Shall I admire England? Shall I admire France?
France?
Why? Because of Paris?
I have just told you my opinion of Athens.
England?
Why?
Because of London?
I hate Carthage.
And then, London, the metropolis of luxury, is the headquarters of wretchedness.
There are a hundred deaths a year of hunger in the parish of Charing-Cross alone.
Such is Albion.
I add, as the climax, that I have seen an Englishwoman dancing in a wreath of roses and blue spectacles.
A fig then for England!
If I do not admire John Bull, shall I admire Brother Jonathan?
I have but little taste for that slave-holding brother.
Take away Time is money, what remains of England?
Take away Cotton is king, what remains of America?
Germany is the lymph, Italy is the bile.
Shall we go into ecstasies over Russia?
Voltaire admired it.
He also admired China.
I admit that Russia has its beauties, among others, a stout despotism; but I pity the despots.
Their health is delicate.
A decapitated Alexis, a poignarded Peter, a strangled Paul, another Paul crushed flat with kicks, divers Ivans strangled, with their throats cut, numerous Nicholases and Basils poisoned, all this indicates that the palace of the Emperors of Russia is in a condition of flagrant insalubrity.
All civilized peoples offer this detail to the admiration of the thinker; war; now, war, civilized war, exhausts and sums up all the forms of ruffianism, from the brigandage of the Trabuceros in the gorges of Mont Jaxa to the marauding of the Comanche Indians in the Doubtful Pass.
‘Bah!’ you will say to me, ‘but Europe is certainly better than Asia?’
I admit that Asia is a farce; but I do not precisely see what you find to laugh at in the Grand Lama, you peoples of the west, who have mingled with your fashions and your elegances all the complicated filth of majesty, from the dirty chemise of Queen Isabella to the chamber-chair of the Dauphin.
Gentlemen of the human race, I tell you, not a bit of it!
It is at Brussels that the most beer is consumed, at Stockholm the most brandy, at Madrid the most chocolate, at Amsterdam the most gin, at London the most wine, at Constantinople the most coffee, at Paris the most absinthe; there are all the useful notions.
Paris carries the day, in short.
In Paris, even the rag-pickers are sybarites; Diogenes would have loved to be a rag-picker of the Place Maubert better than to be a philosopher at the Pir?us.
Learn this in addition; the wineshops of the rag-pickers are called bibines; the most celebrated are the Saucepan and The Slaughter-House.
Hence, tea-gardens, goguettes, caboulots, bouibuis, mastroquets, bastringues, manezingues, bibines of the rag-pickers, caravanseries of the caliphs, I certify to you, I am a voluptuary, I eat at Richard’s at forty sous a head, I must have Persian carpets to roll naked Cleopatra in!
Where is Cleopatra?
Ah! So it is you, Louison.
Good day.”
Thus did Grantaire, more than intoxicated, launch into speech, catching at the dish-washer in her passage, from his corner in the back room of the Cafe Musain.
Bossuet, extending his hand towards him, tried to impose silence on him, and Grantaire began again worse than ever:—
“Aigle de Meaux, down with your paws.
You produce on me no effect with your gesture of Hippocrates refusing Artaxerxes’ bric-a-brac.
I excuse you from the task of soothing me.
Moreover, I am sad.
What do you wish me to say to you?
Man is evil, man is deformed; the butterfly is a success, man is a failure.
God made a mistake with that animal.
A crowd offers a choice of ugliness.
The first comer is a wretch, Femme—woman—rhymes with infame,—infamous.
Yes, I have the spleen, complicated with melancholy, with homesickness, plus hypochondria, and I am vexed and I rage, and I yawn, and I am bored, and I am tired to death, and I am stupid!
Let God go to the devil!”
“Silence then, capital R!” resumed Bossuet, who was discussing a point of law behind the scenes, and who was plunged more than waist high in a phrase of judicial slang, of which this is the conclusion:—