The Girl with the Golden Eyes

7This ambition introduces thought into the second of the Parisian spheres. Go up one floor, then, and go to the mezzanine; or come down from the attic and remain on the fourth; in short, penetrate the world that has something: there, the same result. The wholesale merchants and their clerks, the employees, the people of small banking and great probity, the rogues, the damned souls, the first and the last clerks, the clerks of the bailiff, the attorney, the notary, in short the active, thinking, speculating members of that petty bourgeoisie which triturates the interests of Paris and watches over its grain, corners foodstuffs, stores the products made by the proletarians, packs in casks the fruits of the South, the fish of the Ocean, the wines of every coast loved by the sun; which stretches its hands over the Orient, there takes the shawls disdained by the Turks and the Russians; goes to harvest as far as the Indies, lies down to await the sale, aspires after profit, discounts bills, turns over and cashes all securities; packs all Paris in detail, carts it, watches for the fancies of childhood, spies upon the caprices and vices of mature age, presses out its illnesses; well, without drinking brandy like the worker, nor going to wallow in the mire of the barriers, all likewise exceed their strength; stretch beyond measure their body and their moral being, one by means of the other; dry themselves out with desires, ruin themselves with precipitate errands. Among them, physical torsion is accomplished beneath the whip of interests, beneath the scourge of the ambitions that torment the higher worlds of this monstrous city, as that of the proletarians was accomplished beneath the cruel press of the material elaborations incessantly desired by the despotism of the aristocratic I want it. There too, then, in order to obey this universal master, pleasure or gold, one must devour time, press time, find more than twenty-four hours in day and night, enervate oneself, kill oneself, sell thirty years of old age for two years of sickly rest. Only the worker dies in the hospital, when the last stage of his stunting has been completed, while the petty bourgeois persists in living and lives, but cretinized: you meet him with a worn, flat, old face, without light in his eyes, without firmness in his leg, dragging himself with a dazed air along the boulevard, the belt of his Venus, of his beloved city. What did the bourgeois want? the short saber of the National Guardsman, an unchanging pot-au-feu, a decent place in Père-Lachaise, and for his old age a little legitimately earned gold.