Ten years later, as a cub reporter on a Parisian newspaper, with the same choking lump in his throat and brimming eyes, Daville heard Mirabeau harangue fiercely against the old order and its abuses. His enthusiasm flowed from the same wellspring, but this time it was inspired by a vastly different object. Changed, Daville found himself in a world that too was utterly changed, cast upon it by the Revolution which now swept along hundreds of thousands of young men like himself, with great and irresistible force. He felt as if the whole world were growing young again alongside his own youth, as if the old humdrum of existence were suddenly shot up in a fireworks of dazzling vistas and unimagined opportunities. All at once everything became easy, rational and simple, all striving took on a loftier purpose, every thought and step grew somehow larger than life in a blaze of superhuman grandeur and dignity. It was no longer a case of the King’s bounty seeping down to a limited number of people and families, but a titanic eruption of divine justice over the whole of mankind. Like the others, Daville was lightheaded with irrational happiness, as weak and befuddled people often are when they stumble on a catchall and generally accepted formula that holds out a promise of meeting their needs and catering to their instincts at the cost of other people’s harm and ruin, while at the same time freeing them of responsibility and a nagging conscience.
Although he was only one of a large group of journalists covering the meetings of the Constituent Assembly, it seemed to young Daville that his own reports, in which he detailed the speeches of the leading participants or described the rousing scenes of patriotic and revolutionary fervor among the listeners, had a global, permanent significance, and his own initials at the foot of the column struck him at first as two pinnacles that nothing could surpass or scale. At times he thought he was not just chronicling the daily doings of the Assembly but was kneading, with his own hands and with giant force, the soul of mankind as though it were made of some obedient putty.
But those years went by and, sooner than he could have thought possible, he saw the dark side of this Revolution which had claimed his whole being. He still remembered how it all began.
One morning, awakened by a shouting street crowd, he had got up and flung open the window. Suddenly he had found him-helf face to face with a severed human head, swinging pale and blood-spattered, on the pike of a sans-culotte. At that moment, rising from his Bohemian stomach that hadn’t seen food since the day before, something terrible and sickening, like a cold fluid gone bitter, flooded first his chest and then his whole body. From that day on, for many years, life never ceased plying him with that same sour potion, to which no man can ever become accustomed. He went on living as before, spawning his articles and howling with the mob, but tormented now by the deepening split inside him, which for a long time he would not admit even to himself and which he would continue to hide from others to the very end. And when the time came to decide about the King’s life and the fate of the Kingdom, when he had to choose between the bitter brew of the Revolution, which had once intoxicated him so powerfully, and the “royal bounty” on which he had been nurtured, the young man suddenly found himself once more on the other side.
In the month of June 1792, after the first revolutionary wave had broken over the Court, a strong reaction set in among the more moderate elements and a collection of signatures was started for an address expressing the people’s sympathy for its King and Royal House. Borne along on this wave of protest against violence and chaos, young Daville swallowed his fear, shut his mind to any other thought, and wrote his signature beside those of twenty thousand other citizens of Paris. So great was the inner struggle that preceded his signature that it seemed to Daville as if his name were not lost among those thousands of names, most of them more prominent and better known than his own, but were branded in fiery letters across the evening skies of Paris. He learned then how a man could bend and break and go against himself, how he could fall and rise in his own eyes; he learned, in short, how ephemeral passions are, how tangled and contradictory while they last, what price they exact, and how bitterly they are repented when they pass away.
A month later began the great persecution and mass arrests of suspicious persons and “bad citizens,” especially among the twenty thousand who had signed the petition. To escape arrest and gain time to resolve his private conflicts, the young journalist Daville volunteered for military service and was sent to the Army of the Pyrenees on the Spanish frontier. There he saw the harshness and terror of war at first hand and learned too that war could be a healing and positive thing. He discovered the value and limits of bodily strength, he proved himself in danger, learned to obey and to command, he grew familiar with suffering in all its forms, and also with the beauty of friendship and the meaning of discipline.
Some three years after his first great inner crisis, Daville once again found his feet, appeased and toughened by military life. Chance took him to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, where at that time muddle and confusion were the order of the day. No one, from the Minister on down, was a professional diplomat; they were all learning, from scratch, those skills which until then had been the privilege of men of the old regime. When Talleyrand came to the Ministry, things began to liven up and take a turn for the better. It was pure chance again that Talleyrand should notice young Daville’s articles in Le Moniteur and decide to take him under his wing.
Like so many weak, easily shaken, and vacillating spirits, Daville, in his inner wavering and indecision, looked hopefully to a bright and constant light: the young General Bonaparte, the victor of Italy and the hope of all those who, like Daville, yearned for a middle way between the old regime and the Emigration on the one hand and the Revolution and the Terror on the other. And when Talleyrand gave him the post of Secretary in the new Cisalpine Republic, Daville, before his departure for Milan, was received in audience by the General, who wished to give him a personal message for his envoy, Citizen Trouvé.
Daville knew well Napoleon’s brother Lucien, who had recommended him; he was therefore received with every sign of attention, in the General’s private quarters, after supper.
When he found himself before this haggard man, with the strained white face, smoldering eyes, and cold glance, when he listened to his words, warm and rational at the same time, great, daring, clear, seductive words that opened up unimagined vistas well worth living and dying for, it seemed to Daville that all his doubts and uncertainties vanished without a trace, that everything grew calm and harmonious, all goals attainable, that all efforts were worth making and were blessed in advance. Talking with this unique person was like receiving the healing touch of a miracle worker. All the silt of past years was washed clean out of his soul, all the lamed ecstasies, all the agonizing doubts found their meaning and their justification. This extraordinary man had the gift of picking the safe course between extremes and contradictions which Daville, like so many others, had for years been seeking passionately and in vain. And when, toward midnight, the new Secretary to the Cisalpine Republic left the General’s quarters in rue Chantrennes, tears mounted to his eyes and he felt the same hard knot tightening in his throat as he had when he had waited for Louis XVI or sung revolutionary songs and listened to Mirabeau’s speeches. He felt intoxicated and soaring, almost as if the blood in his temples and in his chest pounded in time with the great pulse of the universe, throbbing up there somewhere beneath the stars of the night.
Once more the years passed. The haggard General made the world his stage and rode the horizon like a sublime sun that knew no setting. Daville held a succession of posts in a succession of places, hatched literary and political plans, turning toward this sun like the rest of the world. But fervor, like all passionate feelings of weak men in great and unstable times, betrayed him and failed to keep its promises; and Daville felt that he too, on his side, was secretly betraying his vision and slowly turning his back on it. How long had this been going on? When did the estrangement begin and how far had it gone? He could not find an answer
, but each passing day made it clearer that it was so. Only this time everything was harder and more complicated. The Revolution had swept away the old regime like a whirlwind, and Napoleon had come as a salvation from both, an intercession of Providence—the “middle way” of reason and dignity that so many had longed for. Now it began to look as if this way too were a kind of blind alley—one of the many false starts—that indeed there was no such thing as a true road and that men frittered away a lifetime in their dogged quest of it, while constantly shifting from one blind alley to another. Even so, one must keep looking for the right way.
After so many ups and downs, this was no longer as simple and easy as it once had been. Daville was not a young man any more; time and his earlier crises, which had been many and enervating, had worn him out; like so many of his coevals, he yearned for stability and quiet work. But instead of that, the rhythm of French life spun faster all the time, flying off on unexpected tangents. More and more peoples and countries outside France caught the germ of this ferment; one after another joined this ring of footloose, entranced dervishes. Six years had gone by since the Peace of Amiens, and Daville was still tossed between hope and doubt, as in a game of chiaroscuro. After each new victory of the First Consul, and later of Emperor Napoleon, the middle way of salvation seemed to appear firm and dependable, but a few months later one groped around in a wilderness once more. People began to live in fear. They all moved forward, but some began to look over their shoulders. During the few months he spent in Paris just before he was appointed Consul at Travnik, Daville could see mirrored in the eyes of innumerable friends the same fear which, unacknowledged and repressed, kept bobbing up obstinately in himself.
Two years before, immediately after Napoleon’s great victory in Prussia, Daville had written a poem, “Battle of Jena,” perhaps because he hoped that an unabashed encomium of the victorious Emperor might still his doubts and ease his fears. As he was about to give the poem to the printer, a fellow countryman and old friend of his, a retired officer now working in the Ministry of the Navy, told him over a glass of Calvados: “Do you know what you’re praising and whom you’re celebrating? Do you know that the Emperor is mad—yes, mad!—and is kept up only by the blood of his victories, victories that lead nowhere and mean nothing? Do you realize that we’re all rushing toward some kind of calamity that is surely waiting for us at the end of all these victories, even if we can’t name it as yet? You don’t, eh? Well, maybe that’s why you can write those poems.”
His friend had had a few too many that evening, but Daville could not forget his dilated pupils, staring fixedly into the distance, nor his low-pitched voice with its warm breath of alcohol and conviction. And sober people voiced the same thought in other words or hid it behind a worried look. All the same, Daville resolved to have the poem printed but lost his taste for it and also his belief in the value of poetry and the permanence of victories in general. This blighted faith, which was only just beginning to be felt in the world at large, grew like an insidious dry rot in Daville’s soul. Harboring these gloomy and involuted thoughts, he had gone to Travnik as Consul, and all his experiences there had done nothing to quiet or encourage him; on the contrary, it had only shaken and confused him more.
These emotions were further stirred and exacerbated by his first contacts with the young man with whom he was now to live and work. Watching his ease of manner, listening to him as he held forth with aplomb and with perfect naturalness on all sorts of subjects, Daville thought: “The terrible thing is not that we grow old and weak and die, but that a new, younger, different breed comes pushing behind us. This is the essence of death. No one drags us toward the grave, we’re pushed in from behind.” The Consul was startled by these thoughts, for they were not typical of his way of thinking; he promptly shrugged them off and put them down to the “oriental poison” which sooner or later was bound to attack every man, and which even now, as it were, was seeping subtly into his brain.
The young man, who was the only Frenchman and his one real colleague in this wilderness, was so different from him in every respect, or so it seemed, that Daville at times had the impression he was living with a stranger and enemy. What vexed and grated on him most of all was the young man’s attitude (lack of it might be a better word) to those “burning questions” that were the content of Daville’s life: the Monarchy, the Revolution, and Napoleon. To the Consul and his generation those three concepts represented an appalling, raveled web of conflicts, passions, sallies, and prodigious achievements, as well as indecision, inner betrayals, and invisible stumblings of conscience, never clearly resolved and holding out less and less hope of a respite; they were like a load of guilt one carries from childhood and takes to the grave. But at the same time, and because of it, this load was as close and dear to them as their very life itself.
But to young Desfosses and his contemporaries these things were neither a torment nor an enigma, they were neither food for reflection nor ground for regrets—or so, at any rate, it seemed to Daville. To them all these were simple and natural matters over which there was no point in wasting words or bothering one’s head. Monarchy was a fairy tale, the Revolution a vague memory from the nursery; but the Empire was life itself, life and a career, a natural and familiar arena of boundless opportunities, of action, achievement, and glory. To Desfosses, in fact, the system in which he lived—the Empire—represented the one and only reality; whether he saw it in spiritual or material terms, it filled his vision from one end to the other and gathered in it all that life contained. To Daville, on the other hand, it was only a brittle and accidental phase of a process whose tortured beginnings he had lived through and witnessed with his own eyes, whose fleeting nature was never far from his mind. In contrast to the young man, he well remembered what had gone before and often wondered what was yet to come.
The world of “ideas,” which to Daville’s contemporaries was their spiritual home and their true life, seemed not to exist for the new generation, who chose to believe in the “living life,” the world of actuality, of tangible facts and visible, measurable successes and failures, a desolate new world that spread before Daville like a chilly wilderness, more terrifying than the agonies, the soul-racking, and the gore of the Revolution. Spawned in blood, it was a generation stripped of everything, inured to everything, burnished and tempered as if it had passed through fire.
Influenced by his strange environment and difficult conditions of life, the Consul doubtless generalized and exaggerated these things, like everything else. Often he would tell himself as much, since it was not in his temperament to suffer contradictions gladly or to admit that they were eternal and unsolvable. Still, he was constantly reminded of it by this young man of unflinching eyes, who seemed to him both cold and sensual, relaxed and yet self-conscious, who was burdened neither by doubts nor circumspection, who saw all things around him nakedly, as they were, and called a spade a spade without batting an eye. His talents and basic goodness notwithstanding, he was still one of the new generation—“animalized” generation, as Daville’s coevals called it. So this was the fruit of the Revolution, the free citizen, the new man, thought Daville whenever he remained alone after a chat with the young man. “Could it be that the revolutions breed monsters?” he would then ask himself anxiously. And more often than not the answer would be: “Yes, they begin in greatness and moral purity and end up by producing freaks.”
Later in the night, dark preying thoughts would return and threaten to overwhelm him, and he would be helpless to turn them back.
While Daville brooded like this and searched his heart following the arrival of the young Chancellor, the latter jotted down the following terse sentence about Daville in his modest diary, which he intended to send to his friends in Paris: “The Consul is just as I had imagined him.” And what he had imagined was based on Daville’s own early dispatches from Travnik, and even more on the accounts of an older colleague in the Ministry, a man called Querrenne, who had the reputation of k
nowing every official in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and who was able, in a few words, to give a more or less accurate “moral and physical” description of each. Querrenne was a bright and witty but otherwise sterile fellow, with whom the drawing of such oral portraits had become a habit and a passion. He gave a great deal of effort to this jejune business, which sometimes sounded like a consummate skill but more often like plain slander; and he could do a sketch like this over and over again, word for word, as if he carried a printed text in his head. What Querrenne had told him about his future chief, Daville, was this: “Jean Daville was born healthy, upright, and mediocre. His whole nature, origin, and upbringing incline him to a simple and quiet life, without any great ups or flopping downs; in short, without any sudden changes. A plant for a temperate climate. Has a native capacity for quick enthusiasm and is easily carried away by ideas and personalities, with a particular weakness for poetry and poeticized spiritual poses. All this within the confines of a happy mediocrity. Peaceful times and settled circumstances make mediocre men even more mediocre, whereas upheavals and great changes make them into complex characters. That is the case with our poor Daville, who kept finding himself in the thick of great events, none of which made the slightest dent on his fundamental nature but merely added some new and contrary qualities to what he already had. Since he cannot, and doesn’t know how to, be ruthless, cunning, unscrupulous, and underhanded, he has protected and maintained himself by becoming timid, discreet, and cautious to the point of superstition. By nature he is healthy, honest, enterprising, and cheerful, but time has made him touchy, slow, undecided, chary, and inclined to melancholy; and as none of this corresponds with his true character, it has made his personality oddly ambiguous. In other words, he is one of those men who are predestined victims of great historic changes, because they neither know how to withstand these changes, as forceful and exceptional individuals do, nor how to come to terms with them, as the great mass of people manage to do. He is the type who complains and will go on complaining just about everything under the sun, even about the sun itself—a not uncommon case in these days of Our Lord,” this colleague concluded.