WE make great progress only at those times when we become melancholy at those times when, discontented with the real world, we are forced to make for ourselves one more bearable.
The Theory of Ambition, an essay:
Jean-Marie Hérault de Séchelles
I. The Theory of Ambition
(17841787)
THE CAFÉ DU PARNASSE was known to its clients as the Café de lÉcole, because it overlooked the Quai of that name. From its windows you could see the river and the Pont-Neuf, and further in the distance the towers of the Law Courts. The café was owned by M. Charpentier, an inspector of taxes; it was his hobby, his second string. When the courts had adjourned for the day, and business was brisk, he would arrange a napkin over his arm and wait at table himself; when business slackened, he would pour a glass of wine and sit down with his regular customers, exchanging legal gossip. Much of the small-talk at the Café de lÉcole was of a dry and legalistic nature, yet the ambience was not wholly masculine. A lady might be seen there; compliments leavened with a discreet wit skimmed the marble-topped tables.
Monsieurs wife Angélique had been, before her marriage, Angelica Soldini. It would be pleasant to say that the Italian bride still enjoyed a secret life under the matrons cool Parisienne exterior. In fact, however, Angélique had kept her rapid and flamboyant speech, her dark dresses which were indefinably foreign, her seasonal outbursts of piety and carnality; under cover of these prepossessing traits flourished her real self, a prudent, economic woman as durable as granite. She was in the café every day perfectly married, plump, velvet-eyed; occasionally someone would write her a sonnet, and present it to her with a courtly bow. I will read it later, she would say, and fold it carefully, and allow her eyes to flash.
Her daughter, Antoinette Gabrielle, was seventeen years old when she first appeared in the café. Taller than her mother, she had a fine forehead and brown eyes of great gravity. Her smiles were sudden decisions, a flash of white teeth before she turned her head or twisted her whole body away, as if her merriment had secret objects. Her brown hair, shiny from long brushing, tumbled down her back like a fur cape, exotic and half-alive: on cold days, a private warmth.
Gabrielle was not neat, like her mother. When she pinned her hair up, the weight dragged the pins out. Inside a room, she walked as if she were out in the street. She took great breaths, blushed easily; her conversation was inconsequential, and her learning was patchy, Catholic and picturesque. She had the brute energies of a washerwoman, and a skin everybody said like silk.
Mme Charpentier had brought Gabrielle into the café so that she could be seen by the men who would offer her marriage. Of her two sons, Antoine was studying law; Victor was married and doing well, employed as a notary public; there was only the girl to settle. It seemed clear that Gabrielle would marry a lawyer customer. She bowed gracefully to her fate, regretting only a little the years of trespass, probate and mortgage that lay ahead. Her husband would perhaps be several years older than herself. She hoped he would be a handsome man, with an established position; that he would be generous, attentive; that he would be, in a word, distinguished. So when the door opened one day on Maître dAnton, another obscure attorney from the provinces, she did not recognize her future husband not at all.
SOON AFTER Georges-Jacques came to the capital, France had been rejoicing in a new Comptroller-General, M. Joly de Fleury, celebrated for having increased taxation on foodstuffs by 10 per cent. Georges-Jacquess own circumstances were not easy, but if there had not been some financial struggle he would have been disappointed; he would have had nothing to look back on in his days of intended prosperity.
Maître Vinot had worked him hard but kept his promises. Call yourself dAnton, he advised. It makes a better impression. On whom? Well, not on the real nobility; but so much civil litigation is pressed by the massed ranks of the socially insecure. So what if they all know its spurious? Maître Vinot said. It shows the right kind of urges. Have comprehensible ambitions, dear boy. Keep us comfortable.
When it was time to take his degree, Maître Vinot recommended the University of Rheims. Seven days residence and a swift reading list; the examiners were known to be accommodating. Maître Vinot searched his memory for an example of someone whom Rheims had failed, and couldnt come up with one. Of course, he said, with your abilities, you could take your exams here in Paris, but His sentence trailed off. He waved a paw. He made it sound like some effete intellectual pursuit, the kind of thing they went in for in Perrins chambers. DAnton went to Rheims, qualified, was received as an advocate of the Parlement of Paris. He joined the lowest rank of barristers; this is where one begins. Elevation from here is not so much a matter of merit, as of money.
After that he left the Île Saint-Louis, for lodgings and offices of varying degrees of comfort, for briefs of varying number and quality. He pursued a certain type of case involving the minor nobility, proof of title, property rights. One social climber, getting his patents in order, would recommend him to his friends. The mass of detail, intricate but not demanding, did not wholly absorb him. After he had found the winning formula, the greater part of his brain lay fallow. Did he take these cases to give himself time to think about other things? He was not, at this date, introspective. He was mildly surprised, then irritated, to find that the people around him were much less intelligent than himself. Bumblers like Vinot climbed to high office and prosperity. Goodbye, they said. Not a bad week. See you Tuesday. He watched them depart to spend their weekends in what with Parisians passed for the country. One day hed buy himself a place just a cottage would do, a couple of acres. It might take the edge off his restless moods.
He knew what he needed. He needed money, and a good marriage, and to put his life in order. He needed capital, to build himself a better practice. Twenty-eight years old, he had the build of the successful coal-heaver. It was hard to imagine him without the scars, but without them he might have had the coarsest kind of good looks. His Italian was fluent now; he practised it on Angelica, calling at the café each day when the courts rose. God had given him a voice, powerful, cultured, resonant, in compensation for his battered face; it made a frisson at the backs of womens necks. He remembered the prizewinner, took his advice; rolled the voice out from somewhere behind his ribs. It awaited perfection a little extra vibrancy, a little more colour in the tone. But there it was a professional asset.
Gabrielle thought, looks arent everything. She also thought, money isnt everything. She had to do quite a lot of thinking of this kind. But compared to him, all the other men who came into the café seemed small, tame, weak. In the winter of 86, she gave him long, private glances; in spring, a chaste fleeting kiss on closed lips. And M. Charpentier thought, he has a future.
The trouble is, that to make a career in the junior ranks of the Bar requires a servility that wears him down. Sometimes the signs of strain are visible on his tough florid face.
Gabrielle thought, looks arent everything. She also thought, money isnt everything. She had to do quite a lot of thinking of this kind. But compared to him, all the other men who came into the café seemed small, tame, weak. In the winter of 86, she gave him long, private glances; in spring, a chaste fleeting kiss on closed lips. And M. Charpentier thought, he has a future.
The trouble is, that to make a career in the junior ranks of the Bar requires a servility that wears him down. Sometimes the signs of strain are visible on his tough florid face.
MAÎTRE DESMOULINS had been in practice now for six months. His court appearances were rare, and like many rare things attracted a body of connoisseurs, more exacting and wonder-weary as the weeks passed. A gaggle of students followed him, as if he were some great jurist; they watched the progress of his stutter, and his efforts to lose it by losing his temper. They noted too his cavalier way with the facts of a case, and his ability to twist the most mundane judicial dictum into the pronouncement of some engirt tyrant, whose fortress he and he alone must storm. It was a special way of looking at the world, the necessary viewpoint of the worm when its turning.
Todays case had been a question of grazing rights, of arcane little precedents not set to make legal history. Maître Desmoulins swept his papers together, smiled radiantly at the judge and left the courtroom with the alacrity of a prisoner released from gaol, his long hair flying behind him.
Come back! dAnton shouted. He stopped, and turned. DAnton drew level. I can see youre not used to winning. Youre supposed to commiserate with your opponent.
Why do you want commiseration? You have your fee. Come, lets walk I dont like to be around here.
DAnton did not like to let a point go. Its a piece of decent hypocrisy. Its the rules.
Camille Desmoulins turned his head as they walked, and eyed him doubtfully. You mean, I may gloat?
If you will.
I may say, So thats what they learn in Maître Vinots chambers?
If you must. My first case, dAnton said, was similar to this. I appeared for a herdsman, against the seigneur.
But youve come on a bit since then.
Not morally, you may think. Have you waived your fee? Yes, I thought so. I hate you for that.
Desmoulins stopped dead. Do you really, Maître dAnton?
Oh Christ, come on, man, I just thought you enjoyed strong sentiments. There were enough of them flying around in court. You were very easy on the judge, I thought stopped just this side of foul personal abuse.
Yes, but I dont always. Ive not had much practice at winning, as you say. What would you think, dAnton, that I am a very bad lawyer, or that I have very hopeless cases?
What do you mean, what would I think?
If you were an impartial observer.
How can I be that? Everybody knows you, he thought. In my opinion, he said, youd do better if you took on more work, and always turned up when you were expected, and took fees for what you do, like a normal lawyer.
Well, how gratifying, Camille said. A neat, complete lecture. Maître Vinot couldnt have delivered it better. Soon youll be patting your incipient paunch and recommending to me a Life Plan. We always had a notion of what went on in your chambers. We had spies.
Im right, though.
There are a lot of people who need lawyers and who cant afford to pay for them.
Yes, but thats a social problem, youre not responsible for that state of affairs.
You ought to help people.
Ought you?
Yes at least, I can see the contrary argument, perhaps as a philosophical position you ought to leave them to rot, but when things are going wrong for them under your nose yes.
At your own expense?
Youre not allowed to do it at anyone elses.
DAnton looked at him closely. No one, he thought, could want to be like this. You must think me very blameworthy for trying to make a living.
A living? Its not a living, its pillage, its loot, and you know it. Really, Maître dAnton, you make yourself ridiculous by this venal posturing. You must know that there is going to be a revolution, and you will have to make up your mind which side you are going to be on.
This revolution will it be a living?
We must hope so. Look, I have to go, Im visiting a client. Hes going to be hanged tomorrow.
Is that usual?
Oh, they always hang my clients. Even in property and matrimonial cases.
To visit, I mean? Will he be pleased to see you? He may think you have in some way failed him.
He may. But then, it is a Corporal Work of Mercy, visiting the imprisoned. Surely you know that, dAnton? You were brought up within the church? I am collecting indulgences and things, he said, because I think I may die at any time.
Where is your client?
At the Châtelet.
You do know youre going the wrong way?
Maître Desmoulins looked at him as if he had said something foolish. I hadnt thought, you see, to get there by any particular route. He hesitated. DAnton, why are you wasting time in this footling dialogue? Why arent you out and about, making a name for yourself?
Perhaps I need a holiday from the system, dAnton said. His colleagues eyes, which were black and luminous, held the timidity of natural victims, the fatal exhaustion of easy prey. He leaned forward. Camille, what has put you into this terrible state?
Camille Desmoulinss eyes were set further apart than is usual, and what dAnton had taken for a revelation of character was in fact a quirk of anatomy. But it was many years before he noticed this.
AND THIS CONTINUED: one of those late-night conversations, with long pauses.
After all, dAnton said, what is it? After dark, and drink, he is often more disaffected. Spending your life dancing attendance on the whims and caprices of some bloody fool like Vinot.
Your Life Plan goes further, then?
You have to get beyond all that, whatever youre doing you have to get to the top.
I do have some ambitions of my own, Camille said. You know I went to this school where we were always freezing cold and the food was disgusting? Its sort of become part of me, if Im cold I just accept it, colds natural, and from day to day I hardly think of eating. But of course, if I do ever get warm, or someone feeds me well, Im pathetically grateful, and I think, well, you know, this would be nice to do it on a grand scale, to have great roaring fires and to go out to dinner every night. Of course, its only in my weaker moods I think this. Oh, and you know to wake up every morning beside someone you like. Not clutching your head all the time and crying, my God, what happened last night, how did I get into this?
It hardly seems much to want, Georges-Jacques said.
But when you finally achieve something, a disgust for it begins. At least, thats the received wisdom. Ive never achieved anything, so I cant say.
You ought to sort yourself out, Camille.
My father wanted me home as soon as I qualified, he wanted me to go into his practice. Then again, he didnt Theyve arranged for me to marry my cousin, its been fixed up for years. We all marry our cousins, so the family money interbreeds.