Mirbeau delivers a biting satire of Parisian spectacle, where fleeting fame, media frenzy, and Sarah Bernhardt’s cult collide in a dazzling parade of playthings. A scornful portrait of a city enamored with noise, novelty, and narcissism.
It takes remarkably little to amuse that gawper we call Paris: an overturned carriage or a woman getting splashed is enough to send him into raptures. A gentleman passes by and takes it into his head to look up—immediately Paris stops, clusters round him, jostles, and there he stands, mouth agape, eyes bulging, staring. At what? He hasn’t a clue, but he is perfectly delighted all the same. Monkey brain, woman’s heart, he’ll play with anything and nothing. They give him toys, like a sick child, and these toys are—depending on the story or gossip of the moment—Chinamen or Englishmen, gambling dens, corpses, statues, a wayward poet, a slightly mad actress, a minister, a singer, sometimes even a great man, but most often some tiny trifle: dolls he dresses up, primps and rocks for a minute before crushing them between his fingers and demanding another toy. It’s not even the toy of the year or the day that his capricious mood requires—it’s the toy of this very minute, of the second already fleeting, this toy that passes by, goes out of fashion as quickly as his impressions, his friendships, his hatreds, froth from his brain that, like champagne bubbles, swells and sparkles for an instant then vanishes into air…
At heart, Paris is nothing but a tart who lives, loves, plays and preens like all tarts, with a bit of rouge on her cheeks—rouge that’s often blood; with stolen jewels, lying smiles, false oaths, and who parades, with equal shamelessness, beneath the curtains of her public bed, yesterday’s lovers after today’s. Yet in her fickle tastes, Paris has maintained a sort of fidelity to one of her most peculiar baubles: Mme Sarah Bernhardt. She leaves her sometimes, but only to seize her better; if she breaks her one day, it’s to mend her dislocated limbs the next and celebrate her more than ever. Paris feels for Sarah Bernhardt that obsessive, unhealthy love certain women have for their “special friend”. Both share the same soul, the same fleeting whims, the same vertigo for noise, the same cerebral derangement. They merge into one another and become one. You can count Paris’s heartbeats by taking Mme Sarah Bernhardt’s pulse, and if Paris makes revolutions, it’s because Sarah Bernhardt is having her nerves. Paris seizes on everything, the slightest domestic event, the most banal incident of her life, to return to her: it’s an announced sale that naturally doesn’t happen, an engagement she hasn’t kept, a theatre she hasn’t bought; it’s anything at all: a dog she has lost, a poet who has left her. Astonishing thing—this poet who has talent, who is from Touraine to boot, who does publicity as well as he does verse, who has published novels, dramas, tragedies, poems, only conquered the populace himself from the day they learned he had laid his muse at Sarah Bernhardt’s feet, and because he is taking back this muse, this popularity nearly becomes fame. Whereupon, from all quarters, the gossip flows; articles spring up, sonnets too, and since the French language seems unworthy of such Parisian subjects, dead languages resurrect themselves to sing the sad abandonment of one and the recovered freedom of the other… And we see, on the jetty at Le Havre, Calypso leaning and weeping; over there, cliffs rising all grey; the misty horizon, the churning sea, a boat carrying Ulysses toward Newfoundland, and the white sail fleeing before the breeze, fleeing and disappearing… all this is Greek! “O Athenians of Chaillot! Pack of Punchinellos!” says the gentleman in evening dress from Henriette Maréchal.
Well, whether it’s Greek, French, or gibberish, in prose or in verse, we now know that M. Richepin has returned to his family. We even know how, with what perfumed water sad Penelope washed the feet of repentant Ulysses. We have been let in on this intimate and very Athenian detail of his life. But nothing is intimate that has touched—near or far—Mme Sarah Bernhardt. Her house is made of glass, like the one Socrates dreamed of, and everyone can peer inside. It seems too that those who have left it keep about them a sort of bright light that pierces the best-hidden retreats and makes them recognisable, even in the deepest nights. So, M. Richepin has returned to reason, to life’s calm, to the truth of blessed affections. What’s he going to do with all that now?
Setting aside the theatrical posturing he’s been pleased to wrap himself in, I have the greatest esteem for M. Richepin’s talent. He is truly a poet, with a superb voice, whose bitter lyricism has often scaled unexplored peaks too high for the diseased lungs of most Parnassian versifiers. His first book was La Chanson des gueux, which will remain in our literature at a better rank than Mathurin Régnier’s satires. La Chanson des gueux gave us a new art, new rhythms, a magnificent gutter poetry where Lamartine’s soul shone through a hooligan’s twisted lips. He wrote Les Caresses, those verses of almost perfect form; La Glu, so vibrant, so astonishing in its verbal upheavals. Here then were real promises of glory, for among the young men, none was better armed with happiness and talent than M. Richepin, and one might have believed that with age, the little vanities, the little absurdities with which he wrapped his person, that sort of resounding, posturing cynicism he gave his manner would disappear entirely… That’s when he met Mme Sarah Bernhardt and was, through her, posted across the face of Paris as her beloved poet. These two theatricalities exasperated each other, and they descended into the darkest follies. It had to be well established that Mme Sarah Bernhardt had sunk her claws into this brain and made a toy of this supposedly ardent, masculine mind. Richepin, smeared with greasepaint, covered in sequins, sprawled across the stage. The poet was drowning in the actor. He, the singer of great skies that gild beggars’ rags and gladden the thin backs of vagabonds, he, the singer of vast seas that weather faces and rock sailors’ poverty, had for his horizon only backdrops with faded skies, flaking seas, and saw only footlight gas jets where stars had filled his eyes.
I don’t mind a man setting himself above routines, prejudices, even laws, entering boldly into human revolt with fists raised, anguished and sincere, crying his sufferings and doubts to God. Alfred de Musset did it: but with Alfred de Musset, his curses are full of love, his blasphemies full of belief; his pride, which is only the momentary cry of a troubled, wounded soul, bows before God’s omnipotence. But Jean Richepin continues with God the same jolly farce he has begun with men, and feels obliged to show himself to Him as he has shown himself to them, in actor’s costume. His Blasphèmes are the continuation of Nana-Sahib. He takes God for a bourgeois who has paid for his theatre seat and wants to astonish Him. He astonishes no one, for his Blasphèmes lack courage. They don’t even have that unhealthy swagger of the man who degrades himself before men, voluntarily exposes himself to hisses and rotten apples. M. Richepin knew perfectly well that God wouldn’t hiss him.
Insulting God in these times, when blasphemy is everywhere displayed, when it draws from the budget, when it sits enthroned in official dress on government benches, when it’s become the ministers’ creed and the masses’ religion, when you see it, sneering with twisted mouth, on posters at every street corner—now there’s fine courage and fine originality. Insulting God when He is driven from hospitals, schools, armies, when He is hunted everywhere like an enemy, and no one dares give Him shelter anywhere, like one accursed: but that’s lowering yourself, you, an independent, to the level of courtiers, those altar-smashers and temple-robbers; it’s falling, you, a poet, into the kneeling mob of Belmonets who under the Empire sang the 2nd of December and waited for their cross on the 15th of August as payment for their cantata. What would have been brave, what wouldn’t have been banal, would have been to defend Him, to gather at the foot of His calvaries His blood that still flows, not to fling it at heaven’s face like a jet of filthy spittle, but to spread it over humanity like a dew of hope and consolation.
M. Richepin has now amply paid his debt to fantasy. He is going to forget and make others forget—I hope for his sake, for his friends’, for literature’s—his excesses and follies in the rediscovered joys of domesticity. A toy in the hands of a woman who was herself a toy in the hands of Paris, he hasn’t been broken. He has emerged victorious from the woman’s hands, but the woman hasn’t emerged from Paris’s hands. Whose toy now? There’s no shortage in literature’s bargain bin: blond and mud-spattered poets, wrinkle-faced actors, Punchinellos and puppets. Come on, you failures, you impotents, you empty bellies! Come on, toys, come on, baubles! Whose toy, the new toy, the pretty toy of the year?
Octave Mirbeau, Le Gaulois, 27 October 1884
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Léon Hennique Novel 