Monseigneur Trump
Trump may be comically inelegant, but he has a couple of truly noble ideas
I’ve been listening to “A Tale of Two Cities,” while walking, and today was struck by how much Monseigneur, one of the great lords in the French Court, was in a central aspect like Donald Trump. He had the idea that everything had to go his way, like Trump, and that everything should serve his personal power and pocket. Here are a couple of passages from Book 2, Chapter 8:
Monseigneur had one truly noble idea of general public business,
which was, to let everything go on in its own way; of particular public
business, Monseigneur had the other truly noble idea that it must all
go his way—tend to his own power and pocket. Of his pleasures, gen-
eral and particular, Monseigneur had the other truly noble idea, that
the world was made for them. The text of his order (altered from the
original by only a pronoun, which is not much) ran: “The earth and the
fulness thereof are mine, saith Monseigneur.”
In this next passage, not concurrent, is a description of those who surround the Marquis, and, again, notice how like they are to those who surround Trump, and the “leprosy of unreality” which infects them
“… military officers destitute of military knowledge; naval officers with no idea of a
ship; civil officers without a notion of affairs; brazen ecclesiastics, of
the worst world worldly, with sensual eyes, loose tongues, and looser
lives; all totally unfit for their several callings, all lying horribly in pre-
tending to belong to them, but all nearly or remotely of the order of
Monseigneur, and therefore foisted on all public employments from
which anything was to be got; these were to be told off by the score
and the score. People not immediately connected with Monseigneur
or the State, yet equally unconnected with anything that was real, or
with lives passed in travelling by any straight road to any true earthly
end, were no less abundant. Doctors who made great fortunes out of
dainty remedies for imaginary disorders that never existed, smiled upon
their courtly patients in the ante-chambers of Monseigneur. Projectors
who had discovered every kind of remedy for the little evils with which
the State was touched, except the remedy of setting to work in earnest
to root out a single sin, poured their distracting babble into any ears
they could lay hold of, at the reception of Monseigneur. Unbelieving
Philosophers who were remodelling the world with words, and making
card-towers of Babel to scale the skies with, talked with Unbelieving
Chemists who had an eye on the transmutation of metals, at this won-
derful gathering accumulated by Monseigneur. Exquisite gentlemen of
the finest breeding, which was at that remarkable time—and has been
since—to be known by its fruits of indifference to every natural subject
of human interest, were in the most exemplary state of exhaustion, at
the hotel of Monseigneur. Such homes had these various notabilities
left behind them in the fine world of Paris, that the spies among the
assembled devotees of Monseigneur—forming a goodly half of the po-
lite company—would have found it hard to discover among the angels
of that sphere one solitary wife, who, in her manners and appearance,
owned to being a Mother. Indeed, except for the mere act of bringing
a troublesome creature into this world—which does not go far towards
the realisation of the name of mother—there was no such thing known
to the fashion. Peasant women kept the unfashionable babies close, and
brought them up, and charming grandmammas of sixty dressed and
supped as at twenty.
The leprosy of unreality disfigured every human creature in atten-
dance upon Monseigneur. In the outermost room were half a dozen
exceptional people who had had, for a few years, some vague misgiving
in them that things in general were going rather wrong. As a promising
way of setting them right, half of the half-dozen had become members of
a fantastic sect of Convulsionists, and were even then considering within
themselves whether they should foam, rage, roar, and turn cataleptic on
the spot—thereby setting up a highly intelligible finger-post to the Fu-
ture, for Monseigneur’s guidance. Besides these Dervishes, were other
three who had rushed into another sect, which mended matters with a
jargon about “the Centre of Truth:” holding that Man had got out of
the Centre of Truth—which did not need much demonstration—but had
not got out of the Circumference, and that he was to be kept from flying
out of the Circumference, and was even to be shoved back into the Cen-
tre, by fasting and seeing of spirits. Among these, accordingly, much
discoursing with spirits went on—and it did a world of good which
never became manifest.