They are all alike.
Not one escapes.
It suffices for them to breathe the air which blows through the street to lose their senses.
The nineteenth century is poison.
The first scamp that happens along lets his beard grow like a goat’s, thinks himself a real scoundrel, and abandons his old relatives.
He’s a Republican, he’s a romantic.
What does that mean, romantic?
Do me the favor to tell me what it is.
All possible follies.
A year ago, they ran to Hernani.
Now, I just ask you, Hernani! antitheses! abominations which are not even written in French!
And then, they have cannons in the courtyard of the Louvre.
Such are the rascalities of this age!”
“You are right, uncle,” said Theodule.
M. Gillenormand resumed:— “Cannons in the courtyard of the Museum!
For what purpose?
Do you want to fire grape-shot at the Apollo Belvedere?
What have those cartridges to do with the Venus de Medici?
Oh! the young men of the present day are all blackguards!
What a pretty creature is their Benjamin Constant!
And those who are not rascals are simpletons!
They do all they can to make themselves ugly, they are badly dressed, they are afraid of women, in the presence of petticoats they have a mendicant air which sets the girls into fits of laughter; on my word of honor, one would say the poor creatures were ashamed of love.
They are deformed, and they complete themselves by being stupid; they repeat the puns of Tiercelin and Potier, they have sack coats, stablemen’s waistcoats, shirts of coarse linen, trousers of coarse cloth, boots of coarse leather, and their rigmarole resembles their plumage.
One might make use of their jargon to put new soles on their old shoes.
And all this awkward batch of brats has political opinions, if you please.
Political opinions should be strictly forbidden.
They fabricate systems, they recast society, they demolish the monarchy, they fling all laws to the earth, they put the attic in the cellar’s place and my porter in the place of the King, they turn Europe topsy-turvy, they reconstruct the world, and all their love affairs consist in staring slily at the ankles of the laundresses as these women climb into their carts.
Ah! Marius!
Ah! you blackguard! to go and vociferate on the public place! to discuss, to debate, to take measures!
They call that measures, just God!
Disorder humbles itself and becomes silly.
I have seen chaos, I now see a mess.
Students deliberating on the National Guard,—such a thing could not be seen among the Ogibewas nor the Cadodaches!
Savages who go naked, with their noddles dressed like a shuttlecock, with a club in their paws, are less of brutes than those bachelors of arts!
The four-penny monkeys!
And they set up for judges! Those creatures deliberate and ratiocinate!
The end of the world is come!
This is plainly the end of this miserable terraqueous globe!
A final hiccough was required, and France has emitted it.
Deliberate, my rascals!
Such things will happen so long as they go and read the newspapers under the arcades of the Odeon.
That costs them a sou, and their good sense, and their intelligence, and their heart and their soul, and their wits.
They emerge thence, and decamp from their families.
All newspapers are pests; all, even the Drapeau Blanc!
At bottom, Martainville was a Jacobin.
Ah! just Heaven! you may boast of having driven your grandfather to despair, that you may!”
“That is evident,” said Theodule.
And profiting by the fact that M. Gillenormand was taking breath, the lancer added in a magisterial manner:—
“There should be no other newspaper than the Moniteur, and no other book than the Annuaire Militaire.”
M. Gillenormand continued:— “It is like their Sieyes! A regicide ending in a senator; for that is the way they always end.