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The Duchesse de Langeais-Part4_Honore de Balzac(1799-1850)_Translated Works(翻译文学)-第2页

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meaningless for political parties as it is for youth.

In every age the great nobles, and the rich who always ape the



great nobles, build their houses as far as possible from crowded

streets. When the Duc d'Uzes built his splendid hotel in the Rue



Montmartre in the reign of Louis XIV, and set the fountain at his

gates--for which beneficent action, to say nothing of his other



virtues, he was held in such veneration that the whole quarter

turned out in a body to follow his funeral--when the Duke, I say,



chose this site for his house, he did so because that part of

Paris was almost deserted in those days. But when the



fortifications were pulled down, and the market gardens beyond

the line of the boulevards began to fill with houses, then the



d'Uzes family left their fine mansion, and in our time it was

occupied by a banker. Later still, the noblesse began to find



themselves out of their element among shopkeepers, left the Place

Royale and the centre of Paris for good, and crossed the river to



breathe freely in the Faubourg Saint-Germain, where palaces were

reared already about the great hotel built by Louis XIV for the



Duc de Maine--the Benjamin among his legitimated offspring. And

indeed, for people accustomed to a stately life, can there be



more unseemly surroundings than the bustle, the mud, the street

cries, the bad smells, and narrow thoroughfares of a populous



quarter? The very habits of life in a mercantile or

manufacturing district are completely at variance with the lives



of nobles. The shopkeeper and artisan are just going to bed when

the great world is thinking of dinner; and the noisy stir of life



begins among the former when the latter have gone to rest. Their

day's calculations never coincide; the one class represents the



expenditure, the other the receipts. Consequently their manners

and customs are diametrically opposed.



Nothing contemptuous is intended by this statement. An

aristocracy is in a manner the intellect of the social system, as



the middle classes and the proletariat may be said to be its

organising and working power. It naturally follows that these



forces are differentlysituated; and of their antagonism there is

bred a seeming antipathy produced by the performance of different



functions, all of them, however, existing for one common end.

Such social dissonances are so inevitably the outcome of any



charter of the constitution, that however much a Liberal may be

disposed to complain of them, as of treason against those sublime



ideas with which the ambitiousplebeian is apt to cover his

designs, he would none the less think it a preposterous notion



that M. le Prince de Montmorency, for instance, should continue

to live in the Rue Saint-Martin at the corner of the street which



bears that nobleman's name; or that M. le Duc de Fitz-James,

descendant of the royal house of Scotland, should have his hotel



at the angle of the Rue Marie Stuart and the Rue Montorgueil.

Sint ut sunt, aut non sint, the grand words of the Jesuit, might



be taken as a motto by the great in all countries. These social

differences are patent in all ages; the fact is always accepted



by the people; its "reasons of state" are self-evident; it is

at once cause and effect, a principle and a law. The common



sense of the masses never deserts them until demagogues stir them

up to gain ends of their own; that common sense is based on the



verities of social order; and the social order is the same

everywhere, in Moscow as in London, in Geneva as in Calcutta.



Given a certain number of families of unequal fortune in any

given space, you will see an aristocracy forming under your eyes;



there will be the patricians, the upper classes, and yet other

ranks below them. Equality may be a RIGHT, but no power on earth



can convert it into FACT. It would be a good thing for France if

this idea could be popularised. The benefits of political



harmony are obvious to the least intelligent classes. Harmony

is, as it were, the poetry of order, and order is a matter of



vital importance to the working population. And what is order,

reduced to its simplest expression, but the agreement of things



among themselves--unity, in short? Architecture, music, and

poetry, everything in France, and in France more than in any



other country, is based upon this principle; it is written upon




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