeks, followed by dreadful tales of Turkish cruelty, gruesome ballads like "La Voile," in which four brothers kill their sister, epigraphs like "O horror! horror! horror!" valiant Klephtes, houris, scimitars, and all the catalogue which the poet himself gives in "Novembre":
Sultans et sultanes, Pyramides, palmiers, galères capitanes, Et le tigre vorace et le chameau frugal; Djinns au vol furieux, danses des bayadères, L'Arabe qui se penche au cou des dromadaires, Et la fauve girafe au galop inégale. Alors éléphants blancs chargés de femmes brunes, Cités aux dômes d'or où les mois sont des lunes, Imams de Mahomet, mages, prêtres de Bel …
Then, as if Victor Hugo did not whip the passions enough, Alfred de Musset lent a hand in the hurly-burly with his "Contes d'Espagne et d'Italie," which made the young maniacs frantically demand:
Avez-vous vu dans Barcelone Une Andalouse au sein bruni? Pâle comme un beau soir d'automne! C'est ma maîtresse, ma lionne! La marquesa d'Amaëgui.
Delacroix, too, was sending the critics into ecstasies of rage with his vivid Eastern scenes and the horrors of his "Massacre of Scio." The ideas of the young men with inflamed sensibilities seethed in turbulent disorder. To be in the movement they had to have at least a poniard and a narghile, a medieval cloak and an Oriental divan. Those with money to spare decorated their rooms like sombre Gothic manors, those with no money enriched their conversations with a wealth of medieval diction. No make-believe was too ridiculous to shut out the actual place and time in which they lived. Balzac's novel "La Peau de Chagrin," which has won a celebrity far beyond its merits, is most unmistakably marked with the frenzies of 1830. His revelling in the supernatural, the massed effects of careful detail in the description of the curiosity shop where the wild-ass skin hangs, the wild riot of the orgy, the terrific excesses in which Valentin ruins his life, the duel and the horrible end, are just as much the genre frénétique as anything by Pétrus Borel. The hero, Valentin, is simply a type of his time, and his tirade on taking the supernatural skin is hardly an exaggeration:
"Je veux que la débauche en délire et rugissante nous emporte, dans son char à quatre chevaux, par delà les bornes du monde, pour nous verser sur des plages inconnues! Que les âmes montent dans les cieux ou se plongent dans la boue, je ne sais si alors elles s'élèvent ou s'abaissent, peu m'importe! Donc, je commande à ce pouvoir sinistre de me fondre toutes les joies dans une joie. Oui, j'ai besoin d'embrasser les plaisirs du ciel et de la terre dans une dernière étreinte, pour en mourir. Aussi souhaité-je et des priapées antiques après boire, et des chants à réveiller les morts, et de triples baisers, des baisers sans fin dont la clameur passe sur Paris comme un craquement d'incendie, y réveille les époux et les inspire une ardeur cuisante qui les rajeunissent tous, même les septuagénaires!"
As for the "orgy," it was so much a fashion that Gautier in his "Les Jeune France" scores a delightful hit with the story of a society of young men who combine for a colossal feast, in which various sections follow out in exact detail the descriptions of orgies given by their favourite novelists and the end is a farcical confusion.
Building castles in Spain is a fascinating pastime, but the ingenuities of imagination cannot entirely shut out the individual from his surroundings. From 1820 to 1830 the young man of France was continually running against the sharp corners of the world and receiving the elbow prods of his fellow-men. Exalted by his excited sensibility, he conceived at once a contempt and a hatred for the insensibility of society, which produced in him a feeling of moral superiority and solitude. This abnormal vanity, shown in the deification of "l'homme supérieur" and a proud contemplation of his social outlawry, is a third marked symptom of le mal du siècle.[5] It broke out in several different forms. One was a romantic worship of energy and strong will, as typified by the career of Napoleon. Given these qualities, a man could rise from the lowest depths to impose his wishes on the world. However, self-styled supermen have invariably found their theories rebellious to practical application, and Henri Dubois, if he started upon a Napoleonic path, soon discovered that society selects its "homme supérieur" when it wants him, and that uncalled-for aspirants receive the point of its toe. He reserved his superiority, therefore, more usually, for less material manifestations and conflicts. His rare spirit, susceptible to all "the finer shades," stood mournfully but prudently on high, scorning the base, unfeeling throng below it, and calling out through space for kindred spirits to cherish. "My friend, take care of yourself," writes young Ampère to his friend. "Obermann cries to us, 'Keep close together, ye simple men who feel the beauty of natural things.' Let us help one another, all of us who suffer." So Henri Dubois and his friends suffered and helped one another, shedding pints of tears and being just as ridiculous as they could be.
Solitary suffering makes men philosophers or poets. Philosophy requiring some intellectual capacity and mental preparation, Henri Dubois often took the further step from crying in the wilderness to enshrining his laments in metre, being encouraged in this by the certain fact that young men and true poets were indeed striking the Romantic harp to a new and surprising tune. The poet was the real "homme supérieur" of the time, not only in fancy but in fact. Henri accordingly proceeded another stage towards sublimity by way of the faulty syllogism: "The poet has an exquisite soul; I have an exquisite soul; therefore I am a poet." The Romantics conceived the poet as a God-sent prophet. This was the attitude, above all, of de Vigny; Lamartine and Sainte-Beuve adopted it in their early days, and certain passages of Victor Hugo—for instance:
O poètes sacrés, échevelés, sublimes, Allez, et répandez vos âmes sur les cimes, Sur les sommets de neige en butte aux aquilons, Sur les déserts pieux où l'esprit se recueille, Sur les bois que l'automne emporte feuille à feuille, Sur les lacs endormis dans l'ombre des vallons!
—show that he was not averse to it. So every youth who could rhyme "âme" with "flamme" put on the aureole of a "poète échevelé," revelled in the ecstasies of solitary contemplation, and sneered magnificently at all who