Mirbeau mourns the decline of literary nobility, scorning a Parisian elite consumed by cosmopolitan vanity and financial vulgarity. Yet in Melchior de Vogüé, he finds a rare beacon—cultured, lyrical, and devoted to art’s enduring truth.
We are no longer in the age when belles-lettres were, in some sense, the prerogative of great lords, when the d’Aubignés, the Larochefoucaulds, the Montesquieus, the Chateaubriands illuminated an epoch with their works. As we move forward, the French nobility continues to divest itself of these privileges of the mind. Apart from the Duke de Broglie and the Vicomte d’Haussonville, we no longer encounter in its ranks those writers passionate about literature, as all other periods have given us.
There are indeed still, here and there, a few amateurs, but in such small numbers and of such poor quality that it’s better not to speak of them, and one regrets that they have, for a moment, abandoned their horses, their dogs, their grooms for superior diversions for which they are not made. We see them very well in the boots of the jockey or under the parti-coloured smock of the clown and the powdered wig of the Marquis de Saint-Lambert, and the lace cuffs of Monsieur de Buffon are for them adjustments quite as ridiculous as the brilliant peacock plumes were for the jay in the fable.
None of them will leave even a few scattered pages of those piquant and prettily chattering memoirs, as many wrote in the eighteenth century. The reason is that, apart from tailor’s anecdotes and stable talk, none of them has anything left to say, anything left to tell. It would be interesting, however, if one of them, between a pirouette at the Molier circus and a game of quinze at the elegant club, would be good enough to confide to us some historical notes on the intellectual decline of their social milieu. That fellow would do no bad work, nor make a foolish business of it.
What causes this? Many particular reasons that bring about, each day more serious and more irremediable, the moral abdications of this old French society; it stems chiefly from the financial cosmopolitanism with which it has allowed itself to be invaded and whose unhealthy tastes, harsh passions, pleasures without ideals, corruptions without grandeur it has assimilated. The Parisian world, whose courtesies, delicacies and—God forgive me—wit too have always been praised out of lingering habit and training, is now composed of little more than foreigners come from all corners of the Orient to rush at the French carrion, with no other preoccupations than money matters and the conquests of vanity by displaying great pomp, scattering gold with full hands, decorated with bizarre titles and doubtful, sometimes bloody, reputations. They were kept at a distance for some time, then the door of a club, a salon was opened a crack for them; and one fine day we found ourselves quite astonished to see them installed as masters everywhere. In Paris, if one sometimes resists a man, one does not resist his pairs of horses, his carriages, his mistresses, his hunts. The fusion has thus been accomplished to the point that this fusion looks very much like a conquest. For since then, our poor French names cut a rather pitiful figure and are somehow lost among these foreign names with barbarous endings. And the Parisian salons, when one reads in the newspapers the accounts of parties, dinners and balls, appear to us like the casinos of spa towns where all the cosmopolitan riffraff comes to rendezvous.
This invasion, armed… with banknotes, has had social consequences whose effect, through unconscious and rapid work, is cruelly felt today. It has, so to speak, denationalised Parisian society by overturning its habits, by imposing new tastes upon it, by shaking daily its genius for antique politeness, by adding to the amiable vices of a civilisation already attacked to the marrow the decompositions of oriental civilisations, decadent and rotten.
What remained of the ideal and of scattered grandeur in these begun collapses has disappeared; what one could expect of hopes and heroic recoveries in difficult days, all that has been buried. The invasion is complete, not only in the salons, but also in the hearts. We no longer even have young men; it is theirs who have installed themselves in their place, everywhere, even in the places of pleasure, where one no longer laughs besides, for this youth is sad, ill-bred. Thrown, almost as children, onto the Stock Exchange, having learned only to make money, they have never stopped at generous studies or the sublime dreams of art. At seventeen, their brains have never worked except on combinations of figures, and their souls have awakened only to the sweetness of rapid gains or the anguish of vertiginous losses. Gaiety does not dwell in these hearts haunted by anxieties, oppressed by the terrors of liquidations and beating only to the tinkling of gold and the rustling of banknotes. Youth dead to the beautiful things of life, which has communicated part of its death to our youth, also seized by the enervating follies of the million and turning towards the Stock Exchange as towards the only temple where reposes the only divinity one can henceforth worship.
So when one sees a man from this milieu carried away to defeat, a young man especially, who could so easily do like the others, straighten up and struggle victoriously against the current that sweeps around him things and beings, pell-mell, one must salute such a man doubly, for his merit—merit being equal—is greater than that of a simple bourgeois or a man of the people, who have the will and powerful ambition to rise and succeed to carry them into battle.
Monsieur le Vicomte Melchior de Vogüé is one of these courageous young men who seek elsewhere than in fortune and the worldly vanity of a fine name for ardent pleasures, noble interests.
A writer of talent, learned, searching, passionate about art and belles-lettres, this is not an occasional litterateur who brightens his idle hours by composing for a salon or a club performance ridiculous sketches in the slang of the dressing room. He is of the strong race of those writers who have chosen literature, not as a pastime with which one amuses oneself, not as a profession by which one lives, but as a vocation of instinct towards which their mind has carried them by an irresistible and natural inclination. Monsieur de Vogüé is truly a man of letters, in the beautiful and tranquil sense of the word, and not a literary dabbler, who always smells of the boulevard, the café and the newspaper. What does he aspire to? The Academy perhaps, where he would cut a very fine figure and where he will very certainly enter. But I imagine he aspires above all, at this moment, to the delicate and serene pleasures that art procures for those who serve it.
Monsieur de Vogüé publishes with the publisher Calmann-Lévy, Winter Nights, Russian studies of the highest interest, which had already appeared in the Revue des deux mondes, where they had obtained a very lively success. Monsieur de Vogüé was, I believe, embassy secretary in Petersburg; he has made a special study of the Russian people, sometimes profound, and all the more fresh because many French writers have given us, until now, Monsieur Tissot for example, the most false ideas of this people, in badly written books—as badly written as they were badly informed.
Winter Nights is a series of tales, in the manner of Turgenev, very picturesque, very dramatic, and all full of sincere, curious observations, of modern views, with a bold turn of thought. One senses that Monsieur de Vogüé has the very rare and very excellent habit of thinking for himself and of never being embarrassed by the narrow and conventional prejudices of his world. Under the dramatic form of his narratives, one also senses a political spirit of great clarity and penetrating sagacity, which does not go without a profound melancholy, as happens to all those who know men. Monsieur de Vogüé charms me above all by the qualities of the poet that are in him, and which admirably complete the observer and historian that he is to a high degree. He experiences before nature vivid sensations, lyrical emotions which he knows how to render in a coloured style, very artistic, abundant in expressions, a style of impression and movement where the image of things surges forth brilliant and clear, where the soul of beings appears with its joys and sorrows of humanity.
Monsieur Melchior de Vogüé has shown himself, in this volume, a writer of great merit, and I take pleasure in noting that he continues the great tradition of the gentleman-writers who endowed French literature with so many masterpieces, and whose grandsons today seem to illustrate only by their ignorance and their contempt for beautiful things, the races that are dying out and the societies that are passing away.
This is one of 50+ rare French literary texts translated into English for the first time on this site.
Léon Hennique Novel 