Thus, these
_quadrumanes_ set themselves to watch, work, and suffer, to fast,
sweat, and bestir them. Then, careless of the future, greedy of
pleasure, counting on their right arm as the painter on his palette,
lords for one day, they throw their money on Mondays to the _cabarets_
which gird the town like a belt of mud, haunts of the most shameless
of the daughters of Venus, in which the periodical money of this
people, as ferocious in their pleasures as they are calm at work, is
squandered as it had been at play. For five days, then, there is no
repose for this laborious portion of Paris! It is given up to actions
which make it warped and rough, lean and pale, gush forth with a
thousand fits of creative energy. And then its pleasure, its repose,
are an exhausting debauch, swarthy and black with blows, white with
intoxication, or yellow with indigestion. It lasts but two days, but
it steals to-morrow's bread, the week's soup, the wife's dress, the
child's wretched rags. Men, born doubtless to be beautiful--for all
creatures have a relative beauty--are enrolled from their childhood
beneath the yoke of force, beneath the rule of the hammer, the chisel,
the loom, and have been promptly vulcanized. Is not Vulcan, with his
hideousness and his strength, the emblem of this strong and hideous
nation--sublime in its mechanical intelligence, patient in its season,
and once in a century terrible, inflammable as gunpowder, and ripe
with brandy for the madness of revolution, with wits enough, in fine,
to take fire at a captious word, which signifies to it always: Gold
and Pleasure! If we comprise in it all those who hold out their hands
for an alms, for lawful wages, or the five francs that are granted to
every kind of Parisian prostitution, in short, for all the money well
or ill earned, this people numbers three hundred thousand individuals.
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