When I see a man, I look him up and down and sound him out involuntarily, and I ask in my heart whether he is really, in truth, a man of probity, or a fortunate brigand whose assaults, thefts and murders are unknown, and will be so forever. Indignant and nauseated, with scorn on my lips, I am tempted to turn my back on him.
If men were, at least, classified like other animals, if their various forms reflected their penchants, their ferocity and their bounty, like other animals—if there were a form for the ferocious murderer as there is for the tiger and the hyena; if there were one for the thief, the usurer and the avaricious man, as there is for the kite, the wolf and the fox—it would then be easy to know one’s society; one could love judiciously and one could avoid the evil, chase them away and expel them, as one flees and expels the panther and the bear, while loving the dog, the deer and the ewe.
* * * *
“Merchant” and “thief” are synonymous
A poor man who steals the smallest object out of necessity is sent to the penitentiary, but merchants, who are privileged, open shops on the sides of roads in order to rob the passers-by who stray into them. Those thieves have neither skeleton-keys nor pliers, but they have scales, account-books and haberdasheries, and no one can get out of them without telling themselves that they have just been robbed. Those petty thieves eventually get rich and become “property-owners,” as they call themselves—insolent property-owners!
At the slightest political disturbance they flock together and take up arms, howling that they are in danger of pillage, and slaughtering with a clear conscience anyone who rises up against tyranny.
Stupid brokers—it’s a fine thing for you to talk about property and kill as looters the worthy people impoverished at your counters! Defend your property, then! Unfortunate rustics who, leaving the countryside, have come to fall upon you in the city, like flocks of crows or hungry wolves, to feed on carrion! Defend your property! Dirty dealers, what would you have without your barbaric pillaging? What would you have, if you did not sell brass as gold, dye for wine? Poisoners!
* * * *
I do not believe that one can become rich without being ferocious; a sensitive man never accumulates. In order to be rich it is necessary to have but one idea, one obsession, hard and immutable: the desire to make a heap of gold; and, in order to increase the size that heap of gold, it is necessary to be a usurer, a crook, an inexorable extortionist and murderer, especially maltreating the weak and the small. And when a mountain of gold is made, one can climb it, and from the height of its summit, with a smile on one’s lips, contemplate the valley of despair that one has made.
* * * *
The big businessman steals from the wholesaler, the wholesaler steals from the shopkeeper, the shopkeeper steals from the householder, the householder steals from the laborer and the laborer dies of hunger. It is not people who work with their hands who succeed; it is exploiters of humankind.
* * * *
In a notebook these verses were written, which I presume to be his, being unable to recall having seen them anywhere else.
TO A CERTAIN MORALIST
It is as well, at the height of the pulpit where one is enthroned,
At one’s ease, with a mocking smile,
Festooning one’s utterances and decorating one’s sermons
Not to be lying in one’s heart!
It is as well when one has just said something new,
To rebuke mores and good taste,
Not to go forth to extract one’s parables
From guard-rooms or the gutter!
Above all, it is as well, when a bard puts on
The mantle of the apostolate,
Not to shoot from a balcony of the Louvre
On the populace down below!
But who, then, Brothers, is that rude anchorite?
Who is this surly monk?
This harsh quibbler, this fat man in a biretta,
Who has come to remonstrate with us?
Who, then, is this torturer with the canine muzzle,
Lacerating everything, denying the beautiful,
Sullying art, who says that our age is in decline,
Only good to feed the crows?
Who is he, Brothers? He sings dirty songs,
Drives the people and raises a hue and cry!
On the thresholds of brothels he preaches morality,
Like a drover shouting at his herd!
* * * *
I shall say nothing about the death penalty; enough eloquent voices have condemned it since Beccaria;21 but I shall rise up and proclaim the infamy of the witness for the prosecution, and cover him with shame. Can one imagine being a witness for the prosecution? What horror! Only humankind offers such examples of monstrosity! Is there a barbarism more refined, more civilized, than evidence for the prosecution?
* * * *
In Paris there are two caverns, one of thieves, the other of murderers; that of thieves is the Bourse, that of murderers the Palais de Justice.
1. “Clotilde de Surville” was the notional fifteenth-century author of a book of poems published in 1803, probably forged by the Marquis de Surville who had died in 1798, after trying to provoke an insurrection against the Directoire in Provence. Carlino was an eighteenth-century actor, famous for playing Arlequino [Harlequin] whose supposed exchange of letters with the contemporary Pope, surnamed Ganganelli, was fraudulent. Joseph Delorme was the subject of Vie, Poésie et Pensées de Joseph Delorme (1829) by Charles-Augustin Saint-Beuve; no serious pretence was ever mounted that he was a real person.
2. The reference is to Pierre Borel (c1620-1671), an early microscopist, who might have been blurring the truth slightly when he referred to his father Jacques as a “mathematician and poet,” as it seems more likely that he was an astrologer, and no examples of his poetry survive.
3. Julius Caesar’s account of his wars in Gaul includes mention of a people called the Segusiani, living in the region where the city of Lyon was eventually founded. The name was further popularized by a thirteenth-century religious writer who signed himself Henricus de Segusia.
4. Philibert Delorme, Étienne de Martelange, Jean-Nicolas Servan, alias Servandoni, various members of the Audran family of artists, Jacques Stella, Antoine Coysevox, and Pierre-Simon Ballanche were all born in Lyon, Borel’s birthplace.
