The Human Comedy (32 page)

“Why,” Juste asked him, “did you not bide your time and follow the example of the only man to emerge since the July Revolution, by always just keeping his head above water?”

“Haven’t I said that we never know all the roots of chance? Carrel was in exactly the same position as the orator you mean: Carrel the morose young man, that bitter character, carried a whole government in his head; the one you are talking about had just one idea—to climb onto the rump of every event as it came along. Of the two, Carrel was the better man. Well, the one became a government minister, and Carrel remained a journalist; that incomplete but shrewd fellow, the minister, is still alive, but
Carrel is dead
. I would point out that that fellow has spent fifteen years making his way, and he has still only partly made it; he could get caught anytime and ground up between two carts on the high road. He has no home;
he hasn’t a palace, a stronghold of royal favor, like Metternich, nor like Villèle the sheltering roof of a reliable majority
. I don’t believe the present situation will still exist in ten years. So supposing such a sorry good fortune, I am too late; in order not to be swept aside in the upheaval I foresee, I would have to be already established in a high position.”

“What upheaval?” Juste asked.

“
August 1830
,” Marcas answered in solemn tones, stretching a hand toward Paris. “August—the child born of Youth, who tied up the sheaves of grain, and of Intellect, who had cultivated the harvest—August 1830 failed to provide for youth and intellect. Youth is going to explode like the boiler of a steam engine. Youth has no outlet in France; it is gathering an avalanche of unrecognized abilities, of legitimate and unsatisfied ambitions; the young are rarely marrying, families don’t know what to do with their children. What shock will come and shake loose these masses I do not know, but they will surge forward into the current situation and overturn it. There are laws of flux that reign in the sequence of generations, which the Roman Empire failed to recognize when the barbarians arrived. Today’s barbarians are intelligent minds. Pressure is rising among us now, slowly, quietly. The government is behaving criminally: It doesn’t recognize youth and intelligence, the two powers to whom it owes everything; it has let its hands be bound by the absurdities of the contract; it is setting up to be a victim. Louis XIV, Napoleon, England were and are all hungry for intelligent young people; in France, the young are imprisoned by the new legalities, by the noxious requirements of the election rules, by the wrong thinking of the ministerial constitution. Look at the roster of the elective chamber: You will not find a single deputy under thirty. Richelieu’s young people or Mazarin’s, the young of Turenne and Colbert, of Pitt and Saint-Just, of Napoleon and Prince Metternich—none of their youthful constituents would have a seat here. Burke, Sheridan, Fox would not be elected. Even if the age of political majority were set at twenty-one, and if the eligibility requirements were cleared of every sort of limiting condition, the regional departments still would only elect these present deputies, people with no political talent whatsoever, who cannot speak without slaughtering grammar, and among whom, over these ten years, scarcely a single statesman has emerged. We can generally make out the forces tending toward some disaster, but we cannot foresee the disaster itself. Right now we are driving our whole younger generation to turn republican because they believe the republic will bring their emancipation! They remember that the representatives of the people were young, and the young generals! This government’s foolishness is matched only by its avarice.”

That day went on echoing in our lives; Marcas confirmed us in our determination to leave France, where talented young people bursting with energy are being crushed beneath the weight of mediocre climbers, envious and insatiable.

We dined together on rue de la Harpe. From that night on we gave him our most respectful affection, and he gave us practical training in the sphere of ideas. The man knew everything; he had thought deeply about everything. He scanned the political globe, seeking the places where opportunities were the most plentiful and the most favorable for the success of our plans. He set out lines of study for us, and he urged us to move quickly, explaining the importance of timing, arguing that a massive exodus would soon begin, that its effect would be to strip France of its best energy, its young talent; that these necessarily nimble minds would choose the best destinations and that it was crucial to get there first. From then on, we would often work late by lamplight. Our generous teacher wrote us memoranda—two for Juste and three for me—marvelous instructions, full of the sort of information that only experience can yield, with guidelines that only genius can lay out. In those pages, perfumed with tobacco, jammed with writing in an almost hieroglyphic cacography, there were pointers toward fortune and uncanny predictions regarding various developments in America and Asia that have since, even before Juste and I could leave, come true.

Marcas, like us in fact, had reached utter destitution; he earned his daily living, but he had neither linen, nor coats, nor shoes. He didn’t pretend to be a better person than he was; he had dreamed of luxury along with his dream of power. He didn’t view his present self as the true Marcas; he left its current shape to the whim of daily life. He lived on the breath of his ambition, dreamed of revenge, and reproached himself for harboring so hollow an attitude. The true statesman ought above all to be indifferent to vulgar passions; like the scholar, he should care only for matters within his expertise. Through those days of poverty Marcas seemed to us a great, even an awesome man: There was something terrifying in his gaze, which looked onto a world past the one that strikes the eyes of ordinary men. He was the focus of our constant study and amazement, for youth feels an urgent need to admire (who among us has not experienced this?); the young are eager to attach to something and naturally lean toward offering themselves to the service of figures they think superior, just as they dedicate themselves to great causes. We were particularly bemused by his indifference to sentimental matters: Women had never disturbed his life. Whenever we mentioned the subject, that eternal topic of conversation among Frenchmen, he would only say, “Dresses cost too much!” He saw the look Juste and I exchanged, and he went on: “Yes, they cost far too much. The woman you buy—and that’s the least expensive sort—takes a great deal of money; the woman who gives herself free takes all our time! A woman snuffs out all activity, all ambition. Napoleon reduced woman to what she ought to be; on that point he was great. He did not fall into ruinous fantasies like Louis XIV and Louis XV; still, he had his secret lovers.”

We discovered that like Pitt, who took England to wife, Marcas carried France in his heart; he worshipped her, never had a thought that was not for his country. He was gnawed by rage at holding in his very hands the remedy for the ailment whose tenacity so saddened him and at his incapacity to apply it, but worse was his rage at France’s status as lower than Russia and England. France in third place! The cry recurred constantly in his conversation. The country’s intestinal upset had moved into his own gut! He called the chamber’s quarrels with the court cheap belowstairs squabbling revealed by so many shifts, such constant agitation, that damaged the nation’s well-being.

“They give us peace by selling off the future,” he said.

One evening, Juste and I were busy in our room, plunged in deep silence. Marcas was at work on his copying. He had refused our help with the task despite our strongest urgings; we had offered to take turns copying in his stead, so that he would have only a third of the dreary labor to do himself; he grew angry, and we stopped insisting. We heard the sound of expensive boots in our corridor and looked up at each other. The newcomer knocked at Marcas’s door, which was always left on the latch. We heard our great man say “Come in!” and then “You—here, monsieur?”

“Yes, it is I,” replied the former minister,
Emperor Diocletian to the unknown martyr
.

The two men talked for a while in low tones. Our neighbor’s voice emerged only rarely, as occurs in a meeting where the interested party begins by setting out his purpose, but suddenly Marcas burst forth at some proposal we had not caught.

“You would laugh at me if I took you seriously!” he cried. “The Jesuits are over, but Jesuitism is eternal! There’s no good faith in your Machiavellianism or in your generosity. You know how to count, but no one can count on you. Your royal court is made up of owls afraid of the light, old men who are either terrified of the young or pay them no attention. And the government does the same as the court. You’ve searched out the leftovers of the Empire, just as the Restoration court recruited Louis XIV’s old Voltigeur troops! So far, people have taken your cowardly, timid evasions for smart maneuvering, but the dangers will come, and the young generation will rise up as they did in 1790. Our youth did some fine things back then. Now you keep changing ministers like a sick man changing positions in bed. These fidgetings show the decrepitude of your government. Your system of political evasions will be turned against you because the country will tire of all this equivocation. The nation won’t tell you outright that it’s tired of it; an invalid never knows exactly
how
he’s dying—the
why
is for the historian to say—but die you surely will, for failing to ask the youth of France for their strength and vigor, their dedication and ardor; for scorning capable people, for not picking them out, with love, from this beautiful generation; for always, in every sphere, choosing mediocrity. You come to ask my support, but you are a part of that decrepit mob made hideous by their self-interest, the crowd that trembles, that cringes, that wants to reduce France to a mean thing because you yourselves are mean things. My strong nature, my ideas would be like poison to you. You’ve tricked me twice, twice I’ve brought you down, and you know it. For us to join forces a third time, it would have to be very serious. I would kill myself if I allowed you to dupe me again, for I would lose faith in my own person: Not you but I would be to blame.”

Then we heard humble appeals, hot pleadings to not deprive the nation of its finest talent. There was talk of “patriotism”; Marcas uttered some sardonic grunts of “Hmpf hmpf!” he mocked his would-be employer. The politician grew more explicit: He acknowledged the superiority of his former counselor and swore to see to it that Marcas would stay on in the administration and become a deputy. Then he offered him a position of real eminence, saying that he, the minister, would take a subordinate role to Marcas, that he could only be the lieutenant to such a figure. He was expected to join the new cabinet, he said, and did not want to return to power unless Marcas held a post that was worthy of him; he had mentioned that condition to the others, and Marcas was understood to be indispensable.

Marcas refused.

The minister said, “I’ve never before been in a position to keep my commitments; here is a chance to be faithful to my promises, and you reject it.”

Marcas did not reply. The fine boots rang in the corridor again, moving toward the stairwell.

“Marcas! Marcas!” the two of us shouted, rushing into his room. “Why refuse? The man meant what he said. His conditions were honorable. And besides, you’d be working with the other ministers!”

In the blink of an eye we listed a hundred reasons why Marcas should agree: The future minister’s tone was honest; without seeing him, we were sure he was not lying.

“I have no clothes,” Marcas said.

“We’ll take care of that,” Juste said, looking over at me.

Marcas was brave enough to trust us; a light flared in his eyes. He ran a hand through his hair, baring his forehead in one of those gestures that reveal a belief in good fortune, and when he had, so to speak, unveiled his face, we saw a man who was utterly unknown to us: Marcas sublime, Marcas in power, the mind in its element, the bird released into the air, the fish returned to the water, the horse galloping across the steppe. It was transitory: The forehead darkened again, and he had a kind of vision of his destiny. Halting Doubt followed close upon the heels of White-Winged Hope. We left him.

“Well,” I said to Doctor, “we promised, but how will we manage it?”

“We’ll think overnight,” Juste replied, “and in the morning we’ll see what ideas we’ve had.”

The next morning we took a walk in the Luxembourg Gardens. We reviewed the events of the night before, both of us surprised at Marcas’s feeble capacity for confronting life’s smaller difficulties—he who was cowed by nothing when it came to solving the most complex problems of theoretical or practical politics. But these great natures are all susceptible to tripping over a grain of sand, to fumbling the most promising projects for lack of a thousand francs. It is the story of Napoleon who for lack of boots did not go off to the Indies.

“What have you come up with?” asked Juste.

“Well, I have a way to get a full outfit on credit.”

“Where?”

“At Humann’s.”

“How is that?”

“Humann, my good fellow, never goes to his clients, the clients come to him, so he doesn’t know whether I am rich; all he knows is that I dress well and carry off the suit he makes for me. I’ll tell him that I’ve just been handed an uncle from the provinces whose indifference in matters of dress is a huge problem for me in the fine houses where I hope to marry, and that he wouldn’t be Humann if he sent his bill before three months.”

Doctor found this an excellent idea for a vaudeville act but a deplorable one for real life, and he doubted it could succeed. But I swear to you, Humann did dress Marcas and, artist that he is, managed to dress him as a political figure should be dressed.

Juste gave Marcas two hundred francs, the earnings off two watches bought on credit and immediately handed over to the pawnshop. Myself, I said nothing about the six shirts and all the necessary linen that cost me only the pleasure of asking for them from the forelady of a lingerie shop with whom I had spent some time during carnival. Marcas accepted it all with no more thanks than was appropriate. He did inquire how we had come by all this treasure, and we made him laugh for the last time. We gazed upon our Marcas the way shipowners who have exhausted their every last credit and all their resources to fit out a vessel must look on as it hoists sail.