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  “Je ne puis que vous plaindre”, the father of Adolphe writes when he observes that, as he expected, the young man’s determination to break with Ellenore is going to weaken. “Je ne puis que vous plaindre de ce qu’avec votre esprit d’indépendance, vous faites toujours ce que vous ne voulez pas.” But lovers of independence are like that; the love of liberty is more easily come by than the will to ensue it. Constant was inured to despotism; society conspired with Madame de Staël to reduce his will. Adolphe and Constant together both lament their lack of career. And if one can think of the writer of a masterpiece as a failure, the âme sèche of Constant was not the sole or even the chief cause of his disorientation. It is true that Madame de Staël’s party was the wrong one to belong to; but it was anyway hopeless for Constant to be a liberal democrat, full of the ideas of the Edinburgh Whigs, under an unconstitutional regime; and one can only sympathise with him when, shut out of public life where he could excel, and kept in the backwaters of scholarship and dalliance by the Napoleonic dictatorship, he should find this backwater dominated by a female of the Napoleonic species. One hesitates, of course, to call any place that Madame de Staël inhabited a backwater. Maelstrom comes nearer to her disposition. “Storm” was his word for her (modified to bel orage in Adolphe), warming up to “earthquake” and settling finally on “volcano”. And not extinct, either, like that crater to which Chateaubriand’s René climbed, in a famous passage, to weep for the mere matter of an hour or two. The real Romantics were men of theatrical moments; a borrower like Constant had to endure the years. He was ten years among the explosions of Madame de Staël, and even Napoleon, it is said, could not withhold a breath of congratulation when he heard she had gone to Italy where the volcano, as he pointed out, is natural to the scenery.

  Constant’s own solution was simply liberal constitutionalism. Marriage, he seems to suggest, was devised by society precisely for this kind of malady, i.e. the fatigue of the imagination, the discovery that when you possessed your mistress you did not love her. Cynical—but the idea had been in his mind since he was a boy of 13. He seems to have thought that even Madame the Volcano in full eruption would become amenable after standing at the altar. He was obeying the instinct of the male who, drowning in the passion he has unwittingly roused, seeks to appease the storm by throwing off his lifebelt.

  “Scène épouvantable avec Madame de Staël. J’annonce une rupture décisive. Deuxième scène. Fureur, reconciliation impossible, départ difficile. Il faut me marier.”

  Départ difficile—that sums up the diminuendo of human love. And even when it was not épouvantable it went on quietly nagging:

  “Minette est de mauvaise humeur, parceque je ne veux pas veiller le soir. Il est clair que je serai forcé de me marier pour pouvoir me coucher de bonne heure.”

  Well, he had two good goes at it and marriage was not a success.

  Adolphe is the intellectual in love, beginning it all out of amour propre and some fashionable imitation, creating love out of his head, rejoicing in the mind’s freedom, and horrified to find that the heart desires slavery. The beauty of the book is that the theme is lived and not argued; not indeed lived with the accidental paraphernalia or even the embellishment with which life mercifully obscures fundamental human problems, but with the austere serenity of abstraction. There is a little of the Romantic foliage taken from the literature of the time—the presentiments, the solitary walks, the wintry landscape and some notes in the deathbed scene are de rigueur—but he is not lyrical, nor does he go back to the urbane generalities of the pure eighteenth-century manner. He is something new. The lives of the lovers are singled out like two trees in the winter, their branches articulated in exact and delicate skeleton against a clear and cloudless sky.

  He was restless, it was noted. He could not keep still when he was in a room. The imagination is the most quickly wearied of our faculties; it craves for more and more stimulus. After its ecstasies it leaves a void; hollowness and listlessness lie like ashes after it has burned. Presently sentiment rewarms them and the tepid souls like Constant begin to live on the imagination’s memories. They are not memories of real things; but a mistress abandoned twenty years ago begins to be clothed in a glamour which, mathematically speaking, is twice the glamour of a mistress abandoned ten years ago; and twenty times the attraction of one he happens to be living with at the moment. She, poor wretch, has to deal with him, stark naked. It is a familiar perversity. The oldest of Constant’s ladies, now old enough to be his grandmother, seems almost proper for the magic state of marriageability. Alas, he had left it too late. She was dead. How far back would Constant’s memories have to go before he hit upon the ultimate and assuaging woman?

  At that question, out of malice to all, one wants to transplant him. One always wants to do this with the early liberals. One wants to show them where it was all leading, this exaltation of life, liberty and the pursuit of autobiography. Since that time there has been only one period in which the intellectuals have had it all their own way; when imagination and experiment were to be canonised, where liberty made its last if desiccated whoopee. One leads him into the Bloomsbury of the ’twenties. The Lawrence wave catches him, as Chateaubriand and Corinne caught him before. Presently he is thrown among the psycho-analysts. They seize him and one hears (as he describes the ever-enrichening associations of his memory) the inevitable question: “When did you last see your mother?” He has to confess he cannot remember: it was his father who had bothered him; she had died at his birth. And then one hears the shrill, scientific howl as Constant at last hears the cause of his trouble, the seat of that sullen will-lessness. It was the charm of living 130 years ago that the psychological novelists did not have to know what their own trouble was.

  The First Detective

  The time of the year and the year itself are unknown, but one day, well before the French Revolution, a tall, good-looking, fair-haired youth was hanging about dejectedly on the quay at Ostend seeking for a boat which would take him to America. Arras was his native town, but Arras could not hold him. His energy, his vitality, his hopes demanded a larger land. Unhappily the only boats going to America were far too expensive for him, and he stood on the quay lonely, homesick and in despair. He was in this state when a stranger fell into conversation with him, a stranger who turned out to be a shipping agent and who explained that once you knew the ropes it was the simplest thing on earth to find a ship. He, personally, would see to it. The two men went off to an inn to discuss the matter further. What happened after that was never quite clear to the youth. There had been good food and drink; there appeared to have been some “dames fort aimables” whose hospitality was of “the antique kind” which did not stop at the table; he even had some recollection of being in a pleasant if rotating room and under the same eiderdown as one of the ladies. All the more astonishing therefore to wake up in the morning and find himself lying half-naked on a pile of ropes—the only ones he was to learn about—with only a couple of écus in his pockets. A sad story and, as the innkeeper said, he ought to be grateful that worse had not happened. But this was not the appropriate moral. The money with which Eugène-François Vidocq had planned to pay his fare to America had been stolen from his mother’s baker’s shop in Arras. The theft was the first major enterprise—hitherto he had only tickled pennies out of the slot in the counter with a feather dipped in glue—in a picaresque career which was to lead Eugène-François into the French, Austrian and revolutionary armies, into the perpetual company of criminals, all over the roads of France and into most of the prisons, until at last, an artist in escape and quick changes, he arrived at the Sûreté in Paris not as a convict but as its Director. To his legend as a criminal was to be added a new legend as a detective. He was to be the first of the Big Four.

  The astonishing story of the life of Vidocq can be read in two French biographies, notably one by Jagot published in 1928; a far fuller and livelier account, however, is contained in the four volumes of Vidocq’s own Mémoi
res published in 1829, of which, as far as I know, no complete or reliable English translation exists. A French edition in two volumes is published by the Librairie Grund. The Mémoires are said not to be his own work, but, whoever wrote them, the book is enormously readable, especially the opening volume. This early narrative has the rapidity, the nonchalance, the variety and crude intrigue of the good picaresque novels; and in it Vidocq is a living man and not a mere first person singular. If he touched up his own past or if someone else touched it up for him, introducing romantic coincidences—Vidocq was always running into his ex-wife, his discarded mistresses or ill-intentioned fellow prisoners, at the least desirable moments—the story gains in romance and ingenuity.

  To describe Vidocq as a great criminal is inaccurate. Rather he was a reckless, adventurous young man with a gift for trouble, a true tête brulée. The Revolution, the war with Austria, the amateur and professional armies of the period, were his environment; the armies were recruited, dissolved, changed sides and, in default of pay, lived by their wits. Brussels was a hive of this knavery and there Vidocq found himself posing as an officer and plotting a bigamous marriage with an elderly baroness. There is some charm in his account of how his nerve went and of how he confessed to the lady. After the Ostend episode he had avoided theft and had tried to settle down with a circus. His employer tried to make him into an acrobat and failed; the alternative was the rôle of the noble savage, but he found this uncongenial, indeed terrifying: he was expected to eat birds alive and swallow stones. His next master was a wandering quack and knave who swindled farmers and who took Vidocq back to Arras, where his adventures and an orgy of forgiveness by his parents at once made him famous. Vidocq no doubt boasted. He was a great talker and something of an actor. Soon he had mistresses all over the town, was fighting duels or assaulting those who refused to fight. He found himself at last in prison.

  Here one picks up the recurring pattern of Vidocq’s life. Gaoled because of one woman, he intrigues with another to get him out—going this time to the length of marriage—but once he is out, the jealousy or unfaithfulness of the rescuing lady drives him again into hiding. It is a continually repeated story. Worse than his infidelity was his lack of tact. A girl called Francine, for example, risked everything to aid his escape from one gaol; yet, such was his crassness or his ill-luck, he walked straight out of the prison gates into the arms of an old mistress and unwisely spent the night with her instead of going to the woman who had rescued him. This was too much for the faithful, or at least sacrificial, Francine. It seemed to her—and to many others—that the best way to be assured of Vidocq was to get him back to prison as soon as possible. Vidocq made no pretence to virtue and delighted in the mystery which gradually grew around his character. He had the vanity of a child. Later on he was to describe with a proper sardonic agony how, when escaping from the police in Brittany and disguised as a nun, he was obliged by a farmer and his wife to occupy the same bed as their daughters, in the interests of propriety. Such a trial by fire is the kind of thing picaresque literature enjoys.

  The other element in the Vidocq pattern is his faculty for escape. Vidocq always held that his big conviction was unjust and that he was “framed” by a fellow prisoner. To escape was therefore a matter of justice and duty. There is something moving in this very vital man’s continual struggles for liberty. The fame of his escapes eclipsed whatever other notoriety he had. At Arras the disconsolate police were driven to put out the legend that he was a werewolf. One gendarme swore that, as he laid hands on him, Vidocq turned into a bale of straw.

  Awaiting trial, for example, he simply picked up the coat and helmet of the guard, which had been put on a bench near by, and walked unmolested out of court. On another occasion he locked the police up in his room. Over and over again he enjoyed the comedy of leading an unsuspecting police officer on to saying what he would do with Vidocq when he caught him. Jumping out of cabs when under escort, leaving prison by a rope at the window, sawing through manacles, digging tunnels out of gaol or making his guards drunk, became a routine. In Arras, where he was very much wanted, he lived for a year disguised as an Austrian officer and neither his family, the police nor the girl he lived with, who had known him well before, discovered his true identity.

  For twelve years, while he was supposedly serving a long sentence, Vidocq was more often out of prison than in it. But it was an exhausting life; freedom was constantly menaced by blackmailing associates, and just when he seemed to have settled down happily as a draper—such was his mild ambition—he met his divorced wife and found himself keeping her and her relatives in order to shut their mouths. The worm turned. He went to the Chief of Police and made him an offer. Pardon him, leave him in peace, Vidocq said, and he would help them to capture all the criminals they desired. It cannot be said that this second period of respectable fame makes entirely comfortable reading. He delivered “the goods” of course; no one could approach his abilities as a detective, for no one else had his knowledge of the underworld. The vanity of criminals is as inexhaustible as their love of the great figure; a burglar or assassin, however great in his own esteem, was flattered if the great and mysterious Vidocq sat down with him at the table of some shabby marchand de vin. Vidocq decoyed them with charm or effrontery, as the case demanded. With a rather devilish gusto he will tell how, hearing So-and-so was wanted, he would go to the house of the man’s mistress, announce her man had been caught, install himself with the lady for a few days and (his own mistress aiding him) would get to know the whole gang, and, at the right moment, strike. It is a little embarrassing. The authorities themselves became embarrassed. The law never feels very happy about the agent provocateur.

  The Mémoires of Vidocq are by a man who was hugely proud of his life both as a fugitive and a pursuer of fugitives. He had an eye for character and there are some admirable farces of low life such as his adventures with the drunken colonial sergeant and their riotous visits to the brothels. The dialogue is racy and real. His portraits of the innumerable “dames fort aimables” are very vivid. He is delighted with himself as a detective. There is a search, at one period, for a house where a hunchback girl lives in a quarter which at first seems to have no hunchbacks. Hunchbacks (Vidocq reasons) are natural gossips—especially about other people’s love affairs; they are jealous and also very respectable. Where do the most respectable gossips meet? At the milk shops. Disguised as a respectable man of 60 he sets out to search the most popular creameries. Sure enough a hunchback appears, a very Venus of hunchbacks, of course, a great-eyed creature like a medieval fairy. Posing as a wronged husband, Vidocq soon discovers who is living in sin in the house and so traces his victims.

  One can hardly call this subtle, but the methods of Vidocq were made for the chaotic period of the Napoleonic wars and their aftermath when France swarmed with criminals. Later on, more systematic and respectable means were wanted. His day came to an end and he had the mortification of seeing another reformed criminal, his secretary, one Coco Lacour, succeed him. Coco had reformed in earnest. He had gone to the Jesuits, who made him and his wife do public penance bare-footed in the streets. A coolness existed between Vidocq and Coco. Coco was a miserable man with no air of the gentleman about him and Vidocq had pointed out that a touch more polish in his conversation as a member of the Big Four would be an advantage. (After all, Vidocq had very nearly married a baroness, a Belgian baroness it is true, but still …) Coco resented his lessons in etiquette. Vidocq, in his jealousy, has drawn a very funny portrait of the little reformed sinner sitting all day by the Pont Neuf fishing while, at home, his wife is doing a good trade in clothes with prostitutes.

  Once out of favour Vidocq is said to have faked a robbery and then to have made arrests to show how clever he was; but the trick was discovered and the words agent provocateur finally doomed him. He started a paper factory which failed, a detective agency which declined into triviality. He died at last in poverty. There is one sentence in the Mémoires which I like t
o think he really wrote:

  Les voleurs de profession (it says) sont tous ceux qui volontairement ou non, ont contracté l’habitude de s’approprier le bien d’autrui.

  Germinal

  In the portrayal of character for its own sake and of the sociable rather than the social man, the English novelists have always excelled. The social man, the creature of ideas who must sacrifice some of his idiosyncrasy to environment, movements or theories, appears in a few exceptional books, books like The Pilgrim’s Progress, Gulliver, Jonathan Wild and later on in Hard Times and The Way of All Flesh. Elsewhere he is to be found mostly in the background. There is emotion about society (Dickens), but there is repugnance to ideas about it. It is remarkable how little the English novel was influenced in the nineteenth century by the political and scientific thought of the time, though some passages in George Eliot and Mrs. Gaskell show the novelist dealing with concrete event. Vainly we look, for example, for any sign that Darwin had been read, at any rate with an eye to the reconsideration of society. Thomas Hardy merely changes the pronoun by which one usually addresses the Deity; and at the turn of the century, Arnold Bennett performs a typical feat in importing the methods of the French naturalists, and leaving out the whole philosophical and political impulse behind that movement. This repugnance is supposed to have changed now. Yet so blankly do the alternatives of sociability and society present themselves to the English novelist that Wells thought he had to abandon character altogether. Since then there has been a good deal of talk about Marx and social realism which may be fruitful but which so far has produced next to nothing in the novel. Why, I am not sure; perhaps because we left learning about the nineteenth century too late.