The Right to Be Lazy by Paul Lafargue

Author:Paul Lafargue
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: New York Review Books
Published: 2022-11-15T00:00:00+00:00

*From 1817 to 1826, no happy or unhappy event could befall the royal family without him lurching for his best goose quill; sometimes it’s a birth, a baptism, or a death, sometimes an accession or a coronation that sets him going. Hugo is the Belmontet of Louis XVIII and Charles X; he is the official poet, committed to the personal service of the royal family.

†The complaint of these interesting and interested young people is touching. “Le Conservateur has not received any encouragement from the government,” they said. “Other publications have found ways of benefiting from the favor of the king’s minister, yet these publications remind one of the advantages of thrift in cases where it is a matter of encouraging rather maladroit work for a show of royalism and independence” (preface to the third volume of Le Conservateur littéraire). Yet on page 361 of the same volume, we read: “The ode written on the death of the Duc de Berry, included in the seventh installment, was submitted by the Comte de Neufchâteau to the Duc de Richelieu, president of the council of ministers and passionate about literature, who judged it worthy of being put before the eyes of the king, and His Majesty deigned to order that a gratification [sic] of five hundred francs be remitted to the author, Monsieur V. Hugo, as a token of his august satisfaction.”

‡Baudelaire, “Consecration,” The Flowers of Evil, translated by Richard Howard (Boston: David R. Godine, 1982).

§Baudelaire, “La Muse vénale,” The Flowers of Evil, translated by Richard Howard.

**This impertinent epithet belongs to Stendhal, who didn’t understand the business of literature any better than Baudelaire. “The Edinburgh Review,” he writes, “is quite mistaken in supposing that Lamartine is the poet of the ultra party . . . the real poet of the party is Monsieur Hugo. This Monsieur Hugo has the same sort of talent as Young, the author of Night Thoughts; he is always coldly over the top . . . There is no denying that he knows how to write French verse, but unfortunately it is soporific” (March 1823).

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