MODERN PAGANISM.
TF any one wishes to gauge the chasm which separates English from 1 French thought, let him read the last story which has supplied gossip to the Parisians. Corporal Rouard had just completed his seven years of service, and accepted the 1000 francs offered for re- enlistment, when he became acquainted with Denise, a flower-maker, of seventeen. The pair lived together, enjoying the enlistment money while it lasted, and fell, it appears, deeply in love with one another. The money sufficed only for a few weeks ; Rouard was obliged to declare himself a soldier, and the two, after grave deliberation, re- solved that the easiest mode of ending their embarrassments was a double suicide. Accordingly they betook themselves to the public- house where they had first met, danced till nine o'clock, and then entering a private room, wrote and posted letters to their friends. The rest of the story cannot be better told than by the reporter :
" After supper, and when the minute-hand of the clock pointed to eight minutes to eleven, which was the exact hour they had fixed upon for the completion of the drama, Renard said, ' The hour has come,' took the poniard, advanced towards her, and said, It is yet time'—meaning to ask if she would change her mind. She replied,' Go on ; and, above all things, don't make me suffer.' He then placed one knee between her legs, and plunged the weapon into her body up to the hilt. She heaved one sigh, closed her eyes, and remained motionless. Rouard drew out the poniard, and, while warm and bloody, as he had said, inserted the point into his own bosom ; he then placed the handle against the body of Denise, and, folding his arms around her, pressed her against it with all his strength. It is deposed by witnesses (for Denise did not die on the spot) that she subsequently affirmed, when in the hospital, that, feeling her lover tremble, she pressed her- self against the handle of the poniard as hard as she could, in order to help to drive it home.'" Denise, pierced through the lungs, lingered for twenty days, and then died. Renard lived to be tried by court-martial, which, with all these facts before them, acquitted him amidst shouts of applause.
The first feeling of an average Englishman on reading this story is not, we think, one of horror, so much as of surprise. Cause and effect seem to him so widely separated, that the narrative produces rather the effect of a poor jest than of an ordinary tale of crime. The motives of the actors, from the corporal to the court-martial, seem to him utterly unintelligible. The re-enlistment, the resolve to spend a brief time in enjoyment, the immoral connexion, are all matters as fami- liar in England as in France. It is the termination of the frolic which
strikes him with such a sense of the incongruous. He is accustomed to suicides, but not such suicides as this. An English suicide is almost invariably the result of some heavy and crushing misery, some event before which the soul seems powerless for anything but retreat. But neither Rouard nor his mistress seem, to English eyes, to have endured any special calamity. He was still a soldier as before his short delirium of pleasure. She had still her flower-making to fall back upon. Even the separation, if that were the motive, need not have been final. Nothing prevented their meeting, though they could no longer hope for the enjoyments the thousand francs' enlistment money had procured. But the idea of separation was avowedly sot the motive. Rouard, a few minutes before using the poniard, explained his ideas in a letter to his father. He "had always required that eccentric life which elevates a human being above his fellows." He analyzes his feelings with a serenity which, though theatrical, must have been real to the extent of leaving him capacity for analysis. As for Denise, in her letter to her brother, all "well spelt," she calls suicide a "celestial journey," and only affirms that "life offers her no prospect of true happiness." In both letters the "eccentric life" of the one and "true happiness" of the other, evidently mean the power of going their own way unrestrained by any considerations, human or divine. In neither is there a trace of the idea that suicide may, by possibility, be wrong, or cowardly, or any of the adjectives by which we usually stigmatize it in England. The notion of criminality, indeed, seems never to have occurred to either. Men do not dance just before a crime, if conscious that it is a crime, and Denise, in particular, hurries her farewell letter in order to make little arrangements for her family, so that she may have nothing with which to reproach herself. The first rudiment of the one moral sense which we are apt to consider instinctive, the respect for life, seems absent from them both. Rouard evidently considered that he had a right not only over his own life, but that of his mis- tress. Denise dying, stiffened her form to drive the poniard more sharply home into her lover's heart. Each aided in what Englishmen deem murder, with the full conviction that they were performing a noble deed.
Had the matter ended there, Englishmen might have passed the story unnoticed, save as a melancholy, though unusual instance of human aberration. But it is quite evident that the ideas of Rouard and Demise are the ideas of a large section of French society, that the murder seemed to them excused by the circumstances which induced, and the suicide which followed, it. The court- martial actually acquitted Rouard, and the multitude vehemently applauded the acquittal. It is this, far more than the crime itself; which seems to the average Englishman so strange. Criminals will do anything, but in judges some respect is demanded, if not for justice, then at least for law. How, indeed, is he to comprehend a state of feeling which not only permits educated people to commit murder and suicide, without consciousness of crime, but compels their judges to sympathize with both.
Yet there is nothing new or unintelligible in the ideas the narrative reveals. They prove merely that the results which high civilization without Christianity produced in the first century, it also produces in the nineteenth. A pagan of the old world would have perceived no in- congruity in Renard. A Roman patrician would have sympathized thoroughly with the feeling which declined life except upon con- ditions, which snatched as it were a few hours from an inexor- able fate, and then escaped its grasp. An epicurean beaten in the game of life would have reasoned just as Rouard reasoned, declared life valueless without its rose leaves, expended all in a struggle for his ideal of happiness, and, when beaten, coolly given up the strain. It is Christianity, not civilization, which has given its grand importance to human life. Suicides like these are but one of many signs that Paris prefers the Pagan to the Christian philosophy, holds the fortune of the State more valuable than life or principle, suicide a courageous defiance of the fates, pleasure a necessity in the cup of life. The Duo d'Aumale, while attacking all Bonapartists, is silent on the treachery of Murat, "for he led our soldiers to victory a hundred times," and the silence which we all respect is but part of the philosophy which produces Rouards, and which we all abhor. It is worth the consideration of those who would disso- ciate civilization from the religious idea, whether there really exists in our much-admired "progress" any principle on which the Rouards can be 'condemned. They are murderers simply by Christian ethics. What are they by the ethics of Parisian civilization?
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