III. Personality Defects.

     The failings of character thus formed.—Adapted to one
     situation but not to a contrary situation.—Defects of
     intelligence.—Defects of disposition.—Such a character is
     disarmed by good-breeding.

The reason is that, the better people have become adapted to a certain situation the less prepared are they for the opposite situation. The habits and faculties that serve them in the previous condition become prejudicial to them in the new one. In acquiring talents adapted to tranquil times they lose those suited to times of agitation, reaching the extreme of feebleness at the same time with the extreme of urbanity. The more polished an aristocracy becomes the weaker it becomes, and when no longer possessing the power to please it not longer possesses the strength to struggle. And yet, in this world, we must struggle if we would live. In humanity, as in nature, empire belongs to force. Every creature that loses the art and energy of self-defense becomes so much more certainly a prey according as its brilliancy, imprudence and even gentleness deliver it over in advance to the gross appetites roaming around it. Where find resistance in characters formed by the habits we have just described? To defend ourselves we must, first of all, look carefully around us, see and foresee, and provide for danger. How could they do this living as they did? Their circle is too narrow and too carefully enclosed. Confined to their castles and mansions they see only those of their own sphere, they hear only the echo of their own ideas, they imagine that there is nothing beyond the public seems to consist of two hundred persons. Moreover, disagreeable truths are not admitted into a drawing-room, especially when of personal import, an idle fancy there becoming a dogma because it becomes conventional. Here, accordingly, we find those who, already deceived by the limitations of their accustomed horizon, fortify their delusion still more by delusions about their fellow men. They comprehend nothing of the vast world, which envelops their little world; they are incapable of entering into the sentiments of a bourgeois, of a villager; they have no conception of the peasant as he is but as they would like him to be. The idyll is in fashion, and no one dares dispute it; any other supposition would be false because it would be disagreeable, and as the drawing rooms have decided that all will go well, all must go well. Never was a delusion more complete and more voluntary. The Duc d'Orléans offers to wager a hundred louis that the States-General will dissolve without accomplishing anything, not even abolishing the lettre-de-cachet.. After the demolition has begun, and yet again after it is finished, they will form opinions no more accurate. They have no idea of social architecture; they know nothing about its materials, its proportions, or its harmonious balance; they have had no hand in it, they have never worked at it. They are entirely ignorant of the old building2321 in which they occupy the first story. They are not qualified to calculate either its pressure or its resistance.2322 They conclude, finally, that it is better to let the thing tumble in, and that the restoration of the edifice in their behalf will follow its own course, and that they will return to their drawing-room, expressly rebuilt for them, and freshly gilded, to begin over again the pleasant conversation which an accident, some tumult in the street, had interrupted.2323 Clear-sighted in society, they are obtuse in politics. They examine everything by the artificial light of candles; they are disturbed and bewildered in the powerful light of open day. The eyelid has grown stiff through age. The organ so long bent on the petty details of one refined life no longer takes in the popular life of the masses, and, in the new sphere into which it is suddenly plunged, its refinement becomes the source of its blindness.

Nevertheless action is necessary, for danger is seizing them by the throat. But the danger is of an ignoble species, while their education has provided them with no arms suitable for warding it off. They have learned how to fence, but not how to box. They are still the sons of those at Fontenoy, who, instead of being the first to fire, courteously raised their hats and addressed their English antagonists, "No, gentlemen, fire yourselves." Being the slaves of good-breeding they are not free in their movements. Numerous acts, and those the most important, those of a sudden, vigorous and rude stamp, are opposed to the respect a well-bred man entertains for others, or at least to the respect which he owes to himself. They do not consider these allowable among themselves; they do not dream of their being allowed, and, the higher their position the more their rank fetters them. When the royal family sets out for Varennes the accumulated delays by which they are lost are the result of etiquette. Madame de Touzel insists on her place in the carriage to which she is entitled as governess of the Children of France. The king, on arriving, is desirous of conferring the marshal's baton on M. de Bouillé, and after running to and fro to obtain a baton he is obliged to borrow that of the Duc de Choiseul. The queen cannot dispense with a traveling dressing-case and one has to be made large enough to contain every imaginable implement from a warming-pan to a silver porridge-dish, with other dishes besides; and, as if there were no shifts to be had in Brussels, there had to be a complete outfit in this line for herself and her children.2324—A fervent devotion, even humanness, the frivolity of the small literary spirit, graceful urbanity, profound ignorance,2325 the lack or rigidity of the comprehension and determination are still greater with the princes than with the nobles.—All are impotent against the wild and roaring outbreak. They have not the physical superiority that can master it, the vulgar charlatanism which can charm it away, the tricks of a Scapin to throw it off the scent, the bull's neck, the mountebank's gestures, the stentor's lungs, in short, the resources of the energetic temperament and of animal cunning, alone capable of diverting the rage of the unchained brute. To find such fighters, they seek three or four men of a different race and education, men having suffered and roamed about, a brutal commoner like the abbé Maury, a colossal and dirty satyr like Mirabeau, a bold and prompt adventurer like that Dumouriez who, at Cherbourg, when, through the feebleness of the Duc de Beuvron, the stores of grain were given up and the riot began, hooted at and nearly cut to pieces, suddenly sees the keys of the storehouse in the hands of a Dutch sailor, and, yelling to the mob that it was betrayed through a foreigner having got hold of the keys, himself jumps down from the railing, seizes the keys and hands them to the officer of the guard, saying to the people, "I am your father, I am the man to be responsible for the storehouse!"2326 To entrust oneself with porters and brawlers, to be collared by a political club, to improvise on the highways, to bark louder than the barkers, to fight with the fists or a cudgel, as much later with the young and rich gangs, against brutes and lunatics incapable of employing other arguments, and who must be answered in the same vein, to mount guard over the Assembly, to act as volunteer constable, to spare neither one's own hide nor that of others, to be one of the people to face the people, all these are simple and effectual proceedings, but so vulgar as to appear to them disgusting. The idea of resorting to such means never enters their head; they neither know how, nor do they care to make use of their hands in such business.2327 They are skilled only in the duel and, almost immediately, the brutality of opinion, by means of assaults, stops the way to polite combats. Their arms, the shafts of the drawing-room, epigrams, witticisms, songs, parodies, and other needle thrusts are impotent against the popular bull.2328 Their personality lacks both roots and resources; through super-refinement it has weakened; their nature, impoverished by culture, is incapable of the transformations by which we are renewed and survive.—An all-powerful education has repressed, mollified, and enfeebled their very instincts. About to die, they experience none of the reactions of blood and rage, the universal and sudden restoration of the forces, the murderous spasm, the blind irresistible need of striking those who strike them. If a gentleman is arrested in his own house by a Jacobin we never find him splitting his head open.2329 They allow themselves to be taken, going quietly to prison; to make an uproar would be bad taste; it is necessary, above all things, to remain what they are, well-bred people of society. In prison both men and women dress themselves with great care, pay each other visits and keep up a drawing-room; it may be at the end of a corridor, by the light of three or four candles; but here they circulate jests, compose madrigals, sing songs and pride themselves on being as gallant, as gay and as gracious as ever: need people be morose and ill-behaved because accident has consigned them to a poor inn? They preserve their dignity and their smile before their judges and on the cart; the women, especially, mount the scaffold with the ease and serenity characteristic of an evening entertainment. It is the supreme characteristic of good-breeding, erected into an unique duty, and become to this aristocracy a second nature, which is found in its virtues as well as in its vices, in its faculties as well as in its impotencies, in its prosperity as at its fall, and which adorns it even in the death to which it conducts.

2301 (return)
[ Champfort, 110.]

2302 (return)
[ George Sand, V. 59. "I was rebuked for everything; I never made a movement which was not criticized."]

2303 (return)
[ "Paris, Versailles, et les provinces," I. 162.—"The king of Sweden is here; he wears rosettes on his breeches; all is over; he is ridiculous, and a provincial king." ("Le Gouvernement de Normandie," by Hippeau, IV. 237, July 4, 1784.]

2304 (return)
[ Stendhal, "Rome, Naples and Florence," 379. Stated by an English lord.]

2305 (return)
[ Marivaux, "La Petit-Maître corrigé.—Gresset, "Le Méchant." Crébillon fils, "La Nuit et le Moment," (especially the scene between the scene between Citandre and Lucinde).—Collé, "La Verité dans le Vin," (the part of the abbé with the with the présidente).—De Bezenval, 79. (The comte de Frise and Mme. de Blot). "Vie privée du Maréchal de Richelieu," (scenes with Mme. Michelin).—De Goncourt, 167 to 174.]

2306 (return)
[ Laclos, "Les Liaisons Dangereuses." Mme. de Merteuil was copied after a Marquise de Grenoble.—Remark the difference between Lovelace and Valmont, one being stimulated by pride and the other by vanity.]

2307 (return)
[ The growth of sensibility is indicated by the following dates: Rousseau, "Sur l'influence des lettres et des arts," 1749; "Sur l'inégalité," 1753; "Nouvelle Héloise," 1759. Greuze, "Le Pére de Famille lisant la Bible," 1755; "L'Accordée de Village," 1761. Diderot, "Le fils natural," 1757; "Le Pére de Famille," 1758.]

2308 (return)
[ Mme. de Genlis, "Mémoires," chap. XVII.—George Sand, I. 72. The young Mme. de Francueil, on seeing Rousseau for the first time, burst into tears.]

2309 (return)
[ This point has been brought out with as much skill as accuracy by Messieurs de Goncourt in "L'Art au dix-huitième siècle," I. 433-438.]

2310 (return)
[ The number for August, 1792, contains "Les Rivaux d'eux-mêmes."—About the same time other pieces are inserted in the "Mercure," such as "The federal union of Hymen and Cupid," "Les Jaloux," "A Pastoral Romance," "Ode Anacréontique à Mlle. S. D. . . . "etc.]

2311 (return)
[ Mme. de Genlis, "Adéle et Théodore," I. 312.—De Goncourt, "La Femme an dixhuitième siècle," 318.—Mme. d'Oberkirk, I. 56.—Description of the puff au sentiment of the Duchesse de Chartres (de Goncourt, 311): "In the background is a woman seated in a chair and holding an infant, which represents the Duc de Valois and his nurse. On the right is a parrot pecking at a cherry, and on the left a little Negro, the duchess's two pets: the whole is intermingled with locks of hair of all the relations of Mme. de Chartres, the hair of her husband, father and father-in-law."]

2312 (return)
[ Mme. de Genlis, "Les Dangers du Monde." I, scène VII; II, scène IV;—"Adèle et Théodore," I. 312;—"Souvenirs de Félicie," 199;—Bachaumont, IV, 320.]

2313 (return)
[ Mme. de la Rochejacquelein, "Mémoires."]

2314 (return)
[ Mme. de Genlis, "Mémoires," chap. XX.—De Lauzun, 270.]

2315 (return)
[ Mme. d'Oberkirk, II. 35 (1783-1784). Mme. Campan, III. 371.—Mercier, "Tableau de Paris," passim.]

2316 (return)
[ "Correspondance" by Métra, XVII. 55, (1784).—Mme. d'Oberkirk, II. 234.—"Marie Antoinette," by d'Arneth and Geffroy, II. 63, 29.]

2317 (return)
[ "Le Gouvernement de Normandie," by Hippeau, IV. 387 (Letters of June 4, 1789, by an eye-witness).]

2318 (return)
[ Florian, "Ruth".]

2319 (return)
[ Hippeau, IV. 86 (June 23, 1773), on the representation of "Le Siege de Calais," at the Comédie Française, at the moment when Mlle. Vestris has pronounced these words:

     Le Français dans son prince aime à trouver un frère
     Qui, né fils de l'Etat, en devienne le père.

    "Long and universal plaudits greeted the actress who had turned in
    the direction of the Dauphin." In another place these verses recur:

     Quelle leçon pour vous, superbes potentats!
     Veillez sur vos sujets dans le rang le plus bas,
     Tel, loin de vos regards, dans la misère expire,
     Qui quelque jour peut-être, eût sauvé votre empire.

"The Dauphin and the Dauphine in turn applauded the speech. This demonstration of their sensibility was welcomed with new expressions of affection and gratitude."]

2320 (return)
[ Madame de Genlis, "Souvenirs de Félicie," 76, 161.]

2321 (return)
[ M. de Montlosier; in the Constituent Assembly, is about the only person familiar with feudal laws.]

2322 (return)
[ "A competent and impartial man who would estimate the chances of the success of the Révolution would find that there are more against it than against the five winning numbers in a lottery; but this is possible, and unfortunately, this time, they all came out" (Duc de Lévis, "Souvenirs," 328.)]

2323 (return)
[ "Corinne," by Madame de Staël, the character of the Comte d'Erfeuil.—Malonet, "Mémoires," II. 297 (a memorable instance of political stupidity).]

2324 (return)
[ Mme. Campan, II. 140, 313.—Duc de Choiseul, "Mémoires."]

2325 (return)
[ Journal of Dumont d'Urville, commander of the vessel which transported Charles X. into exile in 1830.—See note 4 at the end of the volume.]

2326 (return)
[ Dumouriez, "Mémoires," III. chap. III. (July 21, 1789).]

2327 (return)
[ "All these fine ladies and gentlemen who knew so well how to bow and courtesy and walk over a carpet, could not take three steps on God's earth without getting dreadfully fatigued. They could not even open or shut a door; they had not even strength enough to lift a log to put it on the fire; they had to call a servant to draw up a chair for them; they could not come in or go out by themselves. What could they have done with their graces, without their valets to supply the place of hands and feet?" (George Sand, V. 61.)]

2328 (return)
[ When Madame de F—had expressed a clever thing she felt quite proud of it. M—remarked that on uttering something clever about an emetic she was quite surprised that she was not purged. Champfort, 107.]

2329 (return)
[ The following is an example of what armed resistance can accomplish for a man in his own house. "A gentleman of Marseilles, proscribed and living in his country domicile, has provided himself with gun, pistols and saber, and never goes out without this armament, declaring that he will not be taken alive. Nobody dared to execute the order of arrest. (Anne Plumptree, "A Residence of three years in France," (1802-1805), II. 115.]