The barque may roll and pitch, but she cleaves the world,
illuminates it through the hundred mouths of her tribunes, ploughs the
seas of science, rides with full sail, cries from the height of her
tops, with the voice of her scientists and artists: "Onward, advance!
Follow me!" She carries a huge crew, which delights in adorning her
with fresh streamers. Boys and urchins laughing in the rigging;
ballast of heavy _bourgeoisie_; working-men and sailor-men touched
with tar; in her cabins the lucky passengers; elegant midshipmen smoke
their cigars leaning over the bulwarks; then, on the deck, her
soldiers, innovators or ambitious, would accost every fresh shore, and
shooting out their bright lights upon it, ask for glory which is
pleasure, or for love which needs gold.
Thus the exorbitant movement of the proletariat, the corrupting
influence of the interests which consume the two middle classes, the
cruelties of the artist's thought, and the excessive pleasure which is
sought for incessantly by the great, explain the normal ugliness of
the Parisian physiognomy. It is only in the Orient that the human race
presents a magnificent figure, but that is an effect of the constant
calm affected by those profound philosophers with their long pipes,
their short legs, their square contour, who despise and hold activity
in horror, whilst in Paris the little and the great and the mediocre
run and leap and drive, whipped on by an inexorable goddess, Necessity
--the necessity for money, glory, and amusement.
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