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[NOTE: There is a short list of bookmarks, or pointers, at the end of the
file for those who may wish to sample the author's ideas before making an
entire meal of them. D.W.]

COSMOPOLIS

By PAUL BOURGET

With a Preface by JULES LEMAITRE, of the French academy,

PAUL BOURGET

Born in Amiens, September 2, 1852, Paul Bourget was a pupil at the Lycee
Louis le Grand, and then followed a course at the Ecole des Hautes
Etudes, intending to devote himself to Greek philology. He, however,
soon gave up linguistics for poetry, literary criticism, and fiction.
When yet a very young man, he became a contributor to various journals
and reviews, among others to the 'Revue des deux Mondes, La Renaissance,
Le Parlement, La Nouvelle Revue', etc. He has since given himself up
almost exclusively to novels and fiction, but it is necessary to mention
here that he also wrote poetry. His poetical works comprise: 'Poesies
(1872-876), La Vie Inquiete (1875), Edel (1878), and Les Aveux (1882)'.

With riper mind and to far better advantage, he appeared a few years
later in literary essays on the writers who had most influenced his own
development--the philosophers Renan, Taine, and Amiel, the poets
Baudelaire and Leconte de Lisle; the dramatist Dumas fils, and the
novelists Turgenieff, the Goncourts, and Stendhal. Brunetiere says of
Bourget that "no one knows more, has read more, read better, or
meditated, more profoundly upon what he has read, or assimilated it more
completely." So much "reading" and so much "meditation," even when
accompanied by strong assimilative powers, are not, perhaps, the most
desirable and necessary tendencies in a writer of verse or of fiction.
To the philosophic critic, however, they must evidently be invaluable;
and thus it is that in a certain self-allotted domain of literary
appreciation allied to semi-scientific thought, Bourget stands to-day
without a rival. His 'Essais de Psychologie Contemporaine (1883),
Nouveaux Essais (1885), and Etudes et Portraits (1888)' are certainly not
the work of a week, but rather the outcome of years of self-culture and
of protracted determined endeavor upon the sternest lines. In fact, for
a long time, Bourget rose at 3 a.m. and elaborated anxiously study after
study, and sketch after sketch, well satisfied when he sometimes noticed
his articles in the theatrical 'feuilleton' of the 'Globe' and the
'Parlement', until he finally contributed to the great 'Debats' itself.
A period of long, hard, and painful probation must always be laid down,
so to speak, as the foundation of subsequent literary fame. But France,
fortunately for Bourget, is not one of those places where the foundation
is likely to be laid in vain, or the period of probation to endure for
ever and ever.

In fiction, Bourget carries realistic observation beyond the externals
(which fixed the attention of Zola and Maupassant) to states of the mind:
he unites the method of Stendhal to that of Balzac. He is always
interesting and amusing. He takes himself seriously and persists in
regarding the art of writing fiction as a science. He has wit, humor,
charm, and lightness of touch, and ardently strives after philosophy and
intellectuality--qualities that are rarely found in fiction. It may well
be said of M. Bourget that he is innocent of the creation of a single
stupid character. The men and women we read of in Bourget's novels are
so intellectual that their wills never interfere with their hearts.

The list of his novels and romances is a long one, considering the fact
that his first novel, 'L'Irreparable,' appeared as late as 1884. It was
followed by 'Cruelle Enigme (1885); Un Crime d'Amour (1886); Andre
Cornelis and Mensonges (1887); Le Disciple (1889); La Terre promise;
Cosmopolis (1892), crowned by the Academy; Drames de Famille (1899);
Monique (1902)'; his romances are 'Une Idylle tragique (1896); La
Duchesse Bleue (1898); Le Fantome (1901); and L'Etape (1902)'.

'Le Disciple' and 'Cosmopolis' are certainly notable books. The latter
marks the cardinal point in Bourget's fiction. Up to that time he had
seen environment more than characters; here the dominant interest is
psychic, and, from this point on, his characters become more and more
like Stendhal's, "different from normal clay." Cosmopolis is perfectly
charming. Bourget is, indeed, the past-master of "psychological"
fiction.

To sum up: Bourget is in the realm of fiction what Frederic Amiel is in
the realm of thinkers and philosophers--a subtle, ingenious, highly
gifted student of his time. With a wonderful dexterity of pen, a very
acute, almost womanly intuition, and a rare diffusion of grace about all
his writings, it is probable that Bourget will remain less known as a
critic than as a romancer. Though he neither feels like Loti nor sees
like Maupassant--he reflects.

JULES LEMAITRE
de l'Academie Francaise.

AUTHOR'S INTRODUCTION

I send you, my dear Primoli, from beyond the Alps, the romance of
international life, begun in Italy almost under your eyes, to which I
have given for a frame that ancient and noble Rome of which you are so
ardent an admirer.

To be sure, the drama of passion which this book depicts has no
particularly Roman features, and nothing was farther from my thoughts
than to trace a picture of the society so local, so traditional, which
exists between the Quirinal and the Vatican. The drama is not even
Italian, for the scene might have been laid, with as much truth, at
Venice, Florence, Nice, St. Moritz, even Paris or London, the various
cities which are like quarters scattered over Europe of the fluctuating
'Cosmopolis,' christened by Beyle: 'Vengo adesso da Cosmopoli'. It is
the contrast between the rather incoherent ways of the rovers of high
life and the character of perennity impressed everywhere in the great
city of the Caesars and of the Popes which has caused me to choose the
spot where even the corners speak of a secular past, there to evoke some
representatives of the most modern, as well as the most arbitrary and the
most momentary, life. You, who know better than any one the motley world
of cosmopolites, understand why I have confined myself to painting here
only a fragment of it. That world, indeed, does not exist, it can have
neither defined customs nor a general character. It is composed of
exceptions and of singularities. We are so naturally creatures of
custom, our continual mobility has such a need of gravitating around one
fixed axis, that motives of a personal order alone can determine us upon
an habitual and voluntary exile from our native land. It is so, now in
the case of an artist, a person seeking for instruction and change; now
in the case of a business man who desires to escape the consequences of
some scandalous error; now in the case of a man of pleasure in search of
new adventures; in the case of another, who cherishes prejudices from
birth, it is the longing to find the "happy mean;" in the case of
another, flight from distasteful memories. The life of the cosmopolite
can conceal all beneath the vulgarity of its whims, from snobbery in
quest of higher connections to swindling in quest of easier prey,
submitting to the brilliant frivolities of the sport, the sombre
intrigues of policy, or the sadness of a life which has been a failure.
Such a variety of causes renders at once very attractive and almost
impracticable the task of the author who takes as a model that ever-
changing society so like unto itself in the exterior rites and fashions,
so really, so intimately complex and composite in its fundamental
elements. The writer is compelled to take from it a series of leading
facts, as I have done, essaying to deduce a law which governs them. That
law, in the present instance, is the permanence of race. Contradictory
as may appear this result, the more one studies the cosmopolites, the
more one ascertains that the most irreducible idea within them is that
special strength of heredity which slumbers beneath the monotonous
uniform of superficial relations, ready to reawaken as soon as love stirs
the depths of the temperament. But there again a difficulty, almost
insurmountable, is met with. Obliged to concentrate his action to a
limited number of personages, the novelist can not pretend to incarnate
in them the confused whole of characters which the vague word race sums
up. Again, taking this book as an example, you and I, my dear Primoli,
know a number of Venetians and of English women, of Poles and of Romans,
of Americans and of French who have nothing in common with Madame Steno,
Maud and Boleslas Gorka, Prince d'Ardea, Marquis Cibo, Lincoln Maitland,
his brother-in-law, and the Marquis de Montfanon, while Justus Hafner
only represents one phase out of twenty of the European adventurer, of
whom one knows neither his religion, his family, his education, his point
of setting out, nor his point of arriving, for he has been through
various ways and means. My ambition would be satisfied were I to succeed
in creating here a group of individuals not representative of the entire
race to which they belong, but only as possibly existing in that race--or
those races. For several of them, Justus Hafner and his daughter Fanny,
Alba Steno, Florent Chapron, Lydia Maitland, have mixed blood in their
veins. May these personages interest you, my dear friend, and become to
you as real as they have been to me for some time, and may you receive
them in your palace of Tor di Nona as faithful messengers of the grateful
affection felt for you by your companion of last winter.

PAUL BOURGET.

PARIS, November 16, 1892.

COSMOPOLIS

CHAPTER I

A DILETTANTE AND A BELIEVER

Although the narrow stall, flooded with heaped-up books and papers, left
the visitor just room enough to stir, and although that visitor was one
of his regular customers, the old bookseller did not deign to move from
the stool upon which he was seated, while writing on an unsteady desk.
His odd head, with its long, white hair, peeping from beneath a once
black felt hat with a broad brim, was hardly raised at the sound of the
opening and shutting of the door. The newcomer saw an emaciated,
shriveled face, in which, from behind spectacles, two brown eyes twinkled
slyly. Then the hat again shaded the paper, which the knotty fingers,
with their dirty nails, covered with uneven lines traced in a handwriting
belonging to another age, and from the thin, tall form, enveloped in a
greenish, worn-out coat, came a faint voice, the voice of a man afflicted
with chronic laryngitis, uttering as an apology, with a strong Italian
accent, this phrase in French:

"One moment, Marquis, the muse will not wait."

"Very well, I will; I am no muse. Listen to your inspiration
comfortably, Ribalta," replied, with a laugh, he whom the vendor of old
books received with such original unconstraint. He was evidently
accustomed to the eccentricities of the strange merchant. In Rome--for
this scene took place in a shop at the end of one of the most ancient
streets of the Eternal City, a few paces from the Place d'Espagne, so
well known to tourists--in the city which serves as a confluent for so
many from all points of the world, has not that sense of the odd been
obliterated by the multiplicity of singular and anomalous types stranded
and sheltering there? You will find there revolutionists like boorish
Ribalta, who is ending in a curiosity-shop a life more eventful than the
most eventful of the sixteenth century.

Descended from a Corsican family, this personage came to Rome when very
young, about 1835, and at first became a seminarist. On the point of
being ordained a priest, he disappeared only to return, in 1849, so rabid
a republican that he was outlawed at the time of the reestablishment of
the pontifical government. He then served as secretary to Mazzini, with
whom he disagreed for reasons which clashed with Ribalta's honor. Would
passion for a woman have involved him in such extravagance? In 1870
Ribalta returned to Rome, where he opened, if one may apply such a term
to such a hole, a book-shop. But he is an amateur bookseller, and will
refuse you admission if you displease him. Having inherited a small
income, he sells or he does not, following his fancy or the requirements
of his own purchases, to-day asking you twenty francs for a wretched
engraving for which he paid ten sous, to-morrow giving you at a low price
a costly book, the value of which he knows. Rabid Gallophobe, he never
pardoned his old general the campaign of Dijon any more than he forgave
Victor Emmanuel for having left the Vatican to Pius IX. "The house of
Savoy and the papacy," said he, when he was confidential, "are two eggs
which we must not eat on the same dish." And he would tell of a certain
pillar of St. Peter's hollowed into a staircase by Bernin, where a
cartouch of dynamite was placed. If you were to ask him why he became a
book collector, he would bid you step over a pile of papers, of boarding
and of folios. Then he would show you an immense chamber, or rather a
shed, where thousands of pamphlets were piled up along the walls: "These
are the rules of all the convents suppressed by Italy. I shall write
their history." Then he would stare at you, for he would fear that you
might be a spy sent by the king with the sole object of learning the
plans of his most dangerous enemy--one of those spies of whom he has been
so much in awe that for twenty years no one has known where he slept,
where he ate, where he hid when the shutters of his shop in the Rue
Borgognona were closed. He expected, on account of his past, and his
secret manner, to be arrested at the time of the outrage of Passanante as
one of the members of those Circoli Barsanti, to whom a refractory
corporal gave his name.

But, on examining the dusty cartoons of the old book-stall, the police
discovered nothing except a prodigious quantity of grotesque verses
directed against the Piedmontese and the French, against the Germans and
the Triple Alliance, against the Italian republicans and the ministers,
against Cavour and Signor Crispi, against the University of Rome and the
Inquisition, against the monks and the capitalists! It was, no doubt,
one of those pasquinades which his customers watched him at work upon,
thinking, as he did so, how Rome abounded in paradoxical meetings.

For, in 1867, that same old Garibaldian exchanged shots at Mentana with
the Pope's Zouaves, among whom was Marquis de Montfanon, for so was
called the visitor awaiting Ribalta's pleasure. Twenty-three years had
sufficed to make of the two impassioned soldiers of former days two
inoffensive men, one of whom sold old volumes to the other! And there is
a figure such as you will not find anywhere else--the French nobleman who
has come to die near St. Peter's.

Would you believe, to see him with his coarse boots, dressed in a simple
coat somewhat threadbare, a round hat covering his gray head, that you
have before you one of the famous Parisian dandies of 1864? Listen to
this other history. Scruples of devoutness coming in the wake of a
serious illness cast at one blow the frequenter of the 'Cafe Anglais' and
gay suppers into the ranks of the pontifical zouaves. A first sojourn in
Rome during the last four years of the government of Pius IX, in that
incomparable city to which the presentiment of the approaching
termination of a secular rule, the advent of the Council, and the French
occupation gave a still more peculiar character, was enchantment. All
the germs of piety instilled in the nobleman by the education of the
Jesuits of Brughetti ended by reviving a harvest of noble virtues, in the
days of trial which came only too quickly. Montfanon made the campaign
of France with the other zouaves, and the empty sleeve which was turned
up in place of his left arm attested with what courage he fought at
Patay, at the time of that sublime charge when the heroic General de
Sonis unfurled the banner of the Sacred Heart. He had been a duelist,
sportsman, gambler, lover, but to those of his old companions of pleasure
whom chance brought to Rome he was only a devotee who lived economically,
notwithstanding the fact that he had saved the remnants of a large
fortune for alms, for reading and for collecting.

Every one has that vice, more or less, in Rome, which is in itself the
most surprising museum of history and of art. Montfanon is collecting
documents in order to write the history of the French nobility and of the
Church. His mistresses of the time when he was the rival of the Gramont-
Caderousses and the Demidoffs would surely not recognize him any more
than he would them. But are they as happy as he seems to have remained
through his life of sacrifice? There is laughter in his blue eyes, which
attest his pure Germanic origin, and which light up his face, one of
those feudal faces such as one sees in the portraits hung upon the walls
of the priories of Malta, where plainness has race. A thick, white
moustache, in which glimmers a vague reflection of gold, partly hides a
scar which would give to that red face a terrible look were it not for
the expression of those eyes, in which there is fervor mingled with
merriment. For Montfanon is as fanatical on certain subjects as he is
genial and jovial on others. If he had the power he would undoubtedly
have Ribalta arrested, tried, and condemned within twenty-four hours for
the crime of free-thinking. Not having it, he amused himself with him,
so much the more so as the vanquished Catholic and the discontented
Socialists have several common hatreds. Even on this particular morning
we have seen with what indulgence he bore the brusqueness of the old
bookseller, at whom he gazed for ten minutes without disconcerting him in
the least. At length the revolutionist seemed to have finished his
epigram, for with a quiet smile he carefully folded the sheet of paper,
put it in a wooden box which he locked. Then he turned around.

"What do you desire, Marquis?" he asked, without any further
preliminary.

"First of all, you will have to read me your poem, old redshirt," said
Montfanon, "which will only be my recompense for having awaited your good
pleasure more patiently than an ambassador. Let us see whom are you
abusing in those verses? Is it Don Ciccio or His Majesty? You will not
reply? Are you afraid that I shall denounce you at the Quirinal?"

"No flies enter a closed mouth," replied the old conspirator, justifying
the proverb by the manner in which he shut his toothless mouth, into
which, indeed, at that moment, neither a fly nor the tiniest grain of
dust could enter.

"An excellent saying," returned the Marquis, with a laugh, "and one I
should like to see engraved on the facade of all the modern parliaments.
But between your poetry and your adages have you taken the time to write
for me to that bookseller at Vienna, who owns the last copy of the
pamphlet on the trial of the bandit Hafner?"

"Patience," said the merchant. "I will write."

"And my document on the siege of Rome, by Bourbon, those three notarial
deeds which you promised me, have you dislodged them?"

"Patience, patience," repeated the merchant, adding, as he pointed with a
comical mixture of irony and of despair to the disorder in his shop,
"How can you expect me to know where I am in the midst of all this?"

"Patience, patience," repeated Montfanon. "For a month you have been
singing that old refrain. If, instead of composing wretched verses, you
would attend to your correspondence, and, if, instead of buying
continually, you would classify this confused mass . . . . But," said
he, more seriously, with a brusque gesture, "I am wrong to reproach you
for your purchases, since I have come to speak to you of one of the last.
Cardinal Guerillot told me that you showed him, the other day, an
interesting prayer-book, although in very bad condition, which you found
in Tuscany. Where is it?"

"Here it is," said Ribalta, who, leaping over several piles of volumes
and thrusting aside with his foot an enormous heap of cartoons, opened
the drawer of a tottering press. In that drawer he rummaged among an
accumulation of odd, incongruous objects: old medals and old nails,
bookbindings and discolored engravings, a large leather box gnawed by
insects, on the outside of which could be distinguished a partly effaced
coat-of-arms. He opened that box and extended toward Montfanon a volume
covered with leather and studded. One of the clasps was broken, and when
the Marquis began to turn over the pages, he could see that the interior
had not been better taken care of than the exterior. Colored prints had
originally ornamented the precious work; they were almost effaced. The
yellow parchment had been torn in places. Indeed, it was a shapeless
ruin which the curious nobleman examined, however, with the greatest
care, while Ribalta made up his mind to speak.

"A widow of Montalcino, in Tuscany, sold it to me. She asked me an
enormous price, and it is worth it, although it is slightly damaged. For
those are miniatures by Matteo da Siena, who made them for Pope Pius II
Piccolomini. Look at the one which represents Saint Blaise, who is
blessing the lions and panthers. It is the best preserved. Is it not
fine?"

"Why try to deceive me, Ribalta?" interrupted Montfanon, with a gesture
of impatience. "You know as well as I that these miniatures are very
mediocre, and that they do not in the least resemble Matteo's compact
work; and another proof is that the prayerbook is dated 1554. See!"
and, with his remaining hand, very adroitly he showed the merchant the
figures; "and as I have quite a memory for dates, and as I am interested
in Siena, I have not forgotten that Matteo died before 1500. I did not
go to college with Machiavelli," continued he, with some brusqueness,
"but I will tell you that which the Cardinal would have told you if you
had not deceived him by your finesse, as you tried to deceive me just
now. Look at this partly effaced signature, which you have not been able
to read. I will decipher it for you. Blaise de Mo, and then a c, with
several letters missing, just three, and that makes Montluc in the
orthography of the time, and the b is in a handwriting which you might
have examined in the archives of that same Siena, since you come from
there. Now, with regard to this coat-of-arms," and he closed the book to
detail to his stupefied companion the arms hardly visible on the cover,
"do you see a wolf, which was originally of gold, and turtles of gales?
Those are the arms which Montluc has borne since the year 1554, when he
was made a citizen of Siena for having defended it so bravely against the
terrible Marquis de Marignan. As for the box," he took it in its turn to
study it, "these are really the half-moons of the Piccolominis. But what
does that prove? That after the siege, and just as it was necessary to
retire to Montalcino, Montluc gave his prayer-book, as a souvenir, to
some of that family. The volume was either lost or stolen, and finally
reduced to the state in which it now is. This book, too, is proof that a
little French blood was shed in the service of Italy. But those who have
sold it have forgotten that, like Magenta and Solferino, you have only
memory for hatred. Now that you know why I want your prayer-book, will
you sell it to me for five hundred francs?"

The bookseller listened to that discourse with twenty contradictory
expressions upon his face. From force of habit he felt for Montfanon a
sort of respect mingled with animosity, which evidently rendered it very
painful for him to have been surprised in the act of telling an untruth.
It is necessary, to be just, to add that in speaking of the great painter
Matteo and of Pope Pius II in connection with that unfortunate volume, he
had not thought that the Marquis, ordinarily very economical and who
limited his purchases to the strict domain of ecclesiastical history,
would have the least desire for that prayer-book. He had magnified the
subject with a view to forming a legend and to taking advantage of some
rich, unversed amateur.

On the other hand, if the name of Montluc meant absolutely nothing to
him, it was not the same with the direct and brutal allusion which his
interlocutor had made to the war of 1859. It is always a thorn in the
flesh of those of our neighbors from beyond the Alps who do not love us.
The pride of the Garibaldian was not far behind the generosity of the
former zouave. With an abruptness equal to that of Montfanon, he took up
the volume and grumbled as he turned it over and over in his inky
fingers:

"I would not sell it for six hundred francs. No, I would not sell it for
six hundred francs."

"It is a very large sum," said Montfanon.

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