The Girl with the Golden Eyes

His Monday is Sunday; his rest is the excursion in a hired carriage, the outing in the country, during which wife and children joyfully swallow dust or roast in the sun; his barrier is the restaurateur whose poisonous dinner has renown, or some family ball where people suffocate until midnight. Certain fools are astonished by the St. Vitus's dance with which the monads that the microscope reveals in a drop of water are afflicted, but what would Rabelais's Gargantua, figure of a misunderstood sublime audacity, what would this giant, fallen from the celestial spheres, say if he amused himself by contemplating the movement of this second Parisian life, of which here is one of the formulas? Have you seen those little huts, cold in summer, with no other hearth than a foot-warmer in winter, placed beneath the vast copper skullcap that caps the grain market? Madame is there from morning onward, she is a market commission agent and earns twelve thousand francs a year at this trade, they say. Monsieur, when Madame rises, passes into a dark office, where he lends at short weekly terms to the tradesmen of his neighborhood. At nine o'clock, he is at the passport office, of which he is one of the deputy heads. In the evening, he is at the box office of the Théâtre-Italien, or of any other theater you please to choose. The children are put out to nurse, and return from it to go to college or to a boarding school. Monsieur and Madame live on a third floor, have only one cook, give balls in a drawing room twelve feet by eight, and lit by oil lamps; but they give one hundred and fifty thousand francs to their daughter, and rest at fifty, the age at which they begin to appear in the third-tier boxes at the Opera, in a hackney cab at Longchamp, or in faded dress, on every sunny day, upon the boulevards, the espalier of these fructifications. Esteemed in the neighborhood, loved by the government, allied to the upper bourgeoisie, Monsieur obtains at sixty-five the cross of the Legion of Honor, and the father of his son-in-law, mayor of an arrondissement, invites him to his evenings. The labors of an entire life thus profit children whom this petty bourgeoisie tends fatally to raise as far as the upper one. Each sphere thus casts all its spawn into its higher sphere. The son of the rich grocer makes himself a notary, the son of the timber merchant becomes a magistrate. Not a tooth is missing to bite its groove, and everything stimulates the ascending movement of money.