And endlessly quotable

that speculation had become a substitute for religious exaltation, the Bourse
a profane temple, the broker a shaman, financial jargon an incantatory lan-
guage, and the mass of French a worshipful throng.
More conservative writers did not quarrel with Zola’s metaphor, inclined
though some might have been to qualify it or turn it against the godless
doctrine on which he relied for the grand design of his fictional saga. Tra-
dition had unquestionably been dealt a blow by circumstances beyond any-
body’s control. Where bourgeois wisdom held that the virtuous man
planned, labored, saved; that he placed his faith in tangible things; that he
found the reward for all he begrudged himself in his children’s advance-
ment; and that he set posterity a shining example of the golden rule, cir-
cumstances now urged men to believe that the magic attending stock
market numbers augured a new dispensation. Paris swarmed with immi-
grants from provincial France who had come by railroad seeking fortune in
the capital, only to end up in some squalid tenement outside the customs
barrier eating dust all the days of their life. More Parisians than not went to
bed hungry at night. But a gambler could always cite that other swarm on
whom fortune had smiled, the golden dustmen who had struck it rich, the
parvenus who justified Tocqueville’s contention, “There is no longer a race
of wealthy men, just as there is no longer a race of poor people; the former
emerge every day from the bosom of the crowd and constantly return to
it.” Not since Revolutionary days, when the Convention made sang, or
aristocratic blood, and naissance, or high birth, obsolete by decreeing
Year 1, had Frenchmen with nothing to lose, but something to wager;‘]j1i';/
greeted so warmly the prospect of losing their past. v i
. Otherwise, dra-
matic art went into serious decline, as interest shifted from theater to con-
jury, with playwrights relying more and more on the technician who
devised special effects. Victor Séjour’s The Madonna of the Roses, for exam-
ple, owed its entire success to a fire simulated with bengal lights, bellows,
“spark,” and lycopodium. When Dennery’s The Battle of Marengo played at
the Chatelet, the manager requisitioned several four-inch artillery pieces
from the War Ministry and arranged to have their gun crews fire blank
shells, without any assurance that the theater’s glass roof could withstand
the shock wave. A production of Meyerbeer’s The African I/l/01/nan at the
Opera took place on a stage transformed into an enormous ship that was
made to rock fore and aft by hands working machinery underneath it. King
Carrot, a féerie, or extravaganza, written by Victorien Sardou and Jacques
Offenbach, in which an old magician who is dismembered and burned
piecemeal emerges from the fire a young man, inspired devices of the ut-
most ingenuity. “The machinist’s art uses all its resources in the construction
of tmcs. Some of them are veritable masterpieces,” declared one technician.
“The machinist is at once a carpenter, a cabinetmaker, and a mechanic. The
study of design and of dynamics is indispensable to him. Physics and even
chemistry furnish him many effects.”
While the church was accrediting Bernadette’s vision at Lourdes in hopes
of recovering something of its authority from science, theater was discred-
iting occultism with gimmicks that enhanced the prestige of the engineer.
Those who turned a deaf ear to Pius IX’s Syllabus of Errors got all the magic
they wanted on the Boulevard, where the supernatural, like everything else,
became big business. Behind the backdrop and beneath the floorboards of
several dozen stages, machinists and electricians, scene painters and uphol-
Sterers, locksmiths and blacksmiths, smoke-and-fire makers, fountain keep-
§Y$, and lighting masters all did yeomen work in the service of yet another
industry, the entertainment industry, which made fairy-tale scenes for the
Caffiage trade, manufacturing them with the same fastidiousness that
Vlollet-le-Duc applied to his restoration of medieval fortresses and
Napoleon III to the trappings of Napoleonic glory.
* * * * * *
 “This publication has convinced me once
again of women’s deep—seated immorality,” he declared to Feydeau, sparing.
not even those women whom we know he held in high esteem. “You will
object that that one [Louise Colet] is a monster, which I deny. There aren’t
any monsters, alas, and if there were, as many men could fill the role as
women. But one thing no man would do is treat a former mistress as she has
her ex-lover. Women have no notion of rectitude. The best among them
have no compunctions about listening at doors, unsealing letters, counsel-
ing and practicing a thousand little deceits, etc. It all goes back to their
organ. Where man has an Eminence, they have a Hole! That eminence is
Reason, Order, Science, the Phallus-Sun, and the hole is night, humidity,
confusion.”