The Doll - Bolesaw Prus [230]
These observations woke new currents in Wokulski’s soul, of which he had not thought before, or only imprecisely. And so the great city, like a plant or beast, had its own anatomy and physiology. And so the work of millions of people who proclaimed their free will so loudly produced the same results as bees building regular honeycombs, ants raising rounded mounds, or chemical compounds forming regular crystals.
Thus there was nothing accidental in society, but an inflexible law which, as if in irony at human pride, manifested itself so clearly in the life of the most capricious of nations, the French! It had been ruled by Merovingians and Carolingians, Bourbons and Bonapartes; there had been three republics and a couple of anarchies, the Inquisition and atheism; rulers and ministers followed one upon the other like the cut of gowns or the clouds in the sky…But despite so many apparently fundamental changes, Paris took on ever more precisely the form of a dish torn by the Seine; the crystal axis was delineated ever more clearly running from the Place de la Bastille to the Etoile; ever more clearly did the districts define themselves: the learned and the industrial, the ancestral and the industrial, the military and the parvenu.
Wokulski perceived this same fatalism in the history of a dozen of the more prominent Parisian families. The grandfather, as a humble craftsman, worked at the rue du Temple, sixteen hours a day; his son, plunging into the Latin quarter, set up a larger workshop in the rue St-Antoine. His grandson, even more submerged in the scholarly district, moved as a great tradesman to the Boulevard Poissonnier, and his grandson, as a millionaire, set up house in the neighbourhood of the Champs-Elysées so that…his daughters could suffer from nervous dispositions at the Boulevard St-Germain. Thus a race exhausted with work and enriched near the Bastille, worn out alongside the Tuileries, expired in the vicinity of Notre-Dame. The city’s topography reflected this history of its inhabitants.
Pondering this strange regularity of facts, recognised as irregular, Wokulski sensed that if anything was to cure his apathy, it would be analysis of this kind.
‘I am a strange man,’ he said to himself, ‘and so have gone mad, but civilisation will rescue me.’
Every day in Paris brought him new ideas or clarified the secrets of his own soul. Once, drinking iced coffee in a café, a street singer drew near the verandah and, to the accompaniment of a harp, sang:
Au printemps, la feuille repousse,
Et la fleur embellit les prés,
Mignonette, en foulant la mousse,
Suivons les papillons diapres.
Vois les se poser sur les roses;
Comme eux aussi, je veux poser,
Ma lèvre sur tes lèvres closes,
Et te ravir un doux baiser!
And at once several customers echoed the last passage: ‘Fools!’ Wokulski thought, ‘they’ve nothing better to do than repeat such rubbish.’ He rose, scowling, and with a pain in his heart, walked through a crowd of people as lively, noisy, chattering and singing as children let out of school: ‘Fools! Fools!’ he repeated.
But suddenly he wondered whether it was not he, rather, who was the fool? ‘If all these people were like me,’ he told himself, ‘Paris would be a hospital for the melancholy mad. Everyone would be haunted by memories, the streets would turn into puddles, the houses into ruins. Yet they take life as it is, they pursue practical aims, are happy and create masterpieces. And what am I pursuing? First it was perpetual motion and guided balloons, then a position to which my own allies refused to admit me, then a woman I’m hardly allowed to approach. But I have always either sacrificed myself or submitted