The Girl With the Golden Eyes Read Online Free

Pleasure is like certain medicinal substances: To obtain the same effects, you have to keep increasing the dose, and death or mental exhaustion is inherent in the latter. All the lower classes lurk near the rich and keep an eye out for current tastes in order to exploit them and turn them into vices. How can one resist the clever seductions that are hatched in this country? Thus Paris has its
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, its own sort of opium-eaters—for them, gambling, gastrolatry, or the courtesan are their opium. So in these people you will see tastes but not passions—just romantic fantasies and timid affairs. Here impotence reigns; here there are no more ideas, the motive-force is lost in the playacting of the boudoir, in feminine antics. There are forty-year-old greenhorns, sixteen-year-old scholars. In Paris the rich encounter wit ready-made, pre-digested science, and opinions already formulated, which excuse them from having to have wit,science, or opinion. In this world, senselessness is as common as weakness and licentiousness. Here you become greedy for time by dint of losing it. Do not look for affection here any more than for ideas. Embraces mask profound indifference, politeness masks continuous scorn. Here the other is never loved. Shallow witticisms, hosts of indiscretions, much gossip, all blanketed by commonplaces—such is the substance of their language. But these unhappy “beautiful people” boast they don’t get together in order to speak and create maxims in the manner of La Rochefoucauld; as if the eighteenth century had never discovered that happy medium between the too-full and absolute emptiness. If a few intelligent men make use of a subtle, deft witticism, it isn’t understood. Soon they grow tired of giving without receiving, so they stay home and let idiots reign in their place. This hollow life, this constant waiting for a pleasure that doesn’t come, this permanent boredom, this inanity of spirit, heart, and brain, this weariness of the great Parisian rout is reproduced in their features, and produces these cardboard faces, these premature wrinkles, this physiognomy of the rich where impotence scowls, where gold is reflected, and from which intelligence has fled.
    This view of the moral Paris proves that the physical Paris could not be any different from theway it is. This tiara-clad city is a queen who, ever pregnant, has the usual irresistibly violent desires. Paris is the earth’s head, an intelligence bursting with genius and leading human civilization, a great man, a continuously creative artist, a politician with second sight who must have a well-developed cerebrum, with all the vices of a great man, the fantasies of an artist, and the plainness of politics. Its physiognomy implies the germination of good and evil, struggle and victory; the moral battle of 1789 whose trumpets are still resounding throughout all the corners of the world, and also the defeat of 1814. Thus this city could not possibly be any more moral, or more cordial, or cleaner than the engine boiler of those magnificent pyroscaphs, the steamboats you admire cleaving the waves! Isn’t Paris a sublime vessel freighted with intelligence? Yes, the city’s coat of arms is one of those prophecies that fate sometimes allows itself. The City of Paris has its great mast of bronze, sculpted from victories, with Napoleon as its look-out. The carvel indeed pitches and rolls in the waves, but it travels the world, fires shells at it from the hundred mouths of its galleries, plows through the seas of science, scuds through them at full sail, shouts from the peak of its topsails in the voice of its scholars and artists: “Forward, onward! Follow me!” It carries an immense crew that loves to deck it out with freshstreamers. Cabin boys and street urchins laugh in the rigging; its ballast is the ponderous bourgeoisie, laborers and common tars; in its cabins, the happy passengers; elegant midshipmen smoke their cigars, leaning on the rails.