Léon Gozlan

THE present paper is less a rehabilitation than a resuscitation. Its subject died doubly years ago, died in frame and fame, gave up the ghost of his glory before his last sigh. True, that as late as the autumn of 1866, the date of his death in the dictionaries, a being walked and talked, and fed and slept, whom stubborn admirers yet pointed out to you as Léon Gozlan. True, his friends yet held him in high esteem, and even his publishers had not yet abandoned him; but as a living literary force and figure he was no more, and he has been continuing to die ever since the real material death recorded by the biographical dictionaries. "Il y a des morts qu'il faut qu'on tue," could never have been said of Gozlan; rather the inverse, "Il y a des vivants qu'il faut faire vivre," for his odd celebrity went really too soon before him. To the last he was surrounded by professional sympathies and private friendships, but the outer public had forgotten him.

Jules Claretie, who knew him well, describes him at sixty: a massive figure, square-shouldered; brown as burnt umber, not bronzed nor olive-skinned; his crisp hair yet black; his gait energetic. There seemed a wonderful intensity of life in the little robust frame. Only his eyes were weary and melancholy. It was said of him that he spent his last months in an overwhelming dread of death. Claretie opines that it was rather with him a lassitude of life, more than disappointment, disgust. His last years were precisely those in which the mercantile gangrene was gaining art and literature, the press, the stage. The Romantique dream of " Art for art's sake" had disappeared; the cloud had vanished, the counter had come. The measure of success was, What did it "fetch"? The elastic firm Dumas Senior and Company was boasting of an income of sixteen thousand pounds a year; the younger Dumas was making his modern romances turn only on golden hinges, describing in detail the lorette's treasures, and the lover's expenditure. Emile de Girardin had been surpassed by de Villemessant, the newspapers had become a manufacture of advertisements; Queen Réclame and King Chantage reigned supreme from end to end of the Rue du Croissant. And Gozlan came of a generation which treated manuscript paper as vellum, not as cheque books; drew its characters with proud care, hung long over the page,

and if they were sometimes hardly content with the wage, were scarcely ever content with the work. He came from Marseilles, one of the battalion of the South that invaded Paris in very Falstaffian uniforms somewhere about 1830. But he had lived before this, as many of his comrades had not. He was always said to have journeyed round the world, but in truth he had been round Senegal, and perhaps ventured as far as the Cape, or even Madagascar. Before that he had been usher in a Marseilles school, then sailor, then a species of freebooter; he had had bloody battles with the Senegalians, which he subsequently narrated in the Musée des Familles.' This was an exceptional experience for a man who aspired to conquer the Boulevards. But he had besides an education of some depth-and that is useful even on the Boulevards-which he had acquired unaided in night-watches at sea, by lone camp-fires, in settlers' shanties on land. Better than all this, there was the Phocian fire in the brain and veins, the happy dash of the Cannebière.

Before writing he began by selling books, like Champfleury, like Hégésippe Moreau, and Emile Zola. But he merely passed through the booksellers' shops, as it were, and before thirty was one of the Figaro-the first and most famous Figaro-that of 1829. He came in with Alphonse Karr and de Vaulabelle; he found there Blanqui describing the Chambers, Jal writing on art, Stephen de la Madeleine on music, and Jules Janin, Roqueplan, Rolle, Michel Masson were busy giving the journal that free, fanciful tone, brilliant independence of idea, on which it has lived and traded in its worst, most recent days. There he soon made his way, hewed his niche with sharp truths and sharper paradoxes; he boarded literature as it were like a buccaneer, and indeed with his swarthy skin, his fierce moustache, and glittering eye he was for many years known on the boulevards as "the Pirate." Journalism sufficed him not. He wrote stories, romances, proverbes, prose and verse; he contributed physiologies-a fashionable form Balzac had originated-to the chief reviews; he gave the stage every possible form of piece from vaudevilles with couplets to melodramas with prologues. He had that rarest, strongest kind of fancy, a logical fancy, a faculty that is of the earth with the flowers, not in the sky with the clouds. It was the fancy of the South, not that of the North. No French writer has pictured more vividly the inner life of seamen, the sombre dramas of shipboard. To this day despite its demoded raging Romanticism, the 'Histoire de Cent Trente Femmes' remains a model of moving narrative, so brisk as to be almost breathless. It is the story of the mutiny on board an English ship carrying convicts to Botany Bay. It is a flaming picture of almost Neroic brutality; something like the overflowing of a vat of blood and brandy. There is a grinding of teeth, a clenching of fists

from beginning to end, a marvel of ferocious hideousness. The Byronic corsair, the pirates of Walter Scott and Cooper, are false and feeble fribbles beside the ugly splendour of Gozlan's heroes. Eugène Sue himself never attempted anything half as crude and cruel in the famous orgy on board the Salamandre. The Salamandre crew had merely received their wages; the Niagara men have seized the ship, and more than the ship. The superb rebel Ascott stands "his bull's front uncovered, a woman formidably beautiful pressed against his heart," launching a far more practical defiance at society than any of the Byronic denunciations.

"Women condemned by England, exiled by England, to go, crawl and die in the deserts of New Holland, Botany Bay, at Hobart Town, in Norfolk and Sydney; women whom adulterous England, impious and thieving England, corrupt and bloody England, homicidal, infanticidal, poisonous, whom thus England punishes for homicide, infanticide, theft, adultery, corruption;-women, you are free, we deliver you, the mutinied crew of the Niagara. His Majesty's magnificent ship Niagara is yours, all she holds is yours, men and things."

Then there is an explosion of hurrahs, curses and kisses; the officers are massacred, it is proposed to eat the purser; casks are staved in, store-rooms are burst open, the men and women eat and drink madly, cream with rum, jellies after ham, salt cod with plum-cake; they are surfeited without hunger, drunk without thirst, just simply for the bestial delight of devouring. And after the orgy comes the carnage: heads are split open, beards torn out by the roots; the crew is divided into two parties, biting and mangling each other in their vitriol madness. It is in truth one of the most powerful scenes of human butchery in modern romance, Homeric in breadth, realistic in detail; the isolated incidents are noticed with minute care, and the throwing of the vanquished by struggling knots into the sea is Dantesque in its broad horror.

And yet this is one of the least known of Gozlan's books. For many a modern romance-reader he is that irritating abortion of literature, that aloe with a blight, the single-book author. 'Aristide Froissart' is enough for one man's reputation. It is a book unique in romantic literature. Its origin is said to be the proposition of a newspaper editor who in 1848 asked Léon Gozlan for a novel which should make tabula rasa of everything, which should be the requiem of property, society, family. Gozlan was not a more ferocious tabula rasa-ist than his fellows; indeed if any political principles can be associated with his name, they were rather retrograde than advanced. But it was an age when anarchy was in the air; anybody who chose could breathe or exhale it. Aristide Froissart' is a book of

uproarious raillery, keener than Joseph Prudhomme, livelier than Jérôme Paturot, more ironic even than Balzac's immortal bagman, the illustrious Gaudissart. It is the best example of that reasonable fun which is the most remarkable quality of Gozlan's genius. Aristide Froissart, born in Paris, is twenty-three, florid, tall and without any other distinctive sign. But he has a father who is a good deal more distinctive as an appanage than distinguished. Moreover he possesses three friends. The first is known as the Last Guitar, for the reason that he has undertaken a Quixotic crusade in favour of that neglected instrument. The second, BeaugencyBeaugency, is an unreformed but used-up rake who has calculated that he has yet five years of life and four thousand pounds remaining, and intends that the last franc shall go with the last day. Lacervoise, the third friend, is "a sculptor who disdains to sculpt." Their adventures are farces of the most furious type. One of the quietest, most commonplace, is making a lion drunk with champagne in the menagerie of a village fair. Aristide, imprisoned for debt at SaintePélagie, reassures his father as to his future.

"Here is a manuscript," he says, "worth thirty thousand francs." "Nonsense!" is the natural answer of the hoary disbeliever in literature. But the book is ' Memoirs by Jean Froissart, my Father.' And the first chapter opens: "The first family my father ruined was—” and the thirty thousand francs are paid. The paymaster subsequently reflects: "If I make a merchant of Aristide, he will never go to the office; if I make a soldier of him, he'll desert. As he is good for nothing, let us marry him." And the marriage is one of the brightest episodes in the book. His love-gift to his betrothed is "Thirty-six manners of making punch, by Aristide Froissart." The presiding mayor is a bootmaker, and while signing the register abuses the tradesman because of the quality of his leather. At the church Aristide ventriloquises, and a baby being baptized, counsels its mother: "Maman, never you marry." The sacramental "I will" comes from a coffin awaiting interment. No cruel jest is spared throughout the romance. It is a work, as it were, born out of the brain of a sick Yorick, whose infinite jest has become infinitely bitter and strikes at everything, creeds and institutions, opinions and hobbies. The nobility, the bourgeoisie, love, marriage, home-life—all men's gods or idols, save perhaps the idea of fatherland-are riddled and ridiculed with a cruel irony which is crueller perhaps for being comic. The scorn was in some instances, we may believe, something more than a literary expression. In the Goutte de Lait,' a miniature comedy yet unpublished, he attacked the old noblesse, even the principle of any noblesse, with something like vehemence; and in another of his innumerable little pieces, Notre Fille est Princesse,' he

has a much-applauded distinction: "We trading people never have any ancestors; all we have is grandfathers."

It is true that one of the chapters of 'Aristide Froissart' ends with the sublime aspiration: "Ah, when shall I be able to eat a bourgeois ! But there is affectation in the cry; it is a mere Murgerism before letters. The author was himself a very bourgeois in the best sense of the term, if it have a best sense, which is never used save in a bad one. One of his latter-day friends describes his first visit, paid in trembling fear of some rude romantic figure like Lacervoise's father, and resulting in an interview with a simple citizen writing out titles for jampots in a round hand worthy Henri Monnier's writing-master himself. And he talked of Aristide Froissart, a nightmare for many a good bourgeois soul, with all a bourgeois' simple bonhomie.

"You mustn't think," he said, " that I found all those pleasantries at once. Every one of them cost me half-a-dozen headaches." The author's genesis of his works is seldom faithful,-take for example, Edgar Poe's origin of the "Raven"; but in this case the author was probably sincere. The book has certainly not the air of having been written by a good father of a family working at his hearthstone. But one of his axioms was, "Nothing is more immoral than ennui"; and his bookful of paradoxes was a protestation against the boredom bearing down contemporary literature and society.

He was not only a paradoxist, he was a stickler for truth, l'âpre vérité," as Danton said. "No more heroes-men!" he cried long before Jules Vallés. And beside the sentimentalism of Karr, the ladylike prettiness of Sandeau, the clever extravagance of Méry— beside these and others of his famous contemporaries his novels have really a ring of realism that is almost a discordance in the literary chorus of his time. The 'Notaire de Chantilly' is at least as severely exact a study of provincial life as any of Claude Vignon's, and the 'Médecin du Pecq,' that poignant drama in a suburban boarding-house, is as true as all the Comédie Humaine,' and, to be true as itself, far more interesting than much of it. Indeed in his day, Gozlan was known as the lesser Balzac: he was the great man's most intimate friend; but his friendship did not prevent a spirit of rivalry which to us, seeing Balzac's immortality, may seem ridiculous, but was almost legitimate, at the time when the Titan was struggling against public indifference and private debts. In the two works familiar as gospels to all students of modern French romance, 'Balzac en Pantoufles,' and 'Balzac chez lui,' Gozlan has expressed his friendship and admiration in a somewhat irreverent, almost a disrespectful fashion. The ludicrous story of the Jardies-the garden walls perpetually sliding down the slopes, the owner's visions of grapegrowing, of Oriental upholstery, &c.—is told in a fashion that