3 Honoré-Gabriel Riqueti, Comte de Mirabeau (1749–91), was already a scandalous figure when he deserted his class and got himself elected as a deputy for the Third Estate in 1789. Through his gift for oratory and the force of his personality, he quickly became one of the most powerful members of the National Assembly. Always corrupt and deeply in debt, Mirabeau was receptive when the court opened secret negotiations with him; he also sincerely feared the Revolution was getting out of control. He was supposed to calm the more radical tendencies of the Assembly, but his sudden death put an end to this possibility. Mirabeau was the first national hero to be entombed in the Pantheon, the disaffected church near the Sorbonne that was turned into a patriotic shrine by the revolutionary government. One year later, his correspondence with the court was discovered and his remains were disinterred and thrown into a common grave.
Chapter One: Country Pleasures
When it comes to the Ship of State, everyone wants to steer, because the job pays so well. But will there ever be some little spot that's open to an ordinary passenger?" "Yes, yes—and by the way, that should all really please someone as peace loving as you. Is it these most recent elections driving you out of the provinces?" "My problem goes back a lot further. Four years ago, I was forty, and I had five hundred thousand francs. I'm four years older, today, and probably worth fifty thousand francs less. That's what I'm going to lose, when I sell my château, Montfleury, near the Rhône—a superb location. "I got tired of the perpetual comedy we're forced to play, in Paris, by what you call nineteenth-century civilization. I was thirsty for goodwill and simplicity. I bought a place in the mountains, near the Rhône, lovelier than anything under the sun. "For six months, the village priest and the local squires kept courting me. I gave them dinners. 'I've left Paris,' I told them, 'so I'd never hear another word about politics the whole rest of my life. As you've noticed, I don't take a newspaper. The fewer letters the postman brings me, the happier I am.' "That wasn't what the priest had in mind. Pretty soon I was being harassed by a thousand prying questions and nuisances, etc. I wanted to give two or three hundred francs a year to the poor; they wanted my money for pious organizations—for Saint Joseph, the Virgin Mary, etc. I wouldn't do it. So then they insulted me in a hundred different ways. I was stupid enough to get annoyed. I could no longer go out in the morning, relishing the beauty of our mountains, without some vexation pulling me out of my reveries, bringing me back to thoughts of men and their wickedness. In the processions, for example, just before Ascension Day—and I like the chant, it's probably a Greek melody—they stopped blessing my fields, because, said the priest, they belong to a blasphemer. An old peasant lady, very devout, lost her cow, and she said it died from drinking out of my pond—me, a blasphemer from Paris. And a week later I found all my fish belly up, poisoned by lime. I was surrounded by vexations, in every form imaginable. The justice of the peace, a decent man but worried about losing his post, always ruled against me. For me, the peace of the countryside was a hell. Once they saw that the priest had turned away from me—he was head of the local Congregation of the Holy Virgin— and that the head of the local liberals, a retired army captain, wouldn't back me up, they all descended on me, even the mason I helped support, for an entire year, even down to a wheelwright who kept cheating me royally, in the most barefaced fashion, every time he repaired my plows. "To get some support, and to prevail in at least some of my lawsuits, I took up with the liberals—but, just as you said, those devilish elections came along, and they wanted my vote." "For some unknown fellow?" "Oh no, no, for a man I knew only too well. So I refused: what terrible rashness! From then on, with the liberals as well on my hands, my position became intolerable. I believe, so help me, that if the priest had taken it into his head to accuse me of murdering my servant, there would have been twenty witnesses, from both political parties, swearing they saw me committing the crime." "You'd like to live in the country without indulging your neighbors' passions, without even listening to their jabbering? Oh, how offensive..." "I've finally taken care of that. My château is for sale, I'll lose fifty thousand francs, if I have to, but I'll be overjoyed: I'm getting out of that inferno of hypocrisy and petty troublemaking. I propose to look for the peace and solitude of the countryside in the only place in France where those things can be found, a fourth-floor apartment overlooking the
The Red and the Black
Champs-Elysées. But I'm still wondering if, perhaps, I won't begin my political career in Paris, selling consecrated bread to a neighborhood parish." "All that wouldn't have happened, under Bonaparte," said Falcoz, his eyes shining with sorrow and anger. "That may be true, but why couldn't he keep himself in power, your Bonaparte? Everything I endure today stems from what he did." At this point, Julien began listening even more closely. He had understood from the very first word that Falcoz, the Bonapartist, was Monsieur de Rênal's old childhood friend, repudiated by him in 1816, just as the philosophical Saint-Giraud had to be brother to that department head, in the ——— district, who knew how to get city properties knocked down to him for a song. "It's all your Bonaparte's work," Saint-Giraud went on. "A decent man, as harmless as they make them, who's forty years old and has five hundred thousand francs, can't settle down in the provinces and find peace there. The priests and the country aristocracy chase him off." "No, don't say such awful things about him," Falcoz exclaimed. "France never stood so tall, in the eyes of the world, as it did in the thirteen years of his reign. Back then, there was something grand about everything we did." "Your emperor, may the devil take him," replied the forty-four-year-old man, "was only grand on the field of battle and when he put our finances on a sound footing, in 1802. What did it all mean, after that? With his fancy chamberlains, his pompous displays, and his receptions at the Tuileries, he gave us a new edition of all that kingly twaddle. It was a corrected edition; it might have lasted a century or two. The aristocracy and the priests, they wanted to bring back the old one, but they didn't have the iron hand they needed to sell it to the people." "Now there's an old printer talking!" "Who was it who drove me off my property?" the angry printer went on. "The priests, brought back by Napoleon and his concordat,4 instead of dealing with them the way government deals with doctors, lawyers, astronomers, viewing them simply as citizens, rather than harassing the trade by which they try to earn their bread. Would there be arrogant noblemen, today, if your Bonaparte hadn't created barons and counts?5 No, that was already out of fashion. Next to the priests, it was the petty provincial aristocrats who gave me the most trouble and made me turn myself into a liberal." The conversation went on and on: it was a text that France would be busy with for another half century. When Saint-Giraud said, once again, how impossible it was to live in the provinces, Julien shyly offered the example of Monsieur de Rênal. "By God, young man, that's an example indeed!" exclaimed Falcoz. "He's turned himself into a hammer, so he won't become an anvil—and a really terrible hammer. But I suspect he'll be pushed aside by Valenod. Do you know that scoundrel? He's the real thing. What's your Monsieur de Rênal going to say, early some morning, when he finds himself thrown out and Valenod taking his place?" "He'll be left looking at all the crimes he's committed," said Saint-Giraud. "So you know what's going on in Verrières, young man? Well! It's Bonaparte—may heaven close its doors against him and his monarchist rubbish—who put the Rênals and Chélans in power, and it's them who gave us the Valenods and the Maslons."