Chapter 9
When every one had arrived; when the buzz of talk ceased after repeated efforts on the part of M. de Bargeton, who, obedient to his wife, went round the room much as the beadle makes the circle of the church, tapping the pavement with his wand; when silence, in fact, was at last secured, Lucien went to the round table near Mme. de Bargeton. A fierce thrill of excitement ran through him as he did so. He announced in an uncertain voice that, to prevent disappointment, he was about to read the masterpieces of a great poet, discovered only recently (for although André de Chénier’s poems appeared in 1819, no one in Angoulême had so much as heard of him). Everybody interpreted this announcement in one way--it was a shift of Mme. de Bargeton’s, meant to save the poet’s self-love and to put the audience at ease.
Lucien began with _Le Malade_, and the poem was received with a murmur of applause; but he followed it with _L’Aveugle_, which proved too great a strain upon the average intellect. None but artists or those endowed with the artistic temperament can understand and sympathize with him in the diabolical torture of that reading. If poetry is to be rendered by the voice, and if the listener is to grasp all that it means, the most devout attention is essential; there should be an intimate alliance between the reader and his audience, or swift and subtle communication of the poet’s thought and feeling becomes impossible. Here this close sympathy was lacking, and Lucien in consequence was in the position of an angel who should endeavor to sing of heaven amid the chucklings of hell. An intelligent man in the sphere most stimulating to his faculties can see in every direction, like a snail; he has the keen scent of a dog, the ears of a mole; he can hear, and feel, and see all that is going on around him. A musician or a poet knows at once whether his audience is listening in admiration or fails to follow him, and feels it as the plant that revives or droops under favorable or unfavorable conditions. The men who had come with their wives had fallen to discussing their own affairs; by the acoustic law before mentioned, every murmur rang in Lucien’s ear; he saw all the gaps caused by the spasmodic workings of jaws sympathetically affected, the teeth that seemed to grin defiance at him.
When, like the dove in the deluge, he looked round for any spot on which his eyes might rest, he saw nothing but rows of impatient faces. Their owners clearly were waiting for him to make an end; they had come together to discuss questions of practical interest. With the exceptions of Laure de Rastignac, the Bishop, and two or three of the young men, they one and all looked bored. As a matter of fact, those who understand poetry strive to develop the germs of another poetry, quickened within them by the poet’s poetry; but this glacial audience, so far from attaining to the spirit of the poet, did not even listen to the letter.
Lucien felt profoundly discouraged; he was damp with chilly perspiration; a glowing glance from Louise, to whom he turned, gave him courage to persevere to the end, but this poet’s heart was bleeding from countless wounds.
“Do you find this very amusing, Fifine?” inquired the wizened Lili, who perhaps had expected some kind of gymnastics.
“Don’t ask me what I think, dear; I cannot keep my eyes open when any one begins to read aloud.”
“I hope that Naïs will not give us poetry often in the evenings,” said Francis. “If I am obliged to attend while somebody reads aloud after dinner, it upsets my digestion.”
“Poor dearie,” whispered Zéphirine, “take a glass of eau _sucrée_.”
“It was very well declaimed,” said Alexandre, “but I like whist better myself.”
After this dictum, which passed muster as a joke from the play on the word “whist,” several card-players were of the opinion that the reader’s voice needed a rest, and on this pretext one or two couples slipped away into the card-room. But Louise, and the Bishop, and pretty Laure de Rastignac besought Lucien to continue, and this time he caught the attention of his audience with Chénier’s spirited reactionary _Iambes_. Several persons, carried away by his impassioned delivery, applauded the reading without understanding the sense. People of this sort are impressed by vociferation, as a coarse palate is tickled by strong spirits.
During the interval, as they partook of ices, Zéphirine despatched Francis to examine the volume, and informed her neighbor Amélie that the poetry was in print.
Amélie brightened visibly.
“Why, that is easily explained,” said she. “M. de Rubempré works for a printer. It is as if a pretty woman should make her own dresses,” she added, looking at Lolotte.
“He printed his poetry himself!” said the women among themselves.
“Then, why does he call himself M. de Rubempré?” inquired Jacques. “If a noble takes a handicraft, he ought to lay his name aside.”
“So he did as a matter of fact,” said Zizine, “but his name was plebeian, and he took his mother’s name, which is noble.”
“Well, if his verses are printed, we can read them for ourselves,” said Astolphe.
This piece of stupidity complicated the question, until Sixte du Châtelet condescended to inform these unlettered folk that the prefatory announcement was no oratorical flourish, but a statement of fact, and added that the poems had been written by a Royalist brother of Marie-Joseph Chénier, the Revolutionary leader. All Angoulême, except Mme. de Rastignac and her two daughters and the Bishop, who had really felt the grandeur of the poetry, were mystified, and took offence at the hoax. There was a smothered murmur, but Lucien did not heed it. The intoxication of the poetry was upon him; he was far away from the hateful world, striving to render in speech the music that filled his soul, seeing the faces about him through a cloudy haze. He read the sombre Elegy on the Suicide, lines in the taste of a by-gone day, pervaded by sublime melancholy; then he turned to the page where the line occurs, “Thy songs are sweet, I love to say them over,” and ended with the delicate idyll _Néere_.
Mme. de Bargeton sat with one hand buried in her curls, heedless of the havoc she wrought among them, gazing before her with unseeing eyes, alone in her drawing-room, lost in delicious dreaming; for the first time in her life she had been transported to the sphere which was hers by right of nature. Judge, therefore, how unpleasantly she was disturbed by Amélie, who took it upon herself to express the general wish.
“Naïs,” this voice broke in, “we came to hear M. Chardon’s poetry, and you are giving us poetry out of a book. The extracts are very nice, but the ladies feel a patriotic preference for the wine of the country; they would rather have it.”
“The French language does not lend itself very readily to poetry, does it?” Astolphe remarked to Châtelet. “Cicero’s prose is a thousand times more poetical to my way of thinking.”
“The true poetry of France is song, lyric verse,” Châtelet answered.
“Which proves that our language is eminently adapted for music,” said Adrien.
“I should like very much to hear the poetry that has cost Naïs her reputation,” said Zéphirine; “but after receiving Amélie’s request in such a way, it is not very likely that she will give us a specimen.”
“She ought to have them recited in justice to herself,” said Francis. “The little fellow’s genius is his sole justification.”
“You have been in the diplomatic service,” said Amélie to M. du Châtelet, “go and manage it somehow.”
“Nothing easier,” said the Baron.
The Princess’ private secretary, being accustomed to petty manoeuvres of this kind, went to the Bishop and contrived to bring him to the fore. At the Bishop’s entreaty, Naïs had no choice but to ask Lucien to recite his own verses for them, and the Baron received a languishing smile from Amélie as the reward of his prompt success.
“Decidedly, the Baron is a very clever man,” she observed to Lolotte.
But Amélie’s previous acidulous remark about women who made their own dresses rankled in Lolotte’s mind.
“Since when have you begun to recognize the Emperor’s barons?” she asked, smiling.
Lucien had essayed to deify his beloved in an ode, dedicated to her under a title in favor with all lads who write verse after leaving school. This ode, so fondly cherished, so beautiful--since it was the outpouring of all the love in his heart, seemed to him to be the one piece of his own work that could hold its own with Chénier’s verse; and with a tolerably fatuous glance at Mme. de Bargeton, he announced “TO HER!” He struck an attitude proudly for the delivery of the ambitious piece, for his author’s self-love felt safe and at ease behind Mme. de Bargeton’s petticoat. And at the selfsame moment Mme. de Bargeton betrayed her own secret to the women’s curious eyes. Although she had always looked down upon this audience from her own loftier intellectual heights, she could not help trembling for Lucien. Her face was troubled, there was a sort of mute appeal for indulgence in her glances, and while the verses were recited she was obliged to lower her eyes and dissemble her pleasure as stanza followed stanza.
TO HER.
Out of the glowing heart of the torrent of glory and light, At the foot of Jehovah’s throne where the angels stand afar, Each on a seistron of gold repeating the prayers of the night, Put up for each by his star.
Out from the cherubim choir a bright-haired Angel springs, Veiling the glory of God that dwells on a dazzling brow, Leaving the courts of heaven to sink upon silver wings Down to our world below.
God looked in pity on earth, and the Angel, reading His thought, Came down to lull the pain of the mighty spirit at strife, Reverent bent o’er the maid, and for age left desolate brought Flowers of the springtime of life.
Bringing a dream of hope to solace the mother’s fears, Hearkening unto the voice of the tardy repentant cry, Glad as angels are glad, to reckon Earth’s pitying tears, Given with alms of a sigh.
One there is, and but one, bright messenger sent from the skies Whom earth like a lover fain would hold from the heav’nward flight; But the angel, weeping, turns and gazes with sad, sweet eyes Up to the heaven of light.
Not by the radiant eyes, not by the kindling glow Of virtue sent from God, did I know the secret sign, Nor read the token sent on a white and dazzling brow Of an origin divine.
Nay, it was Love grown blind and dazed with excess of light, Striving and striving in vain to mingle Earth and Heaven, Helpless and powerless against the invincible armor bright By the dread archangel given.
Ah! be wary, take heed, lest aught should be seen or heard Of the shining seraph band, as they take the heavenward way; Too soon the Angel on Earth will learn the magical word Sung at the close of the day.
Then you shall see afar, rifting the darkness of night, A gleam as of dawn that spread across the starry floor, And the seaman that watch for a sign shall mark the track of their flight, A luminous pathway in Heaven and a beacon for evermore.
“Do you read the riddle?” said Amélie, giving M. du Châtelet a coquettish glance.
“It is the sort of stuff that we all of us wrote more or less after we left school,” said the Baron with a bored expression--he was acting his part of arbiter of taste who has seen everything. “We used to deal in Ossianic mists, Malvinas and Fingals and cloudy shapes, and warriors who got out of their tombs with stars above their heads. Nowadays this poetical frippery has been replaced by Jehovah, angels, seistrons, the plumes of seraphim, and all the paraphernalia of paradise freshened up with a few new words such as ‘immense, infinite, solitude, intelligence’; you have lakes, and the words of the Almighty, a kind of Christianized Pantheism, enriched with the most extraordinary and unheard-of rhymes. We are in quite another latitude, in fact; we have left the North for the East, but the darkness is just as thick as before.”
“If the ode is obscure, the declaration is very clear, it seems to me,” said Zéphirine.
“And the archangel’s armor is a tolerably thin gauze robe,” said Francis.
Politeness demanded that the audience should profess to be enchanted with the poem; and the women, furious because they had no poets in their train to extol them as angels, rose, looked bored by the reading, murmuring, “Very nice!” “Charming!” “Perfect!” with frigid coldness.
“If you love me, do not congratulate the poet or his angel,” Lolotte laid her commands on her dear Adrien in imperious tones, and Adrien was fain to obey.
“Empty words, after all,” Zéphirine remarked to Francis, “and love is a poem that we live.”
“You have just expressed the very thing that I was thinking, Zizine, but I should not have put it so neatly,” said Stanislas, scanning himself from top to toe with loving attention.
“I would give, I don’t know how much, to see Naïs’ pride brought down a bit,” said Amélie, addressing Châtelet. “Naïs sets up to be an archangel, as if she were better than the rest of us, and mixes us up with low people; his father was an apothecary, and his mother is a nurse; his sister works in a laundry, and he himself is a printer’s foreman.”
“If his father sold biscuits for worms” (_vers_), said Jacques, “he ought to have made his son take them.”
“He is continuing in his father’s line of business, for the stuff that he has just been reading to us is a drug in the market, it seems,” said Stanislas, striking one of his most killing attitudes. “Drug for drug, I would rather have something else.”
Every one apparently combined to humiliate Lucien by various aristocrats’ sarcasms. Lili the religious thought it a charitable deed to use any means of enlightening Naïs, and Naïs was on the brink of a piece of folly. Francis the diplomatist undertook the direction of the silly conspiracy; every one was interested in the progress of the drama; it would be something to talk about to-morrow. The ex-consul, being far from anxious to engage in a duel with a young poet who would fly into a rage at the first hint of insult under his lady’s eyes, was wise enough to see that the only way of dealing Lucien his deathblow was by the spiritual arm which was safe from vengeance. He therefore followed the example set by Châtelet the astute, and went to the Bishop. Him he proceeded to mystify.
He told the Bishop that Lucien’s mother was a woman of uncommon powers and great modesty, and that it was she who found the subjects for her son’s verses. Nothing pleased Lucien so much, according to the guileful Francis, as any recognition of her talents--he worshiped his mother. Then, having inculcated these notions, he left the rest to time. His lordship was sure to bring out the insulting allusion, for which he had been so carefully prepared, in the course of conversation.
When Francis and the Bishop joined the little group where Lucien stood, the circle who gave him the cup of hemlock to drain by little sips watched him with redoubled interest. The poet, luckless young man, being a total stranger, and unaware of the manners and customs of the house, could only look at Mme. de Bargeton and give embarrassed answers to embarrassing questions. He knew neither the names nor condition of the people about him; the women’s silly speeches made him blush for them, and he was at his wits’ end for a reply. He felt, moreover, how very far removed he was from these divinities of Angoulême when he heard himself addressed sometimes as M. Chardon, sometimes as M. de Rubempré, while they addressed each other as Lolotte, Adrien, Astolphe, Lili and Fifine. His confusion rose to a height when, taking Lili for a man’s surname, he addressed the coarse M. de Senonches as M. Lili; that Nimrod broke in upon him with a “_MONSIEUR LULU?_” and Mme. de Bargeton flushed red to the eyes.
“A woman must be blind indeed to bring this little fellow among us!” muttered Senonches.
Zéphirine turned to speak to the Marquise de Pimentel--“Do you not see a strong likeness between M. Chardon and M. de Cante-Croix, madame?” she asked in a low but quite audible voice.
“The likeness is ideal,” smiled Mme. de Pimentel.
“Glory has a power of attraction to which we can confess,” said Mme. de Bargeton, addressing the Marquise. “Some women are as much attracted by greatness as others by littleness,” she added, looking at Francis.
The was beyond Zéphirine’s comprehension; she thought her consul a very great man; but the Marquise laughed, and her laughter ranged her on Naïs’ side.
“You are very fortunate, monsieur,” said the Marquis de Pimentel, addressing Lucien for the purpose of calling him M. de Rubempré, and not M. Chardon, as before; “you should never find time heavy on your hands.”
“Do you work quickly?” asked Lolotte, much in the way that she would have asked a joiner “if it took long to make a box.”
The bludgeon stroke stunned Lucien, but he raised his head at Mme. de Bargeton’s reply--
“My dear, poetry does not grow in M. de Rubempré’s head like grass in our courtyards.”
“Madame, we cannot feel too reverently towards the noble spirits in whom God has set some ray of this light,” said the Bishop, addressing Lolotte. “Yes, poetry is something holy. Poetry implies suffering. How many silent nights those verses that you admire have cost! We should bow in love and reverence before the poet; his life here is almost always a life of sorrow; but God doubtless reserves a place in heaven for him among His prophets. This young man is a poet,” he added laying a hand on Lucien’s head; “do you not see the sign of Fate set on that high forehead of his?”
Glad to be so generously championed, Lucien made his acknowledgments in a grateful look, not knowing that the worthy prelate was to deal his deathblow.
Mme. de Bargeton’s eyes traveled round the hostile circle. Her glances went like arrows to the depths of her rivals’ hearts, and left them twice as furious as before.
“Ah, monseigneur,” cried Lucien, hoping to break thick heads with his golden sceptre, “but ordinary people have neither your intellect nor your charity. No one heeds our sorrows, our toil is unrecognized. The gold-digger working in the mine does not labor as we to wrest metaphors from the heart of the most ungrateful of all languages. If this is poetry--to give ideas such definite and clear expressions that all the world can see and understand--the poet must continually range through the entire scale of human intellects, so that he can satisfy the demands of all; he must conceal hard thinking and emotion, two antagonistic powers, beneath the most vivid color; he must know how to make one word cover a whole world of thought; he must give the results of whole systems of philosophy in a few picturesque lines; indeed, his songs are like seeds that must break into blossom in other hearts wherever they find the soil prepared by personal experience. How can you express unless you first have felt? And is not passion suffering? Poetry is only brought forth after painful wanderings in the vast regions of thought and life. There are men and women in books, who seem more really alive to us than men and women who have lived and died--Richardson’s Clarissa, Chénier’s Camille, the Delia of Tibullus, Ariosto’s Angelica, Dante’s Francesca, Molière’s Alceste, Beaumarchais’ Figaro, Scott’s Rebecca the Jewess, the Don Quixote of Cervantes,--do we not owe these deathless creations to immortal throes?”
“And what are you going to create for us?” asked Châtelet.
“If I were to announce such conceptions, I should give myself out for a man of genius, should I not?” answered Lucien. “And besides, such sublime creations demand a long experience of the world and a study of human passion and interests which I could not possibly have made; but I have made a beginning,” he added, with bitterness in his tone, as he took a vengeful glance round the circle; “the time of gestation is long----”
“Then it will be a case of difficult labor,” interrupted M. du Hautoy.
“Your excellent mother might assist you,” suggested the Bishop.
The epigram, innocently made by the good prelate, the long-looked-for revenge, kindled a gleam of delight in all eyes. The smile of satisfied caste that traveled from mouth to mouth was aggravated by M. de Bargeton’s imbecility; he burst into a laugh, as usual, some moments later.
“Monseigneur, you are talking a little above our heads; these ladies do not understand your meaning,” said Mme. de Bargeton, and the words paralyzed the laughter, and drew astonished eyes upon her. “A poet who looks to the Bible for his inspiration has a mother indeed in the Church.--M. de Rubempré, will you recite _Saint John in Patmos_ for us, or _Belshazzar’s Feast_, so that his lordship may see that Rome is still the _Magna Parens_ of Virgil?”
The women exchanged smiles at the Latin words.
The bravest and highest spirits know times of prostration at the outset of life. Lucien had sunk to the depths at the blow, but he struck the bottom with his feet, and rose to the surface again, vowing to subjugate this little world. He rose like a bull, stung to fury by a shower of darts, and prepared to obey Louise by declaiming _Saint John in Patmos_; but by this time the card-tables had claimed their complement of players, who returned to the accustomed groove to find amusement there which poetry had not afforded them. They felt besides that the revenge of so many outraged vanities would be incomplete unless it were followed up by contemptuous indifference; so they showed their tacit disdain for the native product by leaving Lucien and Mme. de Bargeton to themselves. Every one appeared to be absorbed in his own affairs; one chattered with the prefect about a new crossroad, another proposed to vary the pleasures of the evening with a little music. The great world of Angoulême, feeling that it was no judge of poetry, was very anxious, in the first place, to hear the verdict of the Pimentels and the Rastignacs, and formed a little group about them. The great influence wielded in the department by these two families was always felt on every important occasion; every one was jealous of them, every one paid court to them, foreseeing that they might some day need that influence.
“What do you think of our poet and his poetry?” Jacques asked of the Marquise. Jacques used to shoot over the lands belonging to the Pimentel family.
“Why, it is not bad for provincial poetry,” she said, smiling; “and besides, such a beautiful poet cannot do anything amiss.”
Every one thought the decision admirable; it traveled from lip to lip, gaining malignance by the way. Then Châtelet was called upon to accompany M. du Bartas on the piano while he mangled the great solo from _Figaro_; and the way being opened to music, the audience, as in duty bound, listened while Châtelet in turn sang one of Chateaubriand’s ballads, a chivalrous ditty made in the time of the Empire. Duets followed, of the kind usually left to boarding-school misses, and rescued from the schoolroom by Mme. du Brossard, who meant to make a brilliant display of her dear Camille’s talents for M. de Séverac’s benefit.
Mme. du Bargeton, hurt by the contempt which every one showed her poet, paid back scorn for scorn by going to her boudoir during these performances. She was followed by the prelate. His Vicar-General had just been explaining the profound irony of the epigram into which he had been entrapped, and the Bishop wished to make amends. Mlle. de Rastignac, fascinated by the poetry, also slipped into the boudoir without her mother’s knowledge.