Holiday crowds swarmed, sprawled, and frolicked everywhere. It was one of those gala days that all the clowns, jugglers, animal trainers, and ambulant hucksters count on, long in advance, to make up for the lean seasons of the year.
On such days people seem to forget everything, all their troubles and their toil; they become like children. For the youngsters it means freedom, the horror of school adjourned for twenty-four hours. For the grown-ups it is an armistice concluded with the malignant forces of the world, a respite from universal struggle and strife.
Even a man of the upper classes, or one engaged in intellectual pursuits, can with difficulty escape the influence of this popular jubilee. They absorb unconsciously their share of this carefree atmosphere. For my part, as a true Parisian, I never fail to visit all the booths that flaunt themselves on these periodic occasions.
And how they vied with one another in fantastic competition! They bawled and they screeched and they bellowed. There was a mixture of cries, crashing brass, and exploding fireworks. Punchinellos and pantaloons, burned by the sun and toughened by wind and rain, made grotesque faces and, with the self-confidence of seasoned actors sure of their effect, shot out their quips and jests and sallies, of a solid and heavy humor akin to Moliere’s. Strong-men, proud of their monstrous muscles, without forehead or cranium like orang-utans, strutted majestically in their tights that had been washed for the occasion the day before. And dancers, as lovely as fairies or princesses, leaped and pirouetted with the lantern light sparking in their skirts.
There was nothing but light, dust, shouts, joy, tumult; some spent money, others took it in and both were equally happy. Little tots tugged at their mothers’ skirts begging for candy-sticks, or climbed on their fathers’ shoulders to have a better view of a conjuror as dazzling as a god. And dominating all the other odors, the smell of frying fat filled the air like the incense of the fair.
At the end, at the extreme end of the row of booths, as though he had exiled himself in shame from all these splendors, I saw a pitiful old clown, bent, decrepit, the ruin of a man leaning against one of the posts of his cabin; a cabin more miserable than that of the lowest savage, and in which two candle ends, guttering and smoking, lighted only too well its penury.
Everywhere joy, money-making, debauchery; everywhere the assurance of tomorrow’s daily-bread; everywhere frenetic outbursts of vitality. Here absolute misery, and a misery made all the more horrible by being tricked out in comic rags, whose motley contrast was due more to necessity than to art. He was not laughing, the poor wretch! He was not weeping; he was not dancing, he was not gesticulating, he was not shouting; he sang no song, sad or gay, he was soliciting nothing. He was mute and motionless. He had given up, he had abdicated. His fate was sealed.
But with what a profound and unforgettable expression his eyes wandered over the crowds and the lights, the moving flood that stopped just short of his repulsive misery! I felt the terrible hand of hysteria grip my throat, I felt rebellious tears that would not fall, blurring my sight.
What was I to do? Why ask the unhappy man what curiosity, what wonder he had to show in those foul shadows behind his tattered curtain? In truth, I did not dare; and, although you may laugh at my reason, I admit it was because I feared to humiliate him. I had finally decided to leave some money on the platform as I passed, hoping that he would guess my intention, when a sudden surge of the crowd, caused by I know not what disturbance, swept me away from him.
Obsessed by the sight, I looked back, trying to analyze my sudden depression, and I said to myself: “I have just seen the prototype of the old writer who has been the brilliant entertainer of the generation he has outlived, the old poet without friends, without family, without children, degraded by poverty and the ingratitude of the public, and to whose booth the fickle world no longer cares to come!”
The Old Clown - from Baudelaire’s Paris Spleen
1 month ago