But this florid language becomes insufferable in the theatre. When a lover in Raynouard's Templiers declaims:
'The flame has devoured the sacred characters, Of my written vows depositary witnesses', we have some difficulty in realizing that the fool has let his love-letters fall into the fire.
Prose, therefore, the supreme quality of which is clarity, should have been all the more careful to spare us these riddles. But those that wrote it wanted to follow the fashion, and the journalists were the first to attempt it. For both leading articles and news in brief they made use of the same rhetoric. This is how a reporter expresses himself in an account of the Exhibition of Industrial Products:
'Slowly completed, these pompous monuments are a lasting evidence of difficulty overcome, and of the latest efforts of the spirit of man, rising by means of these marvels above all other creatures and drawing nearer to the Creator, of whom, it might be said, he becomes the most perfect emulator/
Jealous of such fine effects as these, governmental literature itself leaned towards lyricism. When Dubois was appointed Prefect of Police, the manifesto he addressed to the people of Paris was really a masterpiece:
Citizens! Everything that may at any time have been the subject of your complaint will henceforth be the object of my solicitude... Severity but humanity! My eye shall penetrate the innermost recesses of the criminal's soul, but my ear shall be open to the cries of innocence and even to the groans of repentance.. .*
We must not imagine that language of this kind provoked the risibility of the public. On the contrary, it was delighted with the prefectoral eloquence, and had no ambition but to talk in the same strain. It was its love of a flowery style that gave it such a taste for the lectures at the Institute and the courses at the College de France, and made it sneeze with admiration as soon as old La Harpe dipped his fingers into Ms snuff-box. It was for the pleasure of listening to fine periods, carefully cadenced, that so many people frequented the Lycee des Arts and the Portique republicain under the Consulate, and the Athenee de Paris, the Athenee des Strangers and the Academic de Legislation under the Empire.
The programmes of these establishments varied a great deal One day Citizeness Constance Pipelet might be heard holding forth on tf the condition of women in a republic'; another day a certain M. Gallais would discuss the thrilling question, 'Is eloquence useful or harmful at the Bar?' On yet another occasion, Marie-Joseph Chenier would discourse on the history of the Troubadours — a subject foreshadowing Meilhac's Petite Marquise.
And when the Parisians of that day had absorbed all this spiritual nourishment, they were firmly convinced that never before had French literature shone with such brilliance.
It was not only at the theatre that dramas were to be seen. Real life had some very sombre ones to show, and an epidemic of suicides was especially noticeable at the beginning of the Consulate.
On the 3rd Ventose, year VIII, a young pupil of David threw himself from the top of a tower of Notre-Danie. A piece of paper was found on him, on which was scribbled in pencil, 'When one considers the destiny of man on earth, one should water one's cradle with tears/
Not long after, some despairing creature chose the Porte Saint-Denis for his spring-board, but he had the good taste to shout first to the crowd, 'Take care! Passers-by! It's not against you that I bear a grudge! *
Another, less spectacular, exit was that of Chappe the inventor, who, disgusted with life, and perhaps with his telegraph, drowned himself in the well in his house, leaving this declaration, 'I am seeking death to escape from the boredom of life, which is weighing me down.'
And the actor Beaulieu, who also committed suicide, wrote his last message in the style of the monologues of TAmbigu: 'May my blood, that I am about to shed, be, like that of the pelican, of use to my children. In order that they may inherit the esteem the public felt for me, say something in favour of their unfortunate father! I am preparing to fall asleep in eternity!*
Farewells to life all strongly tinged with literature, but which were perhaps the first symptoms of the famous mal du siecle, of which the next generation was to complain so bitterly. 'Alas! They think I am happy, and I have an abyss in y heart!* sighed a nine-year-old child even then, little Albertine, daughter of Mme de StaeL Are we not, henceforth, in the thick of romanticism?
Werther had had time to found a school, and his sorrows had inspired the novelists with endless tragic love-stories. In this pursuit of catastrophe the women authors were well ahead. Apart from Delphine, the boring subject of which is at least relieved by a brilliant style, people had to undergo a perpetual avalanche of Valeries, Clair cfAlbes, Amelie de Mansfields, works by disillusioned Muses with morbid imaginations. "According to Mme Cottin/ says one of their readers, 'one cannot recover from love any more than from the plague. In three novels she has written for us, six people are dead already. If love was as it is painted today it would have destroyed the world instead of preserving it.*
But the bluestockings had a good excuse: the public, especially the feminine public, adored terrifying scenes. 'What a lovely sight!' said a lady one evening, coming out of a place in the Rue des Petits-Champs where ghosts were made to appear; "I fainted three times! 7 She, at any rate, cannot have considered there were too many funereal incidents in Mme Cottnf s novels.
Another failing, which I have called a passion for tears, affected both sexes equally. A word, a memory, a picture, the slightest emotion, were enough to wet the eyelids of a soldier with a heart in the right place, of a professor suddenly obliged to interrupt his lecture, of a judge discomposed in the middle of a hearing. While the advocate Bellart was defending Mile de Cice, implicated in the Rue Saint-Nicaise plot, his eloquence affected the audience to such a degree that 'old gendarmes, forgetting their orders, let go their rifles to mop their eyes, which were full of tears'.
Another time, during the trial of the chemist Ternaux, accused of having poisoned his daughter, it was the foreman of the jury that fainted before pronouncing the verdict. And people thought little of it, for by a strange contrast all these men, who had witnessed the dramas of the Revolution, and were now living through terrible wars, far from concealing their sensibility, -displayed it with a sort of affectation.
There were innumerable instances of this. Alissan de Chazet tells us that on going to see the Grand Chancellor Lacepede, to recommend the widow of a Legionary, he began to weep so violently that he was 'obliged to interrupt his recital for a time'. The same accident overtook the former Jacobin Lemaire when pronouncing the eulogy of Luce de Lancival at the Ecole Normale, and the academician Alex-andre Duval speaking of the young son of his predecessor Legouve, during his address of welcome — even to the cure of Saint-Roch, who, on coining to tell Mme Recamier that she had been elected Lady Patroness, was moved to tears on the subject of her virtues!
People wept and wept, sometimes for an excess of sorrow, sometimes for an excess of joy. Guinguene sobbed as he listened to his little boy spouting congratulations to him on his birthday. Junot's mother squeezed out a tear when lunching with Mme Laetitia, at the thought that the two happiest mothers in France had come together. Hortense's eyes were reddened when writing to her brother Eugene, whose portrait she had just been looking at. Napoleon himself confided to Meneval that he had never been able to read Baculard d'Arnaud's Epreuves du Sentiment without crying—a work we should find difficult to read through today, even with tears.
In the prose of the newspapers the same sentimentaHsm appeared in every line. The subscriber had at all costs to have his emotions stirred by some touching tale —of a concert improvised in the street by the EUevious for the benefit of some unfortunate blind man, or the funeral of Greuze, with a tearful young woman laying a bunch of everlasting flowers on the coffin. 'These flowers, given by the most grateful of his pupils, are the emblem of his fame/ Or again, in the same year 1806, a sensational sale - that of Jean-Jacques Rousseau's walking-stick, exhibited in a sale-room in the Rue Neuve-Saint-Augustin, which an Austrian bidder had come on purpose to buy, all the way from his own country.