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TO SCOFF, TO REIGN
There is no limit to Paris.
No city has had that domination which sometimes derides those
whom it subjugates.
To please you, O Athenians! exclaimed Alexander.
Paris makes more than the law, it makes the fashion; Paris
sets more than the fashion, it sets the routine.
Paris may be stupid, if it sees fit; it sometimes allows itself
this luxury; then the universe is stupid in company with it; then
Paris awakes, rubs its eyes, says:
"How stupid I am!" and bursts out laughing in the
face of the human race. What a marvel is such a city! it is a
strange thing that this grandioseness and this burlesque should
be amicable neighbors, that all this majesty should not be thrown
into disorder by all this parody, and that the same mouth can
to-day blow into the trump of the Judgment Day, and to-morrow
into the reed-flute! Paris has a sovereign joviality.
Its gayety is of the thunder and its farce holds a sceptre.
Its tempest sometimes proceeds from a grimace.
Its explosions, its days, its masterpieces, its prodigies,
its epics, go forth to the bounds of the universe, and so also
do its cock-and-bull stories. Its laugh is the mouth of a volcano
which spatters the whole earth. Its jests are sparks.
It imposes its caricatures as well as its ideal on people;
the highest monuments of human civilization accept its ironies
and lend their eternity to its mischievous pranks. It is superb;
it has a prodigious 14th of July, which delivers the globe; it
forces all nations to take the oath of tennis; its night of the
4th of August dissolves in three hours a thousand years of feudalism;
it makes of its logic the muscle of unanimous will; it multiplies
itself under all sorts of forms of the sublime; it fills with
its light Washington, Kosciusko, Bolivar, Bozzaris, Riego, Bem,
Manin, Lopez, John Brown, Garibaldi; it is everywhere where the
future is being lighted up, at Boston in 1779, at the Isle de
Leon in 1820, at Pesth in 1848, at Palermo in 1860, it whispers
the mighty countersign:
Liberty, in the ear of the American abolitionists grouped
about the boat at Harper's Ferry, and in the ear of the patriots
of Ancona assembled in the shadow, to the Archi before the Gozzi
inn on the seashore; it creates Canaris; it creates Quiroga; it
creates Pisacane; it irradiates the great on earth; it was while
proceeding whither its breath urge them, that Byron perished at
Missolonghi, and that Mazet died at Barcelona; it is the tribune
under the feet of Mirabeau, and a crater under the feet of Robespierre;
its books, its theatre, its art, its science, its literature,
its philosophy, are the manuals of the human race; it has Pascal,
Regnier, Corneille, Descartes, Jean-Jacques: Voltaire for all
moments, Moliere for all centuries; it makes its language to be
talked by the universal mouth, and that language becomes the word;
it constructs in all minds the idea of progress, the liberating
dogmas which it forges are for the generations trusty friends,
and it is with the soul of its thinkers and its poets that all
heroes of all nations have been made since 1789; this does not
prevent vagabondism, and that enormous genius which is called
Paris, while transfiguring the world by its light, sketches in
charcoal Bouginier's nose on the wall of the temple of Theseus
and writes Credeville the thief on the Pyramids.
Paris is always showing its teeth; when it is not scolding
it is laughing.
Such is Paris.
The smoke of its roofs forms the ideas of the universe. A
heap of mud and stone, if you will, but, above all, a moral being.
It is more than great, it is immense.
Why?
Because it is daring.
To dare; that is the price of progress.
All sublime conquests are, more or less, the prizes of daring.
In order that the Revolution should take place, it does not suffice
that Montesquieu should foresee it, that Diderot should preach
it, that Beaumarchais should announce it, that Condorcet should
calculate it, that Arouet should prepare it, that Rousseau should
premeditate it; it is necessary that Danton should dare it.
The cry:
Audacity! is a Fiat lux.
It is necessary, for the sake of the forward march of the
human race, that there should be proud lessons of courage permanently
on the heights.
Daring deeds dazzle history and are one of man's great sources
of light. The dawn dares when it rises.
To attempt, to brave, to persist, to persevere, to be faithful
to one's self, to grasp fate bodily, to astound catastrophe by
the small amount of fear that it occasions us, now to affront
unjust power, again to insult drunken victory, to hold one's position,
to stand one's ground; that is the example which nations need,
that is the light which electrifies them. The same formidable
lightning proceeds from the torch of Prometheus to Cambronne's
short pipe.
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