The Girl with the Golden Eyes | Page 6

descend to the /entresol/: or climb
down from the attic and remain on the fourth floor; in fine, penetrate
into the world which has possessions: the same result! Wholesale
merchants, and their men--people with small banking accounts and
much integrity--rogues and catspaws, clerks old and young, sheriffs'
clerks, barristers' clerks, solicitors' clerks; in fine, all the working,
thinking, and speculating members of that lower middle class which
honeycombs the interests of Paris and watches over its granary,
accumulates the coin, stores the products that the proletariat have made,
preserves the fruits of the South, the fishes, the wine from every
sun-favored hill; which stretches its hands over the Orient, and takes
from it the shawls that the Russ and the Turk despise; which harvests
even from the Indies; crouches down in expectation of a sale, greedy of
profit; which discounts bills, turns over and collects all kinds of
securities, holds all Paris in its hand, watches over the fantasies of

children, spies out the caprices and the vices of mature age, sucks
money out of disease. Even so, if they drink no brandy, like the artisan,
nor wallow in the mire of debauch, all equally abuse their strength,
immeasurably strain their bodies and their minds alike, are burned
away with desires, devastated with the swiftness of the pace. In their
case the physical distortion is accomplished beneath the whip of
interests, beneath the scourge of ambitions which torture the educated
portion of this monstrous city, just as in the case of the proletariat it is
brought about by the cruel see-saw of the material elaborations
perpetually required from the despotism of the aristocratic "/I will/."
Here, too, then, in order to obey that universal master, pleasure or gold,
they must devour time, hasten time, find more than four-and-twenty
hours in the day and night, waste themselves, slay themselves, and
purchase two years of unhealthy repose with thirty years of old age.
Only, the working-man dies in hospital when the last term of his
stunted growth expires; whereas the man of the middle class is set upon
living, and lives on, but in a state of idiocy. You will meet him, with
his worn, flat old face, with no light in his eyes, with no strength in his
limbs, dragging himself with a dazed air along the boulevard--the belt
of his Venus, of his beloved city. What was his want? The sabre of the
National Guard, a permanent stock-pot, a decent plot in Pere Lachaise,
and, for his old age, a little gold honestly earned. /HIS/ Monday is on
Sunday, his rest a drive in a hired carriage--a country excursion during
which his wife and children glut themselves merrily with dust or bask
in the sun; his dissipation is at the restaurateur's, whose poisonous
dinner has won renown, or at some family ball, where he suffocates till
midnight. Some fools are surprised at the phantasmagoria of the
monads which they see with the aid of the microscope in a drop of
water; but what would Rabelais' Gargantua,--that misunderstood figure
of an audacity so sublime,--what would that giant say, fallen from the
celestial spheres, if he amused himself by contemplating the motions of
this secondary life of Paris, of which here is one of the formulae? Have
you seen one of those little constructions--cold in summer, and with no
other warmth than a small stove in winter--placed beneath the vast
copper dome which crowns the Halle-auble? Madame is there by
morning. She is engaged at the markets, and makes by this occupation
twelve thousand francs a year, people say. Monsieur, when Madame is

up, passes into a gloomy office, where he lends money till the week-
end to the tradesmen of his district. By nine o'clock he is at the passport
office, of which he is one of the minor officials. By evening he is at the
box-office of the Theatre Italien, or of any other theatre you like. The
children are put out to nurse, and only return to be sent to college or to
boarding-school. Monsieur and Madame live on the third floor, have
but one cook, give dances in a salon twelve foot by eight, lit by argand
lamps; but they give a hundred and fifty thousand francs to their
daughter, and retire at the age of fifty, an age when they begin to show
themselves on the balcony of the opera, in a /fiacre/ at Longchamps; or,
on sunny days, in faded clothes on the boulevards--the fruit of all this
sowing. Respected by their neighbors, in good odor with the
government, connected with the upper middle classes, Monsieur
obtains at sixty-five the Cross of the Legion of Honor, and his
daughter's father-in-law, a parochial mayor, invites him to his evenings.
These life-long labors, then, are for the good of the