Reception Address to die French Academy

Gentlemen,

The very first words one addresses to the Academy always have a special ring of truth. It is quite remarkable that a speech dictated by custom, a formal acknowledgment which could easily succumb to well-turned, empty compliments, should invariably induce in the speaker the selfsame feeling he utters, a state of pure and perfect sincerity. At this singular point in one's existence, when for a moment one stands facing this Company before becoming a part of it, all our reasons for being modest, which are so frequently torpid and submerged, come forcefully alive. We are moved to appraise ourselves more severely than did the Academy. We feel we are of no weight. Our works seem a mere pinch of dust; and here, on the edge of your gathering, deeply sensible of all I owe to your good favor, I cannot but take stock of myself and conclude that miracles do happen.

You have readily accorded me the high honor of occupying among you one of the seats which so many supremely gifted men have had to spend long years coveting, and not a few of the very greatest, and most deserving, have waited an entire lifetime in vain. I should not be human, gentlemen, if this inescapable reflection did not prompt me to compare, in some fashion, my own with the destiny of others. The past takes hold of the present and I feel hemmed in by ghosts I cannot fail to mention. The dead have but one last resort: the living. Our thoughts are their only access to the light of clay. They who have taught us so much, who seem to have bowed out for our sake and forfeited to us their advantages, ought by all rights to be reverently summoned to our memories and invited to drink a draught of life through our words. It is but just and natural that, at the present moment, my memories should beckon to me, that my mind should be, as it were, revisited by a host of deceased friends and masters whose encouragement and whose perceptions by degrees guided me to where I stand. To many of these deceased I am indebted for being the man, such as he is, whom you have found worthy of election; and to friendship, I owe nearly everything.

It will come as no surprise to you that I single out from among so many dear and respected absent ones, whose presence is so vivid to me, the charming and serious face of your beloved colleague, M. René Boylesve, one of several academicians who persuaded me that I ought to consider the prospect of joining you one day, and who, devising the present occasion for me, sought with evident success to persuade you to feel well disposed toward my candidacy.

When Boylesve and I were together we would often talk about our literary beginnings, comparing our very different recollections of the time when we first met. It so happens that in those days our green enthusiasms, our ideals, our exemplars, our fetishes and infatuations had differed rather widely, for Boylesve had always been cool and level-headed. In a spirit of friendship we would rehearse our former differences just as formerly we had, in much the same spirit, acknowledged them. In the end we would always make common cause, as people who are not getting any younger are wont to do, in nostalgia for our irrecoverable youth. Though nothing could be more commonplace than bemoaning what is gone, never was it more reasonable to do so, for the era of our youth and vigor had vanished not as it usually does, by imperceptible degrees, but died a violent death; it can only be glimpsed beyond gigantic events. The world that reared us into life and thought is a world now in ashes. We live as best we can among its disordered ruins, ruins that are themselves incomplete, ruins that threaten ruin, placing us in oppressive and formidable circumstances where the fading image of our past seems sweeter and more charming than it would, if time in its imperceptible course had quietly stolen away some tens of years from us.

So violent was this upheaval and so relentless the pressure exerted on men's minds, that a new literature emerged which was radically different from its antecedents. Living in 1890 or thereabouts, one was surrounded by quite another and much simpler pattern of ideas and ambitions. The republic of letters, in every generation raising and brandishing its many divergent mirrors before the world, no longer has the same ways or the same temperament it once had. Then, the various persuasions and sects were more mutually exclusive than nowadays. A youth trying his hand at writing and at the outset losing his way, dazzled as he might well have been by contemporary works and ideas, still lost no time discerning which parties and doctrines were dividing up the present and vying for the future. Before long, in that intellectual amphitheatre whose tiers rise from obscurity to fame, he would have had no trouble deciding on which side his preferences lay. In those days every faction of literary politics had its headquarters and arsenal. There were still two banks to the Seine, and from these enemy emplacements came the tattle of salons and the clamor of cafés; certain studios bubbled over with a frothy mixture of all the arts. One garret even gained renown, and such was its fertility that it became the only garret in the world capable of giving birth to an Academy, which complements its elder so well that we ought, you will agree, gentlemen, to pay tribute in passing to its distinction and talent.

Categories have ceased to be as tidy as they were in the age of our innocence. Purposes and systems used to clash with greater precision. The entire literary population arranged itself in a few tribes, according to the naive laws of opposites which pitted art against nature, the beautiful against the true, thought against life, the new against the old. Each of these tribes had its incontestable leader, by which I mean a leader whose authority was contested, if at all, by someone waving the same banner.

Naturalism carried the day under Emile Zola. Grouped round the august figure of Leconte de Lisle, the Parnassian poets practiced rhyming as a rigorous art. In the forefront stood a mixed group, both smiling and pensive, whose influence far surpassed its numbers: the philosophers or moralists, some with severe, even gloomy dispositions, others so fond of irony as to have made of it a universal method, judging, anatomizing, and scoffing at everything on earth as in heaven.

I believe that, of all these ideologues, critics, theoreticians, humanists bred on philosophy, history, and exegesis, invoking the great names...