they think you want to burn their houses down!
It is vain for me to tell them that I speak for futurity,
for posterity, for self-interest properly understood;
for enterprise where nothing can be lost; that man
has preyed upon man long enough; that woman is a
slave; that the great providential thought should
be made to triumph; that a way must be found to
arrive at a rational co-ordination of the social fabric,
—in short, the whole reverberation of
my sentences. Well, what do you think? when
I open upon them with such ideas these provincials
lock their cupboards as if I wanted to steal their
spoons and beg me to go away! Are not they
fools? geese? The ‘Globe’ is smashed.
I said to the proprietors, ’You are too advanced,
you go ahead too fast: you ought to get a few
results; the provinces like results.’ However,
I have made a hundred ‘Globes,’ and I must
say, considering the thick-headedness of these clodhoppers,
it is a miracle. But to do it I had to make
them such a lot of promises that I am sure I don’t
know how the globites, globists, globules, or whatever
they call themselves, will ever get out of them.
But they always tell me they can make the world
a great deal better than it is, so I go ahead and
prophesy to the value of ten francs for each subscription.
There was one farmer who thought the paper was agricultural
because of its name. I Globed
him.
Bah! he gave in at once; he had a projecting forehead;
all men with projecting foreheads are ideologists.
“But the ‘Children’;
oh! ah! as to the ‘Children’! I got
two thousand between Paris and Blois. Jolly
business! but there is not much to say. You
just show a little vignette to the mother, pretending
to hide it from the child: naturally the child
wants to see, and pulls mamma’s gown and cries
for its newspaper, because ‘Papa has dot
his.’ Mamma can’t let her brat tear
the gown; the gown costs thirty francs, the subscription
six—economy; result, subscription.
It is an excellent thing, meets an actual want; it
holds a place between dolls and sugar-plums, the
two eternal necessities of childhood.
“I have had a quarrel here at the
table d’hote about the newspapers and my opinions.
I was unsuspiciously eating my dinner next to a
man with a gray hat who was reading the ‘Debats.’
I said to myself, ’Now for my rostrum eloquence.
He is tied to the dynasty; I’ll cook him;
this triumph will be capital practice for my ministerial
talents.’ So I went to work and praised
his ‘Debats.’ Hein! if I didn’t
lead him along! Thread by thread, I began to
net my man. I launched my four-horse phrases,
and the F-sharp arguments, and all the rest of the
cursed stuff. Everybody listened; and I saw
a man who had July as plain as day on his mustache,
just ready to nibble at a ‘Movement.’
Well, I don’t know how it was, but I unluckily
let fall the word ‘blockhead.’ Thunder!
you should have seen my gray hat, my dynastic hat
(shocking bad hat, anyhow), who got the bit in his
Print
Word
PDF
