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COSMOPOLIS

By PAUL BOURGET



With a Preface by JULES LEMAITRE, of the French academy,




PAUL BOURGET

Born in Amiens, September 2, 1852, Paul Bourget was a pupil at the Lycee
Louis le Grand, and then followed a course at the Ecole des Hautes
Etudes, intending to devote himself to Greek philology. He, however, soon
gave up linguistics for poetry, literary criticism, and fiction. When yet
a very young man, he became a contributor to various journals and
reviews, among others to the 'Revue des deux Mondes, La Renaissance, Le
Parlement, La Nouvelle Revue', etc. He has since given himself up almost
exclusively to novels and fiction, but it is necessary to mention here
that he also wrote poetry. His poetical works comprise: 'Poesies
(1872-876), La Vie Inquiete (1875), Edel (1878), and Les Aveux (1882)'.

With riper mind and to far better advantage, he appeared a few years
later in literary essays on the writers who had most influenced his own
development--the philosophers Renan, Taine, and Amiel, the poets
Baudelaire and Leconte de Lisle; the dramatist Dumas fils, and the
novelists Turgenieff, the Goncourts, and Stendhal. Brunetiere says of
Bourget that "no one knows more, has read more, read better, or
meditated, more profoundly upon what he has read, or assimilated it more
completely." So much "reading" and so much "meditation," even when
accompanied by strong assimilative powers, are not, perhaps, the most
desirable and necessary tendencies in a writer of verse or of fiction. To
the philosophic critic, however, they must evidently be invaluable; and
thus it is that in a certain self-allotted domain of literary
appreciation allied to semi-scientific thought, Bourget stands to-day
without a rival. His 'Essais de Psychologie Contemporaine (1883),
Nouveaux Essais (1885), and Etudes et Portraits (1888)' are certainly not
the work of a week, but rather the outcome of years of self-culture and
of protracted determined endeavor upon the sternest lines. In fact, for a
long time, Bourget rose at 3 a.m. and elaborated anxiously study after
study, and sketch after sketch, well satisfied when he sometimes noticed
his articles in the theatrical 'feuilleton' of the 'Globe' and the
'Parlement', until he finally contributed to the great 'Debats' itself. A
period of long, hard, and painful probation must always be laid down, so
to speak, as the foundation of subsequent literary fame. But France,
fortunately for Bourget, is not one of those places where the foundation
is likely to be laid in vain, or the period of probation to endure for
ever and ever.

In fiction, Bourget carries realistic observation beyond the externals
(which fixed the attention of Zola and Maupassant) to states of the mind:
he unites the method of Stendhal to that of Balzac. He is always
interesting and amusing. He takes himself seriously and persists in
regarding the art of writing fiction as a science. He has wit, humor,
charm, and lightness of touch, and ardently strives after philosophy and
intellectuality--qualities that are rarely found in fiction. It may well
be said of M. Bourget that he is innocent of the creation of a single
stupid character. The men and women we read of in Bourget's novels are so
intellectual that their wills never interfere with their hearts.

The list of his novels and romances is a long one, considering the fact
that his first novel, 'L'Irreparable,' appeared as late as 1884. It was
followed by 'Cruelle Enigme (1885); Un Crime d'Amour (1886); Andre
Cornelis and Mensonges (1887); Le Disciple (1889); La Terre promise;
Cosmopolis (1892), crowned by the Academy; Drames de Famille (1899);
Monique (1902)'; his romances are 'Une Idylle tragique (1896); La
Duchesse Bleue (1898); Le Fantome (1901); and L'Etape (1902)'.

'Le Disciple' and 'Cosmopolis' are certainly notable books. The latter
marks the cardinal point in Bourget's fiction. Up to that time he had
seen environment more than characters; here the dominant interest is
psychic, and, from this point on, his characters become more and more
like Stendhal's, "different from normal clay." Cosmopolis is perfectly
charming. Bourget is, indeed, the past-master of "psychological" fiction.

To sum up: Bourget is in the realm of fiction what Frederic Amiel is in
the realm of thinkers and philosophers--a subtle, ingenious, highly
gifted student of his time. With a wonderful dexterity of pen, a very
acute, almost womanly intuition, and a rare diffusion of grace about all
his writings, it is probable that Bourget will remain less known as a
critic than as a romancer. Though he neither feels like Loti nor sees
like Maupassant--he reflects.

JULES LEMAITRE
de l'Academie Francaise.




AUTHOR'S INTRODUCTION

I send you, my dear Primoli, from beyond the Alps, the romance of
international life, begun in Italy almost under your eyes, to which I
have given for a frame that ancient and noble Rome of which you are so
ardent an admirer.

To be sure, the drama of passion which this book depicts has no
particularly Roman features, and nothing was farther from my thoughts
than to trace a picture of the society so local, so traditional, which
exists between the Quirinal and the Vatican. The drama is not even
Italian, for the scene might have been laid, with as much truth, at
Venice, Florence, Nice, St. Moritz, even Paris or London, the various
cities which are like quarters scattered over Europe of the fluctuating
'Cosmopolis,' christened by Beyle: 'Vengo adesso da Cosmopoli'. It is the
contrast between the rather incoherent ways of the rovers of high life
and the character of perennity impressed everywhere in the great city of
the Caesars and of the Popes which has caused me to choose the spot where
even the corners speak of a secular past, there to evoke some
representatives of the most modern, as well as the most arbitrary and the
most momentary, life. You, who know better than any one the motley world
of cosmopolites, understand why I have confined myself to painting here
only a fragment of it. That world, indeed, does not exist, it can have
neither defined customs nor a general character. It is composed of
exceptions and of singularities. We are so naturally creatures of custom,
our continual mobility has such a need of gravitating around one fixed
axis, that motives of a personal order alone can determine us upon an
habitual and voluntary exile from our native land. It is so, now in the
case of an artist, a person seeking for instruction and change; now in
the case of a business man who desires to escape the consequences of some
scandalous error; now in the case of a man of pleasure in search of new
adventures; in the case of another, who cherishes prejudices from birth,
it is the longing to find the "happy mean;" in the case of another,
flight from distasteful memories. The life of the cosmopolite can conceal
all beneath the vulgarity of its whims, from snobbery in quest of higher
connections to swindling in quest of easier prey, submitting to the
brilliant frivolities of the sport, the sombre intrigues of policy, or
the sadness of a life which has been a failure. Such a variety of causes
renders at once very attractive and almost impracticable the task of the
author who takes as a model that ever-changing society so like unto
itself in the exterior rites and fashions, so really, so intimately
complex and composite in its fundamental elements. The writer is
compelled to take from it a series of leading facts, as I have done,
essaying to deduce a law which governs them. That law, in the present
instance, is the permanence of race. Contradictory as may appear this
result, the more one studies the cosmopolites, the more one ascertains
that the most irreducible idea within them is that special strength of
heredity which slumbers beneath the monotonous uniform of superficial
relations, ready to reawaken as soon as love stirs the depths of the
temperament. But there again a difficulty, almost insurmountable, is met
with. Obliged to concentrate his action to a limited number of
personages, the novelist can not pretend to incarnate in them the
confused whole of characters which the vague word race sums up. Again,
taking this book as an example, you and I, my dear Primoli, know a number
of Venetians and of English women, of Poles and of Romans, of Americans
and of French who have nothing in common with Madame Steno, Maud and
Boleslas Gorka, Prince d'Ardea, Marquis Cibo, Lincoln Maitland, his
brother-in-law, and the Marquis de Montfanon, while Justus Hafner only
represents one phase out of twenty of the European adventurer, of whom
one knows neither his religion, his family, his education, his point of
setting out, nor his point of arriving, for he has been through various
ways and means. My ambition would be satisfied were I to succeed in
creating here a group of individuals not representative of the entire
race to which they belong, but only as possibly existing in that race--or
those races. For several of them, Justus Hafner and his daughter Fanny,
Alba Steno, Florent Chapron, Lydia Maitland, have mixed blood in their
veins. May these personages interest you, my dear friend, and become to
you as real as they have been to me for some time, and may you receive
them in your palace of Tor di Nona as faithful messengers of the grateful
affection felt for you by your companion of last winter.

PAUL BOURGET.

PARIS, November 16, 1892.




COSMOPOLIS




BOOK 1.




CHAPTER I

A DILETTANTE AND A BELIEVER

Although the narrow stall, flooded with heaped-up books and papers, left
the visitor just room enough to stir, and although that visitor was one
of his regular customers, the old bookseller did not deign to move from
the stool upon which he was seated, while writing on an unsteady desk.
His odd head, with its long, white hair, peeping from beneath a once
black felt hat with a broad brim, was hardly raised at the sound of the
opening and shutting of the door. The newcomer saw an emaciated,
shriveled face, in which, from behind spectacles, two brown eyes twinkled
slyly. Then the hat again shaded the paper, which the knotty fingers,
with their dirty nails, covered with uneven lines traced in a handwriting
belonging to another age, and from the thin, tall form, enveloped in a
greenish, worn-out coat, came a faint voice, the voice of a man afflicted
with chronic laryngitis, uttering as an apology, with a strong Italian
accent, this phrase in French:

"One moment, Marquis, the muse will not wait."

"Very well, I will; I am no muse. Listen to your inspiration comfortably,
Ribalta," replied, with a laugh, he whom the vendor of old books received
with such original unconstraint. He was evidently accustomed to the
eccentricities of the strange merchant. In Rome--for this scene took
place in a shop at the end of one of the most ancient streets of the
Eternal City, a few paces from the Place d'Espagne, so well known to
tourists--in the city which serves as a confluent for so many from all
points of the world, has not that sense of the odd been obliterated by
the multiplicity of singular and anomalous types stranded and sheltering
there? You will find there revolutionists like boorish Ribalta, who is
ending in a curiosity-shop a life more eventful than the most eventful of
the sixteenth century.

Descended from a Corsican family, this personage came to Rome when very
young, about 1835, and at first became a seminarist. On the point of
being ordained a priest, he disappeared only to return, in 1849, so rabid
a republican that he was outlawed at the time of the reestablishment of
the pontifical government. He then served as secretary to Mazzini, with
whom he disagreed for reasons which clashed with Ribalta's honor. Would
passion for a woman have involved him in such extravagance? In 1870
Ribalta returned to Rome, where he opened, if one may apply such a term
to such a hole, a book-shop. But he is an amateur bookseller, and will
refuse you admission if you displease him. Having inherited a small
income, he sells or he does not, following his fancy or the requirements
of his own purchases, to-day asking you twenty francs for a wretched
engraving for which he paid ten sous, to-morrow giving you at a low price
a costly book, the value of which he knows. Rabid Gallophobe, he never
pardoned his old general the campaign of Dijon any more than he forgave
Victor Emmanuel for having left the Vatican to Pius IX. "The house of
Savoy and the papacy," said he, when he was confidential, "are two eggs
which we must not eat on the same dish." And he would tell of a certain
pillar of St. Peter's hollowed into a staircase by Bernin, where a
cartouch of dynamite was placed. If you were to ask him why he became a
book collector, he would bid you step over a pile of papers, of boarding
and of folios. Then he would show you an immense chamber, or rather a
shed, where thousands of pamphlets were piled up along the walls: "These
are the rules of all the convents suppressed by Italy. I shall write
their history." Then he would stare at you, for he would fear that you
might be a spy sent by the king with the sole object of learning the
plans of his most dangerous enemy--one of those spies of whom he has been
so much in awe that for twenty years no one has known where he slept,
where he ate, where he hid when the shutters of his shop in the Rue
Borgognona were closed. He expected, on account of his past, and his
secret manner, to be arrested at the time of the outrage of Passanante as
one of the members of those Circoli Barsanti, to whom a refractory
corporal gave his name.

But, on examining the dusty cartoons of the old book-stall, the police
discovered nothing except a prodigious quantity of grotesque verses
directed against the Piedmontese and the French, against the Germans and
the Triple Alliance, against the Italian republicans and the ministers,
against Cavour and Signor Crispi, against the University of Rome and the
Inquisition, against the monks and the capitalists! It was, no doubt, one
of those pasquinades which his customers watched him at work upon,
thinking, as he did so, how Rome abounded in paradoxical meetings.

For, in 1867, that same old Garibaldian exchanged shots at Mentana with
the Pope's Zouaves, among whom was Marquis de Montfanon, for so was
called the visitor awaiting Ribalta's pleasure. Twenty-three years had
sufficed to make of the two impassioned soldiers of former days two
inoffensive men, one of whom sold old volumes to the other! And there is
a figure such as you will not find anywhere else--the French nobleman who
has come to die near St. Peter's.

Would you believe, to see him with his coarse boots, dressed in a simple
coat somewhat threadbare, a round hat covering his gray head, that you
have before you one of the famous Parisian dandies of 1864? Listen to
this other history. Scruples of devoutness coming in the wake of a
serious illness cast at one blow the frequenter of the 'Cafe Anglais' and
gay suppers into the ranks of the pontifical zouaves. A first sojourn in
Rome during the last four years of the government of Pius IX, in that
incomparable city to which the presentiment of the approaching
termination of a secular rule, the advent of the Council, and the French
occupation gave a still more peculiar character, was enchantment. All the
germs of piety instilled in the nobleman by the education of the Jesuits
of Brughetti ended by reviving a harvest of noble virtues, in the days of
trial which came only too quickly. Montfanon made the campaign of France
with the other zouaves, and the empty sleeve which was turned up in place
of his left arm attested with what courage he fought at Patay, at the
time of that sublime charge when the heroic General de Sonis unfurled the
banner of the Sacred Heart. He had been a duelist, sportsman, gambler,
lover, but to those of his old companions of pleasure whom chance brought
to Rome he was only a devotee who lived economically, notwithstanding the
fact that he had saved the remnants of a large fortune for alms, for
reading and for collecting.

Every one has that vice, more or less, in Rome, which is in itself the
most surprising museum of history and of art. Montfanon is collecting
documents in order to write the history of the French nobility and of the
Church. His mistresses of the time when he was the rival of the
Gramont-Caderousses and the Demidoffs would surely not recognize him any
more than he would them. But are they as happy as he seems to have
remained through his life of sacrifice? There is laughter in his blue
eyes, which attest his pure Germanic origin, and which light up his face,
one of those feudal faces such as one sees in the portraits hung upon the
walls of the priories of Malta, where plainness has race. A thick, white
moustache, in which glimmers a vague reflection of gold, partly hides a
scar which would give to that red face a terrible look were it not for
the expression of those eyes, in which there is fervor mingled with
merriment. For Montfanon is as fanatical on certain subjects as he is
genial and jovial on others. If he had the power he would undoubtedly
have Ribalta arrested, tried, and condemned within twenty-four hours for
the crime of free-thinking. Not having it, he amused himself with him, so
much the more so as the vanquished Catholic and the discontented
Socialists have several common hatreds. Even on this particular morning
we have seen with what indulgence he bore the brusqueness of the old
bookseller, at whom he gazed for ten minutes without disconcerting him in
the least. At length the revolutionist seemed to have finished his
epigram, for with a quiet smile he carefully folded the sheet of paper,
put it in a wooden box which he locked. Then he turned around.

"What do you desire, Marquis?" he asked, without any further preliminary.

"First of all, you will have to read me your poem, old redshirt," said
Montfanon, "which will only be my recompense for having awaited your good
pleasure more patiently than an ambassador. Let us see whom are you
abusing in those verses? Is it Don Ciccio or His Majesty? You will not
reply? Are you afraid that I shall denounce you at the Quirinal?"

"No flies enter a closed mouth," replied the old conspirator, justifying
the proverb by the manner in which he shut his toothless mouth, into
which, indeed, at that moment, neither a fly nor the tiniest grain of
dust could enter.

"An excellent saying," returned the Marquis, with a laugh, "and one I
should like to see engraved on the facade of all the modern parliaments.
But between your poetry and your adages have you taken the time to write
for me to that bookseller at Vienna, who owns the last copy of the
pamphlet on the trial of the bandit Hafner?"

"Patience," said the merchant. "I will write."

"And my document on the siege of Rome, by Bourbon, those three notarial
deeds which you promised me, have you dislodged them?"

"Patience, patience," repeated the merchant, adding, as he pointed with a
comical mixture of irony and of despair to the disorder in his shop, "How
can you expect me to know where I am in the midst of all this?"

"Patience, patience," repeated Montfanon. "For a month you have been
singing that old refrain. If, instead of composing wretched verses, you
would attend to your correspondence, and, if, instead of buying
continually, you would classify this confused mass . . . . But," said he,
more seriously, with a brusque gesture, "I am wrong to reproach you for
your purchases, since I have come to speak to you of one of the last.
Cardinal Guerillot told me that you showed him, the other day, an
interesting prayer-book, although in very bad condition, which you found
in Tuscany. Where is it?"

"Here it is," said Ribalta, who, leaping over several piles of volumes
and thrusting aside with his foot an enormous heap of cartoons, opened
the drawer of a tottering press. In that drawer he rummaged among an
accumulation of odd, incongruous objects: old medals and old nails,
bookbindings and discolored engravings, a large leather box gnawed by
insects, on the outside of which could be distinguished a partly effaced
coat-of-arms. He opened that box and extended toward Montfanon a volume
covered with leather and studded. One of the clasps was broken, and when
the Marquis began to turn over the pages, he could see that the interior
had not been better taken care of than the exterior. Colored prints had
originally ornamented the precious work; they were almost effaced. The
yellow parchment had been torn in places. Indeed, it was a shapeless ruin
which the curious nobleman examined, however, with the greatest care,
while Ribalta made up his mind to speak.

"A widow of Montalcino, in Tuscany, sold it to me. She asked me an
enormous price, and it is worth it, although it is slightly damaged. For
those are miniatures by Matteo da Siena, who made them for Pope Pius II
Piccolomini. Look at the one which represents Saint Blaise, who is
blessing the lions and panthers. It is the best preserved. Is it not
fine?"

"Why try to deceive me, Ribalta?" interrupted Montfanon, with a gesture
of impatience. "You know as well as I that these miniatures are very
mediocre, and that they do not in the least resemble Matteo's compact
work; and another proof is that the prayerbook is dated 1554. See!" and,
with his remaining hand, very adroitly he showed the merchant the
figures; "and as I have quite a memory for dates, and as I am interested
in Siena, I have not forgotten that Matteo died before 1500. I did not go
to college with Machiavelli," continued he, with some brusqueness, "but I
will tell you that which the Cardinal would have told you if you had not
deceived him by your finesse, as you tried to deceive me just now. Look
at this partly effaced signature, which you have not been able to read. I
will decipher it for you. Blaise de Mo, and then a c, with several
letters missing, just three, and that makes Montluc in the orthography of
the time, and the b is in a handwriting which you might have examined in
the archives of that same Siena, since you come from there. Now, with
regard to this coat-of-arms," and he closed the book to detail to his
stupefied companion the arms hardly visible on the cover, "do you see a
wolf, which was originally of gold, and turtles of gales? Those are the
arms which Montluc has borne since the year 1554, when he was made a
citizen of Siena for having defended it so bravely against the terrible
Marquis de Marignan. As for the box," he took it in its turn to study it,
"these are really the half-moons of the Piccolominis. But what does that
prove? That after the siege, and just as it was necessary to retire to
Montalcino, Montluc gave his prayer-book, as a souvenir, to some of that
family. The volume was either lost or stolen, and finally reduced to the
state in which it now is. This book, too, is proof that a little French
blood was shed in the service of Italy. But those who have sold it have
forgotten that, like Magenta and Solferino, you have only memory for
hatred. Now that you know why I want your prayer-book, will you sell it
to me for five hundred francs?"

The bookseller listened to that discourse with twenty contradictory
expressions upon his face. From force of habit he felt for Montfanon a
sort of respect mingled with animosity, which evidently rendered it very
painful for him to have been surprised in the act of telling an untruth.
It is necessary, to be just, to add that in speaking of the great painter
Matteo and of Pope Pius II in connection with that unfortunate volume, he
had not thought that the Marquis, ordinarily very economical and who
limited his purchases to the strict domain of ecclesiastical history,
would have the least desire for that prayer-book. He had magnified the
subject with a view to forming a legend and to taking advantage of some
rich, unversed amateur.

On the other hand, if the name of Montluc meant absolutely nothing to
him, it was not the same with the direct and brutal allusion which his
interlocutor had made to the war of 1859. It is always a thorn in the
flesh of those of our neighbors from beyond the Alps who do not love us.
The pride of the Garibaldian was not far behind the generosity of the
former zouave. With an abruptness equal to that of Montfanon, he took up
the volume and grumbled as he turned it over and over in his inky
fingers:

"I would not sell it for six hundred francs. No, I would not sell it for
six hundred francs."

"It is a very large sum," said Montfanon.

"No," continued the good man, "I would not sell it." Then extending it to
the Marquis, in evident excitement, he cried: "But to you I will sell it
for four hundred francs."

"But I have offered you five hundred francs for it," said the nonplussed
purchaser. "You know that is a small sum for such a curiosity."

"Take it for four," insisted Ribalta, growing more and more eager, "not a
sou less, not a sou more. It is what it cost me. And you shall have your
documents in two days and the Hafner papers this week. But was that
Bourbon who sacked Rome a Frenchman?" he continued. "And Charles d'Anjou,
who fell upon us to make himself King of the two Sicilies? And Charles
VIII, who entered by the Porte du Peuple? Were they Frenchmen? Why did
they come to meddle in our affairs? Ah, if we were to calculate closely,
how much you owe us! Was it not we who gave you Mazarin, Massena,
Bonaparte and many others who have gone to die in your army in Russia, in
Spain and elsewhere? And at Dijon? Did not Garibaldi stupidly fight for
you, who would have taken from him his country? We are quits on the score
of service . . . . But take your prayer-book-good-evening, good-evening.
You can pay me later."

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