The world is coming to an end. The only reason for which it can
continue is that it exists. How weak that reason is, compared to all
that announce the opposite, particularly to this: What has the world
henceforth to do beneath the sky? For, supposing that it continue to
exist materially, would it be an existence worthy of the name and
of the Historical Dictionary? I do not say that the world will be
reduced to the expedients and the comic disorder of the South American
Republics, that perhaps we shall return to the savage state, and that
we shall go, across the grassy ruins of our civilization, seeking our
pasture, gun in hand. No; for these adventures presuppose a remnant of
vital energy, echo of the earliest ages. New example and new victims
of the inexorable moral laws, we shall perish by that through which we
thought to live. The mechanical will so have Americanized us, progress
will so have atrophied all our spiritual side, that naught, in the
sanguine, sacrilegious or unnatural dreams of the Utopians can be
compared to the actual outcome. I ask every thinking man to show me
what of life remains. Of religion, I believe it useless to speak and
to seek the remnants, since to take the trouble to deny God is the
only scandal in that field. Property virtually disappeared with the
suppression of the right of the first-born; but the time will come
when humanity, like an avenging ogre, will snatch their last morsel
from those who think they are the legitimate heirs of the revolutions.
Still, that will not be the supreme ill.
The human imagination can conceive, without too much trouble, republics
or other community states, worthy of some glory, if directed by
consecrated men, by definite aristocrats. But it is not particularly
in political institutions that there will be manifest the universal
ruin, or the universal progress; for the name matters little. It will
be in the debasement of the heart. Need I say that the little of the
political remaining will writhe painfully in the embrace of the general
bestiality, and that governments will be forced, in order to maintain
themselves and to create a phantom of order, to revert to means which
will make our actual humanity shudder, although so hardened? Then, the
son will flee from his family not at eighteen years, but at twelve,
emancipated by his gluttonous precocity; he will flee, not in search
of heroic adventures, not to deliver a beautiful prisoner in a tower,
not to immortalize a garret by sublime thoughts, but to establish a
trade, to amass wealth, and to compete with his infamous papa, founder
and stockholder of a journal which will spread the light and which will
cause the century to be looked upon as an abettor of superstition.
Then, the wanderers, the outcasts, those who have had several lovers,
and who were once called angels, in recognition of the heedlessness
which shines, light of luck, in their existence logical as evil--then
these, I say, will be no more than a pitiless wisdom, a wisdom that
will condemn all, lacking money, all, _even the faults of the senses!_
Then, that which will resemble virtue, what do I say?--all that is not
ardor toward Plutus will be considered enormously ridiculous. Justice,
if in that fortunate period justice can still exist, will interdict all
citizens who cannot make a fortune. Your wife, O Bourgeois! your chaste
partner, whose legitimacy is the poetry of your existence, thenceforth,
introducing into legality an irreproachable infamy, zealous and loving
guardian of your strongbox, will be no more than the ideal of the kept
woman. Your daughter, with infantile hopes of marriage, will dream
in her cradle of selling herself for a million, and you yourself, O
Bourgeois, still less poet than you are to-day, you will see nothing
amiss; you will regret naught. For there are things in men that
strengthen and prosper as others weaken and decline; and, thanks to
the progress of the times, you will have left of your entrails only
the viscera! These times are perhaps quite near; who knows even that
they have not come, and that the thickness of our skins is not the only
obstacle that prevents us from appreciating the environment in which we
breathe?
As for me, who sometimes feel in me the ridicule of a prophet, I know
that I shall never find in myself the charity of a doctor. Lost in this
vile world, jostled by the crowds, I am as a tired man who sees behind
him, in the depths of the years, only disillusion and bitterness and
ahead, only a storm that carries nothing new, neither knowledge nor
grief. The evening that man Stole from fate a few hours of pleasure,
cradled in his digestion, forgetful--as far as possible--of the past,
content with the present and resigned to the future, intoxicated with
his sangfroid and his dandyism, proud of being less base than those
who passed, he said, watching the smoke of his cigar: "What does it
matter to me where these consciences are going?"
I think I have achieved what mechanics call an extra. However, I shall
retain these pages,--because I want to date my sadness.