CHAPTER I

I become a fully fledged employé--Bad plays--Thibaut--My studies with him--Where they have been of use to me--_Amaury_ and the consumptives--My reading--Walter Scott--Cooper--Byron--The pleasure of eating _Sauerkraut_ at the Parthenon

On 1 January 1824 I was promoted from being one of the supernumerary clerks at twelve hundred francs per annum to the position of being a regular employé at fifteen hundred. I considered this a most flourishing condition of affairs, and thought that it was now time to send for my mother. I had not seen her for nine months, and the long separation began to grieve me. During these nine months I had made a sad discovery, which it was quite as well I should make, namely, that I had not learnt anything at all that I needed to learn, in order to further my progress in the career I wished to take up. But this did not discourage me, for I felt satisfied that I was now, once for all, firmly established in Paris and that I should not starve, thanks to my 125 francs per month; so I redoubled my zeal, and, ceasing to think of the limit of time I had fixed wherein to attain my end, I resolved to use it in applying myself to study.

Unfortunately, after subtracting my office hours, very little time remained to me. I had to be at the Palais-Royal by half-past ten in the morning, and we did not leave until five in the evening. Moreover, there was a peculiar function connected with the secretary's office, which did not hold with respect to any other office. Either Ernest or I had to return, from eight till ten o'clock in the evening, while the Duc d'Orléans lived at Neuilly, in order to attend to what was called the _portefeuille_; and the Duc d'Orléans, being fond of a country life, spent three-quarters of the year at Neuilly. The task was not a difficult one, but it was imperative; it consisted in sending off by courier to the Duc d'Orléans the evening papers and his day's letters, and in receiving in return the orders for the next day. This meant a loss of two hours in the evening, and, of course, made it impossible to go to any play except at the Théâtre-Français, which adjoined our offices. It is but fair to say that M. Oudard, who had three tickets a day at his disposal for any seat in the theatre, sometimes indulged us with one of them--an act of generosity hardly ever displayed except when poor plays were on. Still, the expression "poor plays" must only be understood to mean the days when neither Talma nor Mademoiselle Mars was acting. But, since I wanted to go to the theatre for purposes of study, those days of poor plays were often profitable exhibitions for me. Then, too, I entered into an arrangement with Ernest by which each of us had his week, and, in this way, we secured fifteen free nights per month.

I had made the acquaintance of a young doctor, named Thibaut; he had no practice at that time, although he was not without ability. One cure he brought about made his reputation, and another his fortune. He cured Félix Deviolaine--the young cousin of whom I have several times spoken and of whom I shall have occasion to speak again--of a chest complaint that had reached the last stages, by means of inducing articular rheumatism, which drew off the inflammation; and by sheer skill he managed to cure the Marquise de Lagrange, whom he accompanied to Italy, of a chronic affection which was considered incurable. When the marquise was restored to perfect health, she was so grateful that she married him, and they both live to-day on their estates near Gros-Bois. As Thibaut has the control of a fortune of forty to fifty thousand livres income, he no longer practises the craft of medicine except to benefit his flowers and fruits.

But, at this period, Thibaut, like Adolphe and myself, was penniless; we were both his patients, and, pecuniarily speaking, very bad ones. How came we to be Thibaut's patients? I will explain. In 1823 and 1824 it was all the fashion to suffer from chest complaint; everybody was consumptive, poets especially; it was good form to spit blood after each emotion that was at all inclined to be sensational, and to die before reaching the age of thirty. Of course, Adolphe and I, both young, tall and thin, considered we were fully entitled to this privilege, and many people who knew us agreed we had some right thereto. I have now lost all claim to this distinction, but, to be fair towards Adolphe, he still has his; for now, at forty-six, he is just as tall and as thin as he was then, when he was twenty-one.

Thibaut knew everything of which I was ignorant, so he undertook my education, and it was no light task. We spent nearly all our evenings together in a tiny room in the rue du Pélican, which looked out on the passage Véro-Dodat. I was a hundred yards off the Palais-Royal, so it was the easiest thing imaginable to go from my quarters to make up my packet for the courier. In the morning, I often accompanied Thibaut to the Hôpital de la Charité, where I picked up a little knowledge of physiology and anatomy, although I have never been able to overcome my aversion towards operations and dead bodies. From these visits accrued a certain amount of medical and surgical knowledge, which has often come in very usefully in my novel-writing. As, for example, in _Amaury_, where I traced the various phases of a lung disease in my heroine, Madeleine, with such accuracy that once I was paid the compliment of a visit from M. Noailles, who came to ask me to stop the run of this novel in the _Presse._ His daughter and his son-in-law, who were both in the same stage of consumption, had recognised their precise symptoms in Madeleine's illness, and both waited impatiently each morning for the paper, to know whether M. d'Avrigny's daughter was going to die or not. As M. d'Avrigny's daughter had been condemned to death both by fate and by her author, the _feuilleton_ was interrupted and, to comfort the two poor invalids, I improvised, in manuscript, a conclusion which raised their hopes, but which, alas! did not restore them to health. The _feuilleton_ was not resumed until after their death. The readers of the _Presse_ had noticed the interruption, but were ignorant of its cause. Now they know.

I have said that I went with Thibaut to the Hôpital de la Charité most mornings, from six to seven o'clock. In the evening, we studied physics and chemistry in his room; and it was in his room that I made my first study of the poisons used by Madame de Villefort in _Monte-Cristo_--a study which I followed and perfected later, with Ruolz.

A good-looking young neighbour named Mademoiselle Walker, who was a milliner, used to join us in our researches. Like la Fontaine's hen, she failed to set Thibaut and me at variance, although she tried all sorts of devices, but happily none was successful, and we all three managed to keep on friendly terms.

I owe much to Thibaut for teaching me method in working, as well as for actual knowledge. I will relate later how Thibaut, whose name is several times quoted in _l'Histoire de dix ans_, by Louis Blanc, was obliged, by reason of his relationship with the family of Maréchal Gérard, to play a certain part in the Revolution of July.

At Lassagne's persuasion I branched out in other directions, and began a course of reading. Walter Scott came first. The first novel I read by the "Scottish Bard," as he was then called, was _Ivanhoe_. Accustomed to the mild plots of Madame Cottin, or to the eccentric pranks of the author of the _Barons de Felsheim_ and of the _Enfant du Carnaval_, it took me some time to get used to the rude, uncouth ways of Gurth the swineherd, and to the facetious jokes of Wamba, Cedric's jester. But when the author introduced me to the old Saxon's romantic dining-hall; when I had seen the fire on the hearth, fed by a whole oak tree, with its light sparkling on the monk and on the dress of the unknown pilgrim; when I saw all the members of the family of the thane take their places at the long oak board, from the head of the castle, the king of his territory, to the meanest servitor; when I saw the Jew Isaac in his yellow cap, and his daughter Rebecca in her gold corselet; when the tourney at Ashby had given me a foretaste of the powerful sword-shakes and lance-thrusts that I should again come across in Froissart, oh! then, little by little, the clouds that had veiled my sight began to lift, I saw open out before me more extended horizons than any that had appeared to me when Adolphe de Leuven worked these changes in my provincial imagination that I have already mentioned.

Next followed Cooper, with his big forests, his vast prairies, his boundless oceans, his _Pioneers_, his _Prairie_, his _Redskins_--three masterpieces of description, wherein absence of substance is well concealed beneath wealth of style, so that one goes the whole way through a novel of his, like the apostle, upon ground ever ready to yawn open and swallow one up, and yet, nevertheless, one is upheld, not by faith but by style, from the first page to the last.

Then came Byron--Byron, lyric and dramatic poet, who died at Missolonghi just when I was beginning to study him in Paris. There had been a tremendous rage over Lord Byron for some time; the glory of the poet had derived fresh glamour from the Greek camp bivouacs; his name would henceforth be associated with those of the famous Greeks of old; not only would Byron be spoken of as akin to Sir Walter Scott and Chateaubriand, but in the same breath as the names of Mavrocordato, Odysseus and Canaris.

One day, before the world even knew that the famous poet was ill, we read in the papers as follows:--

"MISSOLONGHI, 20 _April_

"Our town presents a most touching spectacle; we have all gone into mourning, for our illustrious benefactor died at six o'clock yesterday evening, the 19th instant."

Byron had died at the age of thirty-seven, like Raphael; he had died during the Easter celebrations, and thirty-seven volleys were fired--one for each year of his life--in every town, spreading the news of his death from Thrace to the Piræus, and from Epeirus to the Asiatic coasts.

Courts of justice, public offices and shops were closed for three days; for three days dancing, public amusements and the sound of musical instruments were forbidden; and the public mourning lasted for three weeks.

Poor Byron! he only desired to fight and to help to win a victory, or, if conquered, to die arms in hand. As a general, it would have given him great joy to lead the Souliotes at the siege of Lepanto; Lepanto, the land of Don Juan and of Charles the Fifth, seemed to him a fitting name with which to link his own; it was a noble land to bleed for and to die in.

But he was not to realise that happiness; he died at Missolonghi, and it was he who made an unknown land famous, instead of himself receiving lustre from a sacred land; people say, "Byron died at Missolonghi," not "Missolonghi, the place where Byron died."

The great man had no notion that, in dying for the Greeks, he was only dying so that Europe, as the Duc d'Orléans once expressed it to me, might have the pleasure of eating sauerkraut at the foot of the Parthenon!

Poor immortal bard, who died in the hope that the news of his death would resound through all hearts! what would he have said if he could have heard, as I rushed in, the newspaper containing the fatal notice in my hand, crying despairingly, "Byron is dead," one of the assistants in our office ask, "Who was Byron?" Such a question caused me both pain and pleasure mixed; I had, then, found someone even more ignorant than myself, and he one of the chief clerks in the office. Had it been only an ordinary copying clerk I should not have felt so consoled.

This unlooked for death of one of the greatest poets of the time made a deep impression upon me; I felt instinctively that Byron was more than a poet, that he was one of those leaders whose inspired utterances, in the silence of the night and in the obscurity in which art lives, are heard throughout all nations, whose shining rays lighten the whole world. Such men are usually not only prophets but also martyrs. They create from out their own sufferings the divine thoughts which act as incentives to others; it is at the spectacle of their own tortures that they utter cries which clutch the heart. Had Prometheus or Napoleon been poets, think what verses each would have engraved on his rock of doom!

We will try, then, to give an account of the sufferings of this man, who was driven from his own country as though he were a Barabbas, to die for the Greeks as Christ did for the Jews.

Death must be passed through before there can be transfiguration.