IN THE YEAR 1817
1. THE YEAR 1817Eighteen seventeen is the year that Louis XVIII, with a certain royal aplomb not devoid of arrogance, called the twenty-second year of his reign. It is the year Monsieur Bruguière de Sorsum, the translator of Shakespeare, became famous. All the wigmakers' shops, hoping for the return of powdered wigs along with the royal bird, were awash with azure and fleurs-de-lis. It was the age of innocence when the comte Lynch sat every Sunday as churchwarden in the official pew at Saint-Germain-des-Prés decked out as a peer of France, with his red sash and his long beak and that majestic profile peculiar to a man who has done a remarkable deed. The remarkable deed performed by Monsieur Lynch was that, as mayor of Bordeaux, he had handed the town over a little too soon to Monsieur le duc d'Angoulême, on March 12, 1814. Hence his peerage. In 1817, it was all the rage to bury the heads of little boys from four to six years old under enormous tanned leather caps with earflaps, which looked rather like Eskimo cowls. The French army was dressed in white, Austrian style, the regiments were known as legions, and instead of numbers they wore the names of départements. Napoléon was on Saint Helena, and as England refused his request for green cloth, he was having his old riding habits turned. In 1817, Pellegrini sang, Mademoiselle Bigottini danced, Potier reigned, Odry did not yet exist. Madame Saqui took over from Forioso. There were still Prussians in France. Monsieur Delalot was somebody. Legitimacy reared its ugly head, first by cutting off the hand, then the head, of Pleignier, Carbonneau, and Tolleron. The prince de Talleyrand, grand chamberlain, and the abbé Louis, finance minister designate, looked at each other and laughed the laugh of a pair of soothsayers, both having celebrated the mass of the Federation in the Champ de Mars, on July 14, 1790, Talleyrand saying the mass as bishop, Louis serving him as deacon. In 1817, on the footpaths that laced the same Champ de Mars, big wooden cylinders were to be seen, lying on their sides on the grass, rotting in the rain, their blue paint still bearing traces of eagles and bees that were losing their gold leaf. These were the columns that, two years previously, had supported the emperor's podium in the Champ de Mai. They were scorched and charred here and there by the bivouac fires of the Austrians camped in barracks close to Gros-Caillou. Two or three of the columns had disappeared altogether in these fires, which warmed the great hands of the kaiserlichen, or imperialists. What was remarkable about the Champ de Mai celebration was that it was held on the Champ de Mars and in the month of June. In the year 1817, two things were popular: the Touquet edition of Voltaire and the Touquet snuffbox à la Charte. The latest Paris sensation was the murder committed by Dautun, who had hurled his brother's head into the Marché-aux-Fleurs fountain. The ministry of the navy was beginning to be questioned over the sinking of the doomed frigate the Medusa, an event that was to cover the captain Chaumareix with shame and the painter Géricault with glory. Colonel Selves went to Egypt to become Suleiman Pasha there. The Palais des Thermes, in the rue de la Harpe, served as a cooper's shopfront. You could still see on the roof of the Hôtel de Cluny's octagonal tower the little clapboard shed that had served as an observatory to Messier, naval astronomer to Louis XVI. The duchesse de Duras read the unpublished manuscript of Ourika to three or four friends in her boudoir, done out by X in sky blue satin. The Ns were all scratched out at the Louvre. The pont d'Austerlitz abdicated and called itself the pont du Jardin du Roi, a double riddle that disguised both the pont d'Austerlitz and the Jardin des Plantes. Louis XVIII, who was busily annotating Horace with his thumbnail and worrying about heroes who get themselves made emperors and clogmakers who get themselves made dauphins, had two causes for concern: Napoléon and Mathurin Bruneau. The Académie Française proposed an essay prize on this theme: "the happiness that comes from study." Monsieur Bellart was officially eloquent. Broë's future attorney general could be seen germinating in his shadow, before becoming, when ripe, the butt of Paul-Louis Courier's sarcasm. A Chateaubriand impersonator named Marchangy popped up, followed by a Marchangy impersonator named d'Arlincourt. Claire d'Albe and Malek-Adel were masterpieces and Madame Cottin was declared the premier writer of the age. The Institut de France let the academician Napoléon Bonaparte be struck off its list of members. A royal ordinance established a naval school at Angoulême, for the duc d'Angoulême being a grand admiral of the fleet, it was obvious that the town of Angoulême had to be found by rights to have all the qualities of a seaport, failing which the whole principle of monarchy would have been dented. Ministerial councils fretted over the issue of whether the vignettes of acrobatics that spiced up Franconi's posters and lured the street rabble should be tolerated. Monsieur Paër, author of L'Agnese, a good old fellow with a square face and a wart on one cheek, directed the small private concerts offered by the marquise de Sassenaye, rue de la Ville-l'Évêque. All the young girls sang "L'Ermite de Saint-Avelle," with words by Edmond Géraud. The Nain jaune turned into the Miroir. The Café Lemblin was for the emperor, as opposed to the Café Valois, which was for the Bourbons. Monsieur le duc de Berry had just been married off to a Sicilian princess, though the duc was already regarded most darkly by Louvel. Madame de Staël had been dead a year. The bodyguards hissed and booed Mademoiselle Mars. The big newspapers were quite small. The format had shrunk but freedom of expression had mushroomed. The Constitutionnel was constitutional. The Minerve spelled Chateaubriand Chateaubriant, like the steak, and that final t gave the bourgeoisie a lot of laughs at the great writer's expense. In the turncoat press, old newspaper hacks prostituted themselves and insulted the outlaws of 1815: David had lost his talent, Arnault had lost his wit, Carnot had lost his integrity, Soult had never won a battle, and certainly Napoléon had lost his genius. Everyone knows that letters addressed to a man in exile rarely reach him, the police making it a religious duty to intercept them. This is nothing new; Descartes complained about it when he was banished. But when David moaned about not receiving the letters people wrote to him, in the columns of some Belgian newspaper, the royalists found this hilarious and jeered at the exile in their rags. Whether you said "regicides" or "voters," "enemies" or "allies," "Napoléon" or "Buonaparte" divided you from the next man more decisively than any yawning chasm. All reasonable people agreed that the age of revolutions had been closed forever by King Louis XVIII, fondly known as "the immortal author of the Charter." On the tip of the central island by the Pont-Neuf the word Redivivus was sculpted on the pedestal that awaited the statue of Henri IV. In the rue Thérèse, no. 4, Monsieur Pieté was hatching his plans for the consolidation of the monarchy. In critical situations, the leaders of the right invariably wheeled out the phrase: "We must write to Bacot." The ultra-royalists Messieurs Canuel, O'Mahony, and de Chappedelaine were working, not entirely without the approbation of Monsieur, the king's brother, on what would later become known as "the Waterside Conspiracy." The ex-army officers of L'Épingle Noir were also plotting away. Delaverderie teamed up with Trogoff. Monsieur Decazes, showing somewhat liberal tendencies as police minister, prevailed. Chateaubriand, on his feet every morning at the window at no. 27, rue Saint-Dominique, in stirrup pants and slippers, his gray hair tied up in a Madras scarf, his eyes glued to a mirror, a complete dental surgeon's kit open in front of him, was cleaning his teeth, which were perfect, while dictating variations on La Monarchie selon la Charte to his secretary, Monsieur Pilorge. The most influential critics preferred Lafon to Talma. Monsieur de Féletz signed himself "A"; Monsieur Hoffmann signed "Z." Charles Nodier wrote Thérèse Aubert. Divorce was abolished. High schools were called colleges. The college students, sporting decorative gold fleurs-de-lis on their collars, thrashed each other over the king of Rome. The palace secret police informed her royal highness, Madame, about the portrait, everywhere on show, of, Monsieur le duc d'Orléans, who looked better in the uniform of a colonel general of hussars than Monsieur le duc de Berry in the uniform of a colonel general of dragoons—which was a real worry. The city of Paris dipped into its own coffers to have the dome of the Invalides regilded. Serious men wondered what Monsieur de Trinquelague would do on such and such an occasion; Monsieur Clausel de Montals differed, on this or that point, with Monsieur Clausel de Coussergues; Monsieur de Salaberry was not happy. The actor Picard, who belonged to the Académie, which Molière had never been able to get into, put on Les deux Philibert at the Odéon, on the pediment of which, though the letters had been torn off, you could still clearly read: THÉÂTRE DE L'IMPÉRATRICE. You were either for Cugnet de Montarlot or against him. Fabvier was seditious; Bavoux was revolutionary. The bookseller Pélicier brought out an edition of Voltaire under the title The Works of Voltaire, by the Académie Française. "That brings the customers in," the naïve publisher reckoned. Popular opinion had it that Monsieur Charles Loyson would turn out to be the genius of the century; envy was beginning to nip at his heels, a sure sign of glory, and he was the butt of this line of verse:
Even when Loyson takes wing,
you know his paws are firmly on the ground.
Cardinal Fesch refused to step down, so Monsieur de Pins, archbishop of Amasie, took over the administration of the diocese of Lyon. The fight over the valley of Dappes kicked off between France and Switzerland with a memo from Captain Dufour, who was later made a general. Saint-Simon, then unknown, was busy constructing his sublime dream. At the Académie des Sciences, there was a celebrated Fourier whom posterity has forgotten, and in some godforsaken attic or other, there was a Fourier the future will remember. Lord Byron was beginning to shine; a note in a poem of Millevoye's introduced him to France as "a certain Lord Baron." David d'Angers tried to knead marble. The abbé Caron spoke with praise, in a small committee of seminarists, in the cul-de-sac of the Feuillantines, of an unknown priest named Félicité Robert, who was later known as Lamennais. A thing that smoked and sloshed along the Seine with a noise like a dog swimming came and went beneath the windows of the Tuileries, from the pont Royal to the pont Louis XV; it was a crummy bit of machinery, a sort of toy, the invention of a daydreaming crackpot, a utopia: in a word, a steamboat. Parisians regarded the useless object with indifference. Monsieur de Vaublanc, an Institut de France reformer whose preferred tools were the coup d'état, the royal decree, and the lot, proved to be the making of several academicians, but did not manage to become one himself. The faubourg Saint-Germain and the pavillon Marsan wanted Monsieur Delavau as chief of police because of his devoutness. Dupuytren and Récamier argued in the amphitheater of the École de Médecine and virtually came to blows over the divinity of Jesus Christ. Cuvier, with one eye on Genesis and the other on Nature, tried to satisfy the bigots by getting fossils to fit in with the scriptural record and having Moses backed up by the mastodons. Monsieur François de Neufchâteau, the praiseworthy keeper of the flame of Parmentier's memory, did his level best to see that pomme de terre—potato—was pronounced parmentière, but he did not pull it off. The abbé Grégoire, ex-bishop, ex-Conventionist, ex-senator, acquired the status of "the infamous Grégoire" in royalist polemics. The expression just used—"to acquire the status of"—was denounced as a neologism by Monsieur Royer-Collard. You could still distinguish by its whiteness, under the third arch of the pont d'Iéna, the new stone that plugged the hole made two years earlier by Blücher when he tried to blow up the bridge. The Law called to its bar a man who, on seeing the comte d'Artois enter Notre-Dame, was reckless enough to say out loud: "I'll be buggered! How I miss the days when I used to see Bonaparte and Talma going into the Bal-Sauvage arm in arm." Seditious words—six months' jail. Traitors crawled out of the woodwork; men who had gone over to the enemy the day before a battle did not bother hiding a sou of what they'd earned in bribes and strutted about shamelessly in broad daylight full of the cynicism wealth and honors bring; the deserters of Ligny and Quatre-Bras, in their unchecked and financially rewarded depravity, paraded their monarchical devotion brazenly, for all to see—forgetting what is written on lavatory walls in England: Please adjust your dress before leaving.
And that, willy-nilly, is what dimly survives of the year 1817, otherwise now largely forgotten. History neglects nearly every one of these little details and cannot do otherwise if it is not to be swamped by the infinite minutiae. And yet, the details, which are wrongly described as little—there are no little facts in the human realm, any more than there are little leaves in the realm of vegetation—are useful. The face of the century is made up of the lines of the years.
In the year 1817, four young Parisians played "a great practical joke."
II. A DOUBLE FOURSOME
One of these Parisians was from Toulouse, one from Limoges, the third from Cahors, and the fourth from Montauban; but they were students, and once you're a student, you're a Parisian; to study in Paris is to be born in Paris.1/sup>
These young men were of no account, everyone has seen their type. Pull the first four passersby off the street and they would be perfect examples; neither good nor bad, neither knowledgeable nor ignorant, neither geniuses nor morons; good-looking in that charming fresh-faced way known as being twenty. They were four Oscar what's-his-names, for in those days Arthurs had not yet come into their own. "Burn the perfumes of Arabia for him," the romance cries, "Oscar is coming, Oscar—soon, I'll see him!" Everything was straight out of Ossian, elegance was either Scandinavian or Caledonian, and the first of the Arthurs, Wellington, had only just won the battle of Waterloo.
These Oscars were called Félix Tholomyès, of Toulouse, Listolier, of Cahors, Fameuil, of Limoges, and lastly, Blachevelle, of Montauban. Naturally, each one had his mistress. Blachevelle loved Favorite, so named because she had been to England; Listolier adored Dahlia, who had adopted the name of a flower as her nom de guerre; Fameuil idolized Zéphine, a diminutive of Joséphine; Tholomyès had Fantine, known as "the Blonde" because of her beautiful hair, the color of sunlight.
Favorite, Dahlia, Zéphine, and Fantine were four ravishing girls, perfumed and sparkling, still a bit on the working-class side, not having entirely abandoned their sewing needles, troubled by torrid romances of the railway novel kind, but with traces of the serenity of labor on their faces and in their hearts that bloom of purity that survives a woman's first fall from grace. One of the four was known as "the baby" because she was the youngest; and one was known as "the old girl." The old girl was twenty-three. To be frank, the first three were more experienced, more nonchalant, and more familiar with the ways of the world than Fantine, the Blonde, who still harbored a few illusions.
The same could not be said for Dahlia, Zéphine, and especially not Favorite. There had already been more than one chapter in their barely begun romantic novel, and the amorous young man who was called Adolphe in the first chapter turned into Alphonse in the second and Gustave in the third. Poverty and coquetry are two deadly counselors; one upbraids, the other flatters, and the beautiful daughters of the working class have both of them whispering in their ears, each with its own agenda. Such defenseless creatures listen. Hence their falls from grace and the stones thrown at them. The splendor of all that is immaculate and inaccessible is hurled at them, heaped upon them. Alas! What if the Jungfrau had been starving?
Favorite, having been to England, was much admired by Zéphine and Dahlia. She'd had a home of her own at a very early age. Her father was an old brute of a mathematics teacher who swaggered like a Gascon and was an out-and-out braggart; he had never married and he still chased skirt despite his age. When he was young, this teacher had one day seen a chambermaid's dress snag on a fender, and he had fallen in love with the accident. Favorite was the result. She ran into her father from time to time and he would say hello. One morning an old woman who looked a bit dotty turned up on her doorstep and said, "Don't you know me, Mademoiselle?" "No." "I'm your mother." Then the old woman opened the buffet cupboard, ate and drank her fill, sent for a mattress she had lying about somewhere, and settled in. This mother, a terrible nag and pious on top of it, never spoke to Favorite, could sit for hours on end without uttering a sound, ate enough breakfast, lunch, and dinner for four, and would go down to the porter's lodge to peer at visitors and stab her daughter in the back.
What had driven Dahlia into Listolier's arms and, perhaps, into the arms of others, into an idle life, was her pink fingernails, which were far too pretty. How could anyone expect those nails to do any work? If a girl wants to remain virtuous she can't be too soft on her hands. As for Zéphine, she had conquered Fameuil with her cute little mutinous way of simpering: "Oui, monsieur."
The young men were pals, the young women, friends. Such love affairs are always coupled with such friendships.
It's one thing to be good and quite another to be philosophical; the proof, if proof were needed, is that Favorite, Zéphine, and Dahlia were able to come to terms with these illicit little pairings off because they were philosophical, but Fantine was a good girl.
Good, I hear you say? What about Tholomyès? Solomon would reply that love is part of goodness. We'll say only that Fantine's was a first love, a unique love, a faithful love.
She was the only one of the four to whom one man alone had whispered sweet nothings.
Fantine was one of those beings who spring up, so to speak, in the very bosom of the people. Emerging from the absolute dregs of the social morass, she bore the mark of anonymity and disconnection on her forehead. She was born at Montreuil-sur-mer. Who were her parents? Who could say? No one had ever known her to have a father or a mother. She called herself Fantine. Why Fantine? No one had ever known her to go by any other name. At the time of her birth, the Directoire still held sway. She had no family name, since she had no family; she had no Christian name, since the Church had become a spent force. She was called whatever the first person who had happened along felt like calling her when they ran across her as a tiny toddler padding around the streets barefoot. A name had fallen upon her the same way water from the clouds fell on her head when it rained. They called her la petite Fantine. That was all anyone knew about her. This human being had come into existence just like that. At the age of ten, Fantine left town and went into service with a farming family in the district. At fifteen, she came to Paris "to seek her fortune." Fantine was beautiful and remained pure for as long as she could. A pretty blonde with beautiful teeth, she had gold and pearls for a dowry, but her gold was on her head and her pearls were in her mouth.
She worked in order to live; then, also in order to live, she loved, for the heart has its own hunger.
She loved Tholomyès.
For him it was a simple love affair, for her, passion. The streets of the quartier Latin, which were crawling with students and working girls, saw the beginning of this idyll. In the labyrinth of the Panthéon hill, where so many amorous adventures coalesce and dissolve, Fantine had run away from Tholomyès for a long time, but always in such a way that she would run into him again. There is a way of running away that looks a lot like chasing after. To cut a long story short, the pastoral idyll happened.
Blachevelle, Listolier, and Fameuil formed a sort of group with Tholomyès at the head. He was the wit.
Tholomyès was the original world-weary student. He was rich, with four thousand francs annual income—four thousand francs, annual income—a splendid scandal on the montagne Sainte-Geneviève. Tholomyès was a wasted high roller of thirty. He was wrinkled and gap-toothed, and he was starting to develop a bald patch, of which he himself said without a hint of regret: "the noggin at thirty, the knees at forty." His digestion was pretty lousy and he had suddenly developed a weeping eye. But the more his youth faded, the gayer a blade he became; he replaced his teeth with gibes, his hair with hilarity, his health with irony, and his weeping eye laughed nonstop. He was falling apart yet blooming. His youth, packing it in long before its time, beat an orderly retreat in a fit of laughter, and all that could be seen of it was its fire. He'd had a play turned down at the Vaudeville. He would toss off mediocre verses whenever he had the urge. What's more, he maintained a superior skepticism about all things, a great strength in the eyes of the weak. And so, being ironic and bald, he was the chief. Iron is a strong metal. Could that be where the irony came in?
One day Tholomyès took the other three aside, made an oracular gesture, and said to them: "It's nearly a year since Fantine, Dahlia, Zéphine, and Favorite have been asking us for a surprise. We promised them solemnly to give them one. They keep harping on it, especially to me. Just as the old women of Naples cry to Saint Janvier, Faccia gialluta, fa o miracolo—'Yellow face, do your miracle!'—so our beauties are always saying to me, 'Tholomyès, when are you going to produce your surprise?' At the same time our parents are appealing to us. Let's kill two birds with the one stone. The time has come, it seems to me. Let's see what we can come up with."
On that note, Tholomyès lowered his voice and mysteriously intoned something so hysterically funny that a huge and wildly enthusiastic guffaw went up from all four in concert and Blachevelle cried: "Now, that's not a bad idea!"
A small smoke-filled bar cropped up, they went in, and the rest of their conference was lost in shadow.
The result of this secret conference was a wonderful pleasure trip that took place the following Sunday, the four young men inviting the four young women along.
III. FOUR BY FOUR
What a trip to the country meant for students and their girls forty-five years ago can hardly be imagined today. Paris no longer has the same outskirts; the face of what we might call circum-Parisian life has completely changed in half a century. Where there was once the battered old rattletrap there is now the railway car; where there was once the rickety old two-masted cutter, there is now the steamboat; today we say Fécamp the way we once said Saint-Cloud. The Paris of 1862 is a city that has the whole of France as its suburbs.
The four couples conscientiously got through all the folies champêtres then possible in the country. It was the start of the holidays and a bright hot summer's day. The night before, Favorite, the only one who could write, had written a note to Tholomyès on behalf of all four: "It is a good time to set out in good time." This is why they got up at five o'clock in the morning. They caught the coach to Saint-Cloud, looked at the dry waterfall, and cried, "Must be fabulous when there's water!" had breakfast at the Tête-Noire, to which Castaing had not yet been, treated themselves to a game of quoits on the paths by the main pool, climbed up to Diogenes' Lantern, bet macaroons on the roulette wheel at the pont de Sèvres, picked bunches of flowers at Puteaux, bought toy reed pipes at Neuilly, ate apple turnovers everywhere they went, and were perfectly happy.
The girls trilled and twittered away like warblers who'd escaped from their cages. They were delirious. Now and then they'd give the young men a few soft girlish pokes. Ah, the intoxication of life's clear morning! What wonderful years! The wings of dragonflies are quivering. Oh, whoever you are, don't you remember? Have you never walked in the undergrowth beneath the trees, holding branches out of the way because of the lovely head following behind you? Have you never slipped, laughing, on a slope wet with rain with a woman you love holding on to you by the hand and squealing: "Oh, my brand-new lace-up boots! Look at them now!"
We hasten to add that this good-humored crowd missed out on that thrilling setback, the squall, even though Favorite had said at the outset, in an authoritative and motherly tone, "The slugs are wandering all over the paths. Sign of rain, children."
All four girls were deliriously pretty. A good old classic poet well-known at the time, the knight of Labouïsse—a nice man who had an Eléanore stashed away somewhere—was strolling under the chestnuts of Saint-Cloud that day and when he saw them go by at about ten in the morning, he shrieked, "There's one too many!"—thinking, of course, of the Graces. Favorite, Blachevelle's girlfriend, the one who was twenty-three, the old girl, was running ahead under the great green branches, jumping over ditches, madly leaping over bushes, and presiding over the general high spirits with the verve of a young female faun. As chance would have it, Zéphine and Dahlia were beautiful in a complementary way that was enhanced when they were seen together, so they never left each other's side, more out of some instinctive vanity than out of affection; leaning on each other's arm, they struck English poses. The first sentimental keepsakes had just started to appear at the time, melancholy was coming into vogue for women just as Byronism would later be all the rage for men, and the hair of the tender sex was beginning to stream down in a weeping habit. Zéphine and Dahlia wore their hair in rolls. Listolier and Fameuil were engaged in a discussion about their teachers and were explaining the difference between Monsieur Delvincourt and Monsieur Blondeau to Fantine.
Blachevelle seemed to have been born to carry Favorite's limp dun-colored shawl on his arm on Sundays.
Tholomyès brought up the rear, dominating the group from behind. He was as gay as a lark, but you could sense that it was all very controlled; there was a whiff of the dictatorial about his joviality—he was pulling the strings. His principal adornment was a pair of "elephant-leg" pants—ballooning nankeen trousers, with stirrups of copper braid; he had a strong rattan cane in his hand that had cost two hundred francs, and, as his boldness knew no bounds, he had the strangest thing, a cigar, in his mouth. Since nothing was sacred to him, he'd taken up smoking.
"You've got to hand it to Tholomyès," said the others with reverence. "Those pantaloons! All that energy!"
As for Fantine, she was pure joy. Her magnificent teeth had clearly been given her by God with one purpose only, and that was to laugh. She had a little straw hat with long white ribbons, which she preferred to carry in her hand rather than to wear on her head. Her thick blond hair, which was inclined to come adrift and needed to be pinned back up constantly, seemed made for some enactment of Galatea's flight beneath the willows, tresses floating free. Her rosy lips babbled with delight. The corners of her mouth, voluptuously turned up like those of the antique masks of Erigone, seemed to encourage bold advances; but her long shadowy eyelashes were discreetly cast down over the suggestive animation of the lower part of her face, as though to rein it in. Her whole getup had something wildly poetic and flamboyant about it. She wore a frock of mauve barège, little bronze-colored ankle boots whose laces traced Xs on her fine white openwork stockings, and a sort of muslin spencer, originally invented in Marseilles and called a canezou, the name being a corruption of the words quinze août—15 August—as pronounced on the Canebière in Marseilles, and connoting the warm sunny weather of the south. The other three were not so timid, as we said, and wore boldly low-cut dresses without further ado; in summer, under hats covered in flowers, they looked extremely graceful and alluring, but next to such daring attire, the canezou of the blond Fantine—transparent, indiscreet, yet understated, covering and revealing at the same time—seemed like one of decency's more provocative brainwaves, and the famous court of love presided over by the vicomtesse de Cette, the woman with the sea green eyes, would perhaps have awarded the prize for seduction and sex appeal to this little canezou that had entered the modesty stakes. The most naïve is sometimes the most knowing. It can happen.
Stunning face-on, delicate in profile, with her deep blue eyes, lustrous eyelids, small, beautifully high-arched feet, wrists and ankles admirably turned, white skin that showed, here and there, a bluish arborescence of veins, fresh young cheeks, the robust neck of the Aegean Juno, the nape firm and supple, shoulders modeled as though by Coustou, with a voluptuous hollow between them visible through the muslin; a gaiety cooled by dreaminess; sculptural and exquisite … That was Fantine. You could sense the statue beneath the ribbons and glad rags, and in this statue, a soul.
Fantine was beautiful, without being too conscious of the fact. Those rare dreamers, mysterious priests of the beautiful, who compare all things to perfection, would have glimpsed the sacred antique harmony in this little working-class miss through the transparency of Parisian grace. This daughter of darkness had class. She possessed both types of beauty—style and rhythm. Style is the shape the ideal takes, rhythm, its movement.
We said Fantine was joy itself. Fantine was also decency.
What any observer studying her closely would have picked up, emanating from her through all the intoxication of her age, the season, her little love affair, was invincible reserve and modesty. She was always a bit on the wide-eyed side. That peculiarly chaste bewilderment is the subtle difference between Psyche and Venus. Fantine had the slender long white fingers of the vestal virgins who once stirred the ashes of the sacred fire with golden rods. Although she would never have refused Tholomyès anything, as was all too clear, her face at rest was utterly virginal; a sort of serious and almost austere dignity would suddenly come over it at certain moments, and nothing was as strange and disturbing as seeing the gaiety so swiftly eclipsed by withdrawal—without any transition. This sudden gravity, sometimes severely pronounced, was like the contempt of a goddess. Her forehead, nose, and chin offered that balance of line, as distinct from the balance of proportion, that constitutes the harmony of the whole face; in the expressive space that separates the base of the nose from the upper lip, she had that barely perceptible but enchanting line that is a mysterious sign of chastity and that made Barbarossa fall in love with a Diana dug up in the excavations in Iconium.
Illicit love is a sin; so be it. Fantine was the innocence that rises above this sin.
IV. THOLOMYÈS IS SO CHEERY HE SINGS A SPANISH DITTY
That particular day was pure sunshine from dawn to dusk. All of nature seemed to be on holiday and to smile on them. The parterres of Saint-Cloud were fragrant with scent; the breeze from the Seine gently stirred the leaves; the branches waved in the wind; the bees were having their way with the jasmine; a whole bohemia of butterflies fluttered in the milfoil, clover, and wild oats; there was a swarm of those vagabonds, the birds, in the stately playground of the king of France.
The four frolicking couples, at one with the sun, the fields, the flowers, the trees, were radiant with happiness, too.
And in this shared magic, talking, singing, running, dancing, chasing butterflies, picking convolvulus, getting their stockings wet in the long grass, fresh, wild, but nice, all the girls earned kisses now and then from all the boys, except Fantine, remote in her vague resistance, dreamy and fierce, and full of love. "You know," Favorite said to her, "you always come across as a bit odd."
These are the joys of life. This casual coming together of happy couples is a profound rallying of life and nature and brings out the light and the love in everything. Once upon a time, there was a fairy who made meadows and trees just for people in love. Whence the eternal clandestine school of the open air, that school of love that just keeps starting over again and that will keep on as long as there are bushes and schoolboys. Whence the popularity of spring among thinkers. The patrician and the small-time operator, the duke and the peer and the gownsman, the people of the court and the people of the town, as they used to be called, are all in thrall to this good fairy. You laugh, you play hide-and-seek, the air has never been so bright and clear, love transfigures every little thing! Notary clerks are gods. And the little squeals, the games of chasing in the grass, waists encircled on the sly, all that mumbo jumbo that is music to the ear, the adoration that breaks out in the way a syllable is said, those cherries sucked from one mouth by another—all this blazes and burns into heavenly rapture. Beautiful girls throw themselves away so sweetly. You feel that it will never end. Philosophers, poets, painters look on these ecstasies and don't know what to do with them, so dazzled are they. "The embarkation for Cythera!" cries Watteau; Lancret, the commoner's painter, contemplates these bourgeois sailing off into the blue; Diderot opens his arms wide to all the fleeting romances, and d'Urfé sticks a few Druids in among them for good measure.
After breakfast, the four couples went off to what was then called the king's patch to look at a plant that had just arrived from India, the name of which escapes us for the moment but which drew all Paris to Saint-Cloud at the time; it was a bizarre and lovely shrub with a long stem and numerous fine threadlike branches, all tangled and leafless and covered with thousands of tiny white stars, which made the bush look like a head of hair crawling with flowers like lice. There was always a crowd standing around admiring it.
The bush having been viewed, Tholomyès shouted: "Donkeys, everyone—my treat!" And once they agreed on a price with the donkey man, they rode back via Vanves and Issy. At Issy, there was a bit of an incident. The park, now part of the Bien National but at the time owned by the army supply officer Bourguin, was open, as luck would have it. They went in through the gates, visited the statue of the anchorite in its grotto, gave themselves a few thrills in the famous hall of mirrors, a lascivious snare fit for a satyr-cum-millionaire or a Turcaret metamorphosed into Priapus. They rattled the swing that hung from two chestnuts celebrated by the abbé de Bernis. While he gave each gorgeous girl a turn on the swing, one after the other, amid general hilarity due to a flying up of skirts that would have been grist for the mill for Greuze, the Toulousian Tholomyès, who was something of a Spaniard, Toulouse being a sister city of Tolosa, sang to the tune of a melancholy lament the old gallega song probably inspired by some beautiful girl zooming high in the air on a rope between two trees:
I am from Badajoz.
Love calls me.
My whole soul
Is in my eyes
Because you are showing
Your legs.
Fantine alone refused to swing.
"Talk about laying it on thick," Favorite muttered sharply.
The donkeys finished with, a new pleasure: They took a boat down the Seine and then walked from Passy to the barrière de l'Étoile. They had been on their feet since five o'clock in the morning, as you'll recall, but that meant nothing! "No petering out on Sunday," according to Favorite. "Tiredness doesn't work Sundays." Toward three o'clock the four couples, delirious with happiness, were racing down the roller coaster, a strange structure that sat on Beaujon heights then, and whose snaking line could be seen over the tops of the trees in the Champs-Élysées.
From time to time, Favorite cried out:
"What about the surprise? I want the surprise!"
"Patience," Tholomyès retorted.