ies
of children, spies out the caprices and the vices of mature age,
sucks money out of disease. Even so, if they drink no brandy, like the
artisan, nor wallow in the mire of debauch, all equally abuse their
strength, immeasurably strain their bodies and their minds alike, are
burned away with desires, devastated with the swiftness of the pace. In
their case the physical distortion is accomplished beneath the whip of
interests, beneath the scourge of ambitions which torture the educated
portion of this monstrous city, just as in the case of the proletariat
it is brought about by the cruel see-saw of the material elaborations
perpetually required from the despotism of the aristocratic "_I will_."
Here, too, then, in order to obey that universal master, pleasure or
gold, they must devour time, hasten time, find more than four-and-twenty
hours in the day and night, waste themselves, slay themselves, and
purchase two years of unhealthy repose with thirty years of old age.
Only, the working-man dies in hospital when the last term of his stunted
growth expires; whereas the man of the middle class is set upon living,
and lives on, but in a state of idiocy. You will meet him, with his
worn, flat old face, with no light in his eyes, with no strength in his
limbs, dragging himself with a dazed air along the boulevard--the belt
of his Venus, of his beloved city. What was his want? The sabre of the
National Guard, a permanent stock-pot, a decent plot in Pere Lachaise,
and, for his old age, a little gold honestly earned. _HIS_ Monday is on
Sunday, his rest a drive in a hired carriage--a country excursion during
which his wife and children glut themselves merrily with dust or bask
in the sun; his dissipation is at the restaurateur's, whose poisonous
dinner has won renown, or at some family ball, where he suffocates till
midnight. Some fools are surprised at the phantasmagoria of the monads
which they see with the aid of the microscope in a drop of water;
but what would Rabelais' Gargantua,--that misunderstood figure of
an audacity so sublime,--what would that giant say, fallen from the
celestial spheres, if he amused himself by contemplating the motions of
this secondary life of Paris, of which here is one of the formulae? Have
you seen one of those little constructions--cold in summer, and with
no other warmth than a small stove in winter--placed beneath the vast
copper dome which crowns the Halle-auble? Madame is there by morning.
S