Chapter 33: A Minor Shock from Zhou Shuren

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With a loud bang, Professor Taine disappeared into his office.

Gaston Boissier and the others exchanged glances, all of them wearing helpless expressions.

Hippolyte Taine was highly learned and not a bad man, but he was proud, inflexible, and quick-tempered.

When Hugo published the first part of Les Misérables, “Fantine,” in 1862, Taine had spoken bluntly, declaring that the novel was “insincere.” He had nearly fallen out with Monsieur Hugo, who was both his mentor and his friend.

Of course, Taine was not the only person to criticize Les Misérables. Flaubert’s judgment had been even more cutting: “In this book, one finds neither truth nor greatness.”

The Goncourt brothers wrote in their review that Les Misérables was an “artificial” work. Baudelaire, meanwhile, praised it lavishly in the newspapers while telling his friends that the novel was “tasteless and incompetent.”

Yet none of these men had enjoyed an intimate personal relationship with Hugo, as Taine did. His temperament was therefore plain to see.

Émile Egger spread his hands, as if to say, “You tell me what we ought to do.”

Gaston Boissier, however, was decisive. He handed him the manuscript of The Old Guardsman. “Pass it around. It is a rare masterpiece. Even if it truly is to be submitted to Monsieur Hugo, I would have no cause for shame.”

Émile Egger accepted the manuscript with some hesitation, wondering whether Professor Boissier had said all this merely to save face.

But after reading the first page, his eyes widened. He looked up and stared at Gaston Boissier in disbelief.

“This... this was really written by a student?”

Paul Janet and the others had been waiting impatiently. One of them snatched the first page of the manuscript and began reading it eagerly.

Moments later, the offices of the Sorbonne Journal rang with overlapping cries of astonishment, doubt, and praise.

More than twenty minutes later, everyone present had finished reading The Old Guardsman, and silence once again settled over the office.

“Could this... truly be a new work by Gustave Flaubert? Or did this lucky fellow somehow find an unpublished manuscript by Alphonse Daudet?” Someone finally voiced the question that had been on many minds.

In its economy, precision, and depth of language, the story bore Flaubert’s style. Yet its descriptions of Alpine customs and local character, along with the ingenuity of its narrative structure, possessed much of Daudet’s flair.

Daudet himself was a Provençal, and his homeland bordered the Alps. Many of the customs were similar, so it would have been entirely plausible if The Old Guardsman had been written by him.

More remarkable still, the story bore none of the clumsy, immature traces of imitation. It was refined, seasoned, and perfectly assured. No one could have guessed that such a masterpiece had been completed by a university student—even a student of the Sorbonne’s Faculty of Letters.

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In present-day France, mastering the essence of either man would be enough to establish oneself in Paris through one’s writing. What, then, of someone who had combined the strengths of both?

The lively Paul Janet was the first to break the silence. In a tone of wonder, he said, “If this was truly written by Lionel Sorel, then without question he will become one of the Sorbonne’s treasures!

“The Old Guardsman is one of the few short masterpieces I have read in recent years. If the Faculty Bulletin fails to publish it, that will be the Bulletin’s loss!”

“There is one other thing. Did you notice the point of view in The Old Guardsman? The narrator—the ‘I’—seems entirely different from the ‘I’ in every other novel. I cannot quite say how, but there is something extraordinarily strange about it.”

“Yes. The ‘I’ in The Old Guardsman possesses a remarkable vitality. He is not merely the story’s narrator, but also a participant and an observer... It is fascinating.”

“The question is, was this really written by Lionel Sorel?”

Everyone frowned. The doubt lay upon their hearts like a heavy stone.

For the Bulletin to publish a masterpiece would be an honor. But to publish a plagiarized work would easily turn it into a laughingstock.

Gaston Boissier gathered up the manuscript. “It seems we ought to meet this Monsieur Sorel... Very well, let us leave it at that for now. We still have the other matters concerning the March issue to discuss...”

———————

Lionel had no idea what kind of shock The Old Guardsman had caused among the professors of the Sorbonne.

Although he knew that the great master’s novels were excellent, he had not fully realized how astonishing certain writing techniques—which would only gradually emerge and mature in the twentieth century—would appear in the nineteenth.

He was standing outside a private room in the Necker Children’s Hospital, located in the Fifteenth Arrondissement, visiting Petty.

“Master Sorel, when can I leave the hospital?” Petty asked timidly through the window of her room. Her face was still somewhat pale.

“The doctor just told me that you most likely do not have tuberculosis. It is probably only ordinary pneumonia. You should recover in two weeks at the earliest, or a month at the latest,” Lionel reassured her.

In 1879, microscopes were already being widely used in the diagnosis of disease, but only some bacteria had been identified and classified. The bacterium responsible for tuberculosis was not among them.

Doctors therefore had to rely on experience, listening to patients’ chests with stethoscopes and diagnosing them according to symptoms such as dry coughs and moist rales.

Fortunately, Petty did not display the typical symptoms of tuberculosis.

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“But I overheard the nurses talking. They said staying here costs three francs a day... Can I leave earlier?” Petty’s voice grew softer and softer.

Three francs... She thought of her father, who worked as a servant and sometimes could not earn three francs even in an entire day.

Lionel did not pretend to be generous. Instead, he told Petty about the agreement he had reached with her parents, which finally put her mind at ease.

After speaking with her a little longer, Lionel was reminded by a nurse that visiting hours had ended. He then bade Petty farewell.

As he walked out of the hospital, Lionel became the focus of many nurses’ attention. When they saw him crossing the corridor in a coat whose elbows had been worn completely smooth, they whispered among themselves.

The entire hospital had already heard that a little maid from a poor lodging house in the Eleventh Arrondissement had been admitted to the Necker Children’s Hospital—and to a room costing three francs a day. Everyone was curious to know who this generous employer might be.

The moment the nurses saw Lionel’s face and figure, their eyes lit up. But when they noticed his coat and leather shoes, their expressions shifted to astonishment, suspicion, contempt, and various other emotions.

To them, Lionel was probably a fool pretending to be wealthy, the sort of “good-natured idiot” who would rather go hungry than refuse someone in need. A man like that would not last long in Paris.

After leaving the Necker Children’s Hospital, Lionel walked to a public carriage stop on Saint-Germain Boulevard. He intended to travel to the Ninth Arrondissement, known to Parisians as the Opera district.

He planned to find a new apartment there, one that would meet his needs for the next year or two and at least spare him the worry of suddenly falling ill as Petty had.

In Paris, apart from villas and mansions worth tens or even hundreds of thousands of francs, the only buildings that met his requirements were the Haussmann buildings. These had begun to be constructed in 1850 under Baron Georges-Eugène Haussmann, the senior official of the Seine during the Second Empire and the chief architect of Paris’s renovation, and would become the standard form of Parisian housing.

Haussmann buildings were generally five or six stories high and constructed from dressed stone. Their basements were connected to the sewers, and running water was supplied throughout the buildings. The second floor usually featured a long, continuous balcony, while every apartment had large windows that provided excellent light and ventilation.

Although Baron Haussmann was forced from office in 1870 after the city-renovation budget exceeded its limit by a billion francs, Paris continued to be transformed according to his original plans over the following forty years, essentially completing the work before the First World War.

Haussmann buildings became an architectural emblem of Paris and one of the principal elements of the city’s romantic atmosphere familiar to later generations.

But just as Lionel was about to enter an apartment building beside the Opera, he was coldly stopped.

“Sir, we do not permit improperly dressed visitors here...”

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