屋顶间的哲学家 精彩片段：
CHAPTER V
COMPENSATION
Sunday, May 27th
Capital cities have one thing peculiar to them: their days of rest seemto be the signal for a general dispersion and flight. Like birds thatare just restored to liberty, the people come out of their stone cages,and joyfully fly toward the country. It is who shall find a greenhillock for a seat, or the shade of a wood for a shelter; they gather Mayflowers, they run about the fields; the town is forgotten until theevening, when they return with sprigs of blooming hawthorn in their hats,and their hearts gladdened by pleasant thoughts and recollections of thepast day; the next day they return again to their harness and to work.
These rural adventures are most remarkable at Paris. When the fineweather comes, clerks, shop keepers, and workingmen look forwardimpatiently for the Sunday as the day for trying a few hours of thispastoral life; they walk through six miles of grocers shops and public-houses in the faubourgs, in the sole hope of finding a real turnip-field.
The father of a family begins the practical education of his son byshowing him wheat which has not taken the form of a loaf, and cabbage "inits wild state." Heaven only knows the encounters, the discoveries, theadventures that are met with! What Parisian has not had his Odyssey inan excursion through the suburbs, and would not be able to write acompanion to the famous Travels by Land and by Sea from Paris to St.
Cloud?
We do not now speak of that floating population from all parts, for whomour French Babylon is the caravansary of Europe: a phalanx of thinkers,artists, men of business, and travellers, who, like Homers hero, havearrived in their intellectual country after beholding "many peoples andcities;" but of the settled Parisian, who keeps his appointed place, andlives on his own floor like the oyster on his rock, a curious vestige ofthe credulity, the slowness, and the simplicity of bygone ages.
For one of the singularities of Paris is, that it unites twentypopulations completely different in character and manners. By theside of the gypsies of commerce and of art, who wander through all theseveral stages of fortune or fancy, live a quiet race of people with anindependence, or with regular work, whose existence resembles the dialof a clock, on which the same hand points by turns to the same hours.
If no other city can show more brilliant and more stirring forms of life,no other contains more obscure and more tranquil ones. Great cities arelike the sea: storms agitate only the surface; if you go to the bottom,you find a region inaccessible to the tumult and the noise.
For my part, I have settled on the verge of this region, but do notactually live in it. I am removed from the turmoil of the world, andlive in the shelter of solitude, but without being able to disconnect mythoughts from the struggle going on. I follow at a distance all itsevents of happiness or grief; I join the feasts and the funerals; for howcan he who looks on, and knows what passes, do other than take part?
Ignorance alone can keep us strangers to the life around us: selfishnessitself will not suffice for that.
These reflections I made to myself in my attic, in the intervals of thevarious household works to which a bachelor is forced when he has noother servant than his own ready will. While I was pursuing mydeductions, I had blacked my boots, brushed my coat, and tied my cravat;I had at last arrived at the important moment when we pronouncecomplacently that all is finished, and that well.
A grand resolve had just decided me to depart from my usual habits.
The evening before, I had seen by the advertisements that the next daywas a holiday at Sevres, and that the china manufactory would be open tothe public. I was tempted by the beauty of the morning, and suddenlydecided to go there.