Part 6 (1/2)
He left Gazonal to overlook Regulus, who was ”preparing” a newly arrived head. Tapping his tongue against his palate, he made a disapproving noise, which may perhaps be written down as ”t.i.tt, t.i.tt, t.i.tt.”
”There, there! good heavens! that cut is not square; your scissors are hacking it. Here! see there! Regulus, you are not clipping poodles; these are men--who have a character; if you continue to look at the ceiling instead of looking only between the gla.s.s and the head, you will dishonor my house.”
”You are stern, Monsieur Marius.”
”I owe them the secrets of my art.”
”Then it is an art?” said Gazonal.
Marius, affronted, looked at Gazonal in the gla.s.s, and stopped short, the scissors in one hand, the comb in the other.
”Monsieur, you speak like a--child! and yet, from your accent, I judge you are from the South, the birthplace of men of genius.”
”Yes, I know that hair-dressing requires some taste,” replied Gazonal.
”Hush, monsieur, hus.h.!.+ I expected better things of YOU. Let me tell you that a hair-dresser,--I don't say a good hair-dresser, for a man is, or he is not, a hair-dresser,--a hair-dresser, I repeat, is more difficult to find than--what shall I say? than--I don't know what--a minister?--(Sit still!) No, for you can't judge by ministers, the streets are full of them. A Paganini? No, he's not great enough. A hair-dresser, monsieur, a man who divines your soul and your habits, in order to dress your hair conformably with your being, that man has all that const.i.tutes a philosopher--and such he is. See the women! Women appreciate us; they know our value; our value to them is the conquest they make when they have placed their heads in our hands to attain a triumph. I say to you that a hair-dresser--the world does not know what he is. I who speak to you, I am very nearly all that there is of--without boasting I may say I am known--Still, I think more might be done--The execution, that is everything! Ah! if women would only give me carte blanche!--if I might only execute the ideas that come to me! I have, you see, a h.e.l.l of imagination!--but the women don't fall in with it; they have their own plans; they'll stick their fingers or combs, as soon as my back is turned, through the most delicious edifices--which ought to be engraved and perpetuated; for our works, monsieur, last unfortunately but a few hours. A great hair-dresser, hey! he's like Careme and Vestris in their careers. (Head a little this way, if you please, SO; I attend particularly to front faces!) Our profession is ruined by bunglers who understand neither the epoch nor their art. There are dealers in wigs and essences who are enough to make one's hair stand on end; they care only to sell you bottles. It is pitiable! But that's business. Such poor wretches cut hair and dress it as they can. I, when I arrived in Paris from Toulouse, my ambition was to succeed the great Marius, to be a true Marius, to make that name ill.u.s.trious. I alone, more than all the four others, I said to myself, 'I will conquer, or die.' (There! now sit straight, I am going to finish you.) I was the first to introduce _elegance_; I made my salons the object of curiosity.
I disdain advertis.e.m.e.nts; what advertis.e.m.e.nts would have cost, monsieur, I put into elegance, charm, comfort. Next year I shall have a quartette in one of the salons to discourse music, and of the best. Yes, we ought to charm away the ennui of those whose heads we dress. I do not conceal from myself the annoyances to a client. (Look at yourself!) To have one's hair dressed is fatiguing, perhaps as much so as posing for one's portrait. Monsieur knows perhaps that the famous Monsieur Humbolt (I did the best I could with the few hairs America left him--science has this in common with savages, that she scalps her men clean), that ill.u.s.trious savant, said that next to the suffering of going to be hanged was that of going to be painted; but I place the trial of having your head dressed before that of being painted, and so do certain women. Well, monsieur, my object is to make those who come here to have their hair cut or frizzed enjoy themselves. (Hold still, you have a tuft which _must_ be conquered.) A Jew proposed to supply me with Italian cantatrices who, during the interludes, were to depilate the young men of forty; but they proved to be girls from the Conservatoire, and music-teachers from the Rue Montmartre. There you are, monsieur; your head is dressed as that of a man of talent ought to be. Ossian,” he said to the lacquey in livery, ”dress monsieur and show him out. Whose turn next?” he added proudly, gazing round upon the persons who awaited him.
”Don't laugh, Gazonal,” said Leon as they reached the foot of the staircase, whence his eye could take in the whole of the Place de la Bourse. ”I see over there one of our great men, and you shall compare his language with that of the barber, and tell me which of the two you think the most original.”
”Don't laugh, Gazonal,” said Bixiou, mimicking Leon's intonation. ”What do you suppose is Marius's business?”
”Hair-dressing.”
”He has obtained a monopoly of the sale of hair in bulk, as a certain dealer in comestibles who is going to sell us a pate for three francs has acquired a monopoly of the sale of truffles; he discounts the paper of that business; he loans money on p.a.w.n to clients when embarra.s.sed; he gives annuities on lives; he gambles at the Bourse; he is a stockholder in all the fas.h.i.+on papers; and he sells, under the name of a certain chemist, an infamous drug which, for his share alone, gives him an income of thirty thousand francs, and costs in advertis.e.m.e.nts a hundred thousand yearly.”
”Is it possible!” cried Gazonal.
”Remember this,” said Bixiou, gravely. ”In Paris there is no such thing as a small business; all things swell to large proportions, down to the sale of rags and matches. The lemonade-seller who, with his napkin under his arm, meets you as you enter his shop, may be worth his fifty thousand francs a year; the waiter in a restaurant is eligible for the Chamber; the man you take for a beggar in the street carries a hundred thousand francs worth of unset diamonds in his waistcoat pocket, and didn't steal them either.”
The three inseparables (for one day at any rate) now crossed the Place de la Bourse in a way to intercept a man about forty years of age, wearing the Legion of honor, who was coming from the boulevard by way of the rue Neuve-Vivienne.
”Hey!” said Leon, ”what are you pondering over, my dear Dubourdieu?
Some fine symbolic composition? My dear cousin, I have the pleasure to present to you our ill.u.s.trious painter Dubourdieu, not less celebrated for his humanitarian convictions than for his talents in art.
Dubourdieu, my cousin Palafox.”
Dubourdieu, a small, pale man with melancholy blue eyes, bowed slightly to Gazonal, who bent low as before a man of genius.
”So you have elected Stidmann in place of--” he began.
”How could I help it? I wasn't there,” replied Lora.
”You bring the Academy into disrepute,” continued the painter. ”To choose such a man as that! I don't wish to say ill of him, but he works at a trade. Where are you dragging the first of arts,--the art those works are the most lasting; bringing nations to light of which the world has long lost even the memory; an art which crowns and consecrates great men? Yes, sculpture is priesthood; it preserves the ideas of an epoch, and you give its chair to a maker of toys and mantelpieces, an ornamentationist, a seller of bric-a-brac! Ah! as Chamfort said, one has to swallow a viper every morning to endure the life of Paris. Well, at any rate, Art remains to a few of us; they can't prevent us from cultivating it--”
”And besides, my dear fellow, you have a consolation which few artists possess; the future is yours,” said Bixiou. ”When the world is converted to our doctrine, you will be at the head of your art; for you are putting into it ideas which people will understand--_when_ they are generalized! In fifty years from now you'll be to all the world what you are to a few of us at this moment,--a great man. The only question is how to get along till then.”
”I have just finished,” resumed the great artist, his face expanding like that of a man whose hobby is stroked, ”an allegorical figure of Harmony; and if you will come and see it, you will understand why it should have taken me two years to paint it. Everything is in it! At the first glance one divines the destiny of the globe. A queen holds a shepherd's crook in her hand,--symbolical of the advancement of the races useful to mankind; she wears on her head the cap of Liberty; her b.r.e.a.s.t.s are sixfold, as the Egyptians carved them--for the Egyptians foresaw Fourier; her feet are resting on two clasped hands which embrace a globe,--symbol of the brotherhood of all human races; she tramples cannon under foot to signify the abolition of war; and I have tried to make her face express the serenity of triumphant agriculture. I have also placed beside her an enormous curled cabbage, which, according to our master, is an image of Harmony. Ah! it is not the least among Fourier's t.i.tles to veneration that he has restored the gift of thought to plants; he has bound all creation in one by the signification of things to one another, and by their special language. A hundred years hence this earth will be much larger than it is now.”