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Updated: June 4, 2025
"Monsieur de Lesperon," said he in a curious tone, "do you know that a rumour of your death is current in the province?" "I had hoped that such a rumour might get abroad when I disappeared," I answered calmly. "And you have taken no single step to contradict it?" "Why should I, since in that rumour may be said to lie my safety?" "Nevertheless, monsieur, voyons.
One after another these white-faced applicants leant over the counter. "Voyons, Monsieur!" they urged; "tell me this or inform me of that." But the clerk only smiled and shook his head. "Patience, Monsieur," he answered. "I cannot tell you yet. We are awaiting advices from London." "But when will you receive them?" inquired several, at once. "It may be to-morrow. It may not be for several days."
But, when one tries to catch him and pin him down on the dissecting-table, he turns out to be exasperatingly elusive. Even his most fervent admirers cannot agree among themselves as to the true nature of his achievements. Balzac thought of him as an artist, Taine was captivated by his conception of history, M. Bourget adores him as a psychologist, M. Barrès lays stress upon his 'sentiment d'honneur, and the 'Beylistes' see in him the embodiment of modernity. Certainly very few writers have had the good fortune to appeal at once so constantly and in so varied a manner to succeeding generations as Henri Beyle. The circumstances of his life no doubt in part account for the complexity of his genius. He was born in 1783, when the ancien régime was still in full swing; his early manhood was spent in the turmoil of the Napoleonic wars; he lived to see the Bourbon reaction, the Romantic revival, the revolution of 1830, and the establishment of Louis Philippe; and when he died, at the age of sixty, the nineteenth century was nearly half-way through. Thus his life exactly spans the interval between the old world and the new. His family, which belonged to the magistracy of Grenoble, preserved the living tradition of the eighteenth century. His grandfather was a polite, amiable, periwigged sceptic after the manner of Fontenelle, who always spoke of 'M. de Voltaire' with a smile 'mélangé de respect et d'affection'; and when the Terror came, two representatives of the people were sent down to Grenoble, with the result that Beyle's father was pronounced (with a hundred and fifty others) 'notoirement suspect' of disaffection to the Republic, and confined to his house. At the age of sixteen Beyle arrived in Paris, just after the coup d'état of the 18th Brumaire had made Bonaparte First Consul, and he immediately came under the influence of his cousin Daru, that extraordinary man to whose terrific energies was due the organisation of Napoleon's greatest armies, and whose leisure moments for apparently he had leisure moments were devoted to the composition of idylls in the style of Tibullus and to an enormous correspondence on literary topics with the poetasters of the day. It was as a subordinate to this remarkable personage that Beyle spent nearly the whole of the next fifteen years of his life in Paris, in Italy, in Germany, in Russia wherever the whirling tempest of the Napoleonic policy might happen to carry him. His actual military experience was considerably slighter than what, in after years, he liked to give his friends to understand it had been. For hardly more than a year, during the Italian campaign, he was in the army as a lieutenant of dragoons: the rest of his public service was spent in the commissariat department. The descriptions which he afterwards delighted to give of his adventures at Marengo, at Jéna, at Wagram, or at the crossing of the Niémen have been shown by M. Chuquet's unkind researches to have been imaginary. Beyle was present at only one great battle Bautzen. 'Nous voyons fort bien, he wrote in his journal on the following day, 'de midi
The soldier fell, got up, and ran away. But his comrade, throwing down the boots and drawing his sword, moved threateningly toward Pierre. "Voyons, Pas de betises!" * he cried. * "Look here, no nonsense!" Pierre was in such a transport of rage that he remembered nothing and his strength increased tenfold.
One woman tried to push past the soldiers, and to strike her in the face a woman! not thirty! and who was dragging a pale, squalid little boy by the hand. "Crache donc sur l'aristo, voyons!" the woman said to this poor, miserable litte scrap of humanity as the soldiers pushed her roughly aside. "Spit on the aristocrat!"
'Voyons', speak, explain yourself!" The time was far distant when these explosions surprised her, though they always pained her. "I speak stupidly," she said. "What will you? I am stupid; forgive me." These words, "forgive me," were more cruel than numberless reproaches, for he well knew that he had nothing to forgive in her, since she was the victim and he the criminal.
"Voyons l'amoureux," he cried, "show me thy face of a lover, little boy, who only yesterday wore aprons and climbed on my knees to search for sweets in my pockets!" Madame Joyselle turned quietly, after having, with a dexterous twist of her frying-pan, flopped her omelet to its other side. "Victor! And what brings you back, my man?"
"'Ow clever of you! You knew? Don't I look well, hein? I feel well quite all right. But I say to myself: 'Voyons 'alf an hour with nothing to do. I pay that cross doctor a visit. I would 'ave come before, but I 'ave been so busy. We re'earse 'Mademoiselle Pantalonne, ze first night to-morrow. You come? I send you a ticket." "Thanks.
And on Newman's assenting, "Ah no, ah no," he went on with a smile. "You are quite wrong, my dear fellow; you needn't mind him." "I verily believe that you are accusing the poor gentleman of being capable of rejoicing in his daughter's dishonor." "Voyons," said Valentin; "who is he? what is he?" "He is what he looks like: as poor as a rat, but very high-toned." "Exactly.
A ragged petticoat, a greasy red kerchief round the head, a tattered, stained shift to this pass of squalor and shame had Liberty brought the daughters of France. And they jeered at any passer-by less filthy, less degraded than themselves. "Ah! voyons l'aristo!" they shouted every time a man in decent clothes, a woman with tidy cap and apron, passed swiftly down the street.
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