it was of no importance. If you wish to enjoy the benefit of being
governed, which alone raises mankind above the animals, you must leave,
to those who govern, the means of exercising power, and the first of
these means is secrecy. That is why popular government, which is the
least secret of all, is also the weakest. Do you then think, Monsieur
l’Abbé, that you can govern men by virtue? That is a wild dream!”
“I do not think so,” replied my good master, “I have noticed in the
varied chances of my life that men are evil beasts; one can only
control them by force and cunning. But one must be measured and not
offend the small amount of good tendencies which mingles with the evil
instincts in their minds. For after all, Monsieur, man, all cowardly,
stupid, cruel, as he is was made in God’s image, and there remain to
him still certain features of his primal shape. A government drawn
from the common stock of average honesty, and that yet scandalises the
people, should be deposed.”
“Speak lower, Monsieur l’Abbé,” said the Secretary.
“The King can do no wrong,” said Monsieur Roman, “and your maxims are
seditious, Monsieur l’Abbé. You deserve, you and your like, not to be
governed at all.”
“Oh!” said my good master, “if, as you give us to understand,
government consists in swindling, violence, and exactions of all
kinds, there is not much fear that this threat will take effect, and
we shall find, for long enough yet, ministers of State and governors
of provinces to carry on our affairs. Only I should much like to see
others in place of these. The new-comers could not be worse than the
old, and who knows but that they may be even slightly better?”
“Take care!” said Monsieur Roman, “take care! What is admirable in a
state, is succession and continuity, and if there is no perfect state
in this world, it is because, according to my idea, the flood in the
time of Noah disordered the transmission of crowns. It is a confusion
we have not quite set straight to this day.”
“Monsieur,” retorted my good master, “you are amusing with your
theories. The history of the world is full of revolutions. One sees
but civil wars, tumults, and seditions, caused by the wickedness
of princes, and I know not which to admire the most nowadays, the
impudence of the rulers, or the patience of the people.”
The secretary complained then that Monsieur l’Abbé Coignard overlooked
the benefits of royalty, and Monsieur Blaizot represented to us that it
was not fitting to contend about public matters in a bookseller’s shop.
When we were outside, I pulled my good master by the sleeve.
“Monsieur l’Abbé,” I said, “have you then forgotten the old woman of
Syracuse, that you now want to change the tyrant?”
“Tournebroche, my son,” answered he, “I acknowledge with a good grace
that I have fallen into a contradiction. But this ambiguity, that you
justly point out in my words, is not as evil as that called antinomy
by the philosophers. Charron, in his book on ‘Wisdom,’ affirms that
antinomies exist which cannot be resolved. For my part, I am no sooner
plunged in meditations of the kind than I see in my mind’s eye half a
dozen of these she-devils take each other by the nose and make pretence
to tear each other’s eyes out, and one sees at once that one would
never come to the end of reconciling these obstinate shrews. I lose all
hope of making them agree, and it is their fault if I have not much
advanced metaphysics. But in the present case the contradiction, my
son, is merely apparent. My reason always sides with the old woman of
Syracuse. I think to-day what I thought yesterday. Only I have let my
feelings run away with me and have yielded to passion as do the vulgar.”
FOOTNOTES:
[3] A stipendiary magistrate.
V
EASTER EGGS
My father kept a cook-shop in the Rue St. Jacques opposite to St.
Benoît-le-Bétourné. I do not pretend that he had any affection for
Lent; the sentiment would not have been natural in a cook. But he
observed the fasts and days of abstinence like the good Christian that
he was. For lack of money to buy a dispensation from the Archbishop
he supped off haddock on fast-days, with his wife, his son, his dog,
and his usual guests, of whom the most assiduous was my good master,
Monsieur l’Abbé Jérôme Coignard. My pious mother would not have allowed
Miraut, our watchdog, to gnaw a bone on Good Friday. That day she put
neither meat nor fat in the poor animal’s mess. In vain did Monsieur
l’Abbé Coignard represent to her that this was doing the wrong thing,
and that in all justice, Miraut, who had no share in the sacred
mysteries of redemption, ought not to suffer in his allowance.
“My good woman,” said this great man, “it is fitting, that we, as
members of the Church, should sup off haddock; but there is a certain
superstition, impiety, temerity—nay even sacrilege—to associate a dog,
as you do, with these mortifications of the flesh, made infinitely
precious by the interest God Himself takes in them, and which that
interest apart would be contemptible and ridiculous. It is an abuse,
which your simplicity renders innocent, but which would be criminal in
a Divine, or even in a judiciously minded Christian. Such a practice,
my good lady, leads straight to the most shocking heresy. It tends to
no less than the upholding of the theory that Jesus Christ died for
dogs even as for the sons of Adam. And nothing is more contrary to the
Scriptures.”
“That may be,” replied my mother. “But if Miraut ate meat on Good
Friday I should fancy to myself that he was a Jew, and have a horror of
him. Is that committing a sin, Monsieur l’Abbé?”
My excellent master answered gently, taking a drink of wine:
“Ah dear creature, without deciding at this moment if you sin or if
you do not, I can tell you for a certainty that there is no malice
in you, and I believe more surely in your eternal salvation than in
that of five or six bishops and cardinals of my acquaintance, who have
nevertheless written fine treatises on the canon law.”
Miraut swallowed his mess sniffing at it, as if he did not like it, and
my father went off with Monsieur l’Abbé Coignard to take a stroll to
the _Petit Bacchus_.
Thus passed the holy time of Lent at the _Sign of the Reine Pédauque_.
But from early Easter morn, when the bells of St. Benoît-le-Bétourné
announced the joyful Resurrection, my father spitted chickens, ducks,
and pigeons by the dozen, and Miraut, in the corner by the glowing
fire-place, sniffed the good smell of fat, wagging his tail with grave
and pensive joy. Old, tired, and nearly blind, he still relished the
joys of this life, whose ills he accepted with a resignation which made
them less unkind for him. He was a sage, and I am not surprised that my
mother associated such a reasonable creature in her good works.
Having heard High Mass we dined in the savoury-smelling shop. My father
brought to this repast a pious joy. He had commonly, as companions, a
few attorneys’ clerks, and my good master Monsieur l’Abbé Coignard.
This year of grace 1725, at Easter-tide, I remember, my good master
brought Monsieur Nicolas Cerise, whom he had dragged from a loft in the
Rue des Maçons, where this learned man wrote, day and night, news of
the republic of letters for Dutch publishers. On the table a mound of
red eggs rose from a wire basket. And when Monsieur l’Abbé Coignard had
said the Benedicite, these eggs formed the topic of conversation.
“One reads in Ælius Lampridus,” said Monsieur Nicolas Cerise, “that
a hen owned by the father of Alexander Severus laid a red egg on the
birthday of that child destined to Empire.”
“This Lampridus, who had not much intelligence,” said my good master,
“had better have left such a tale to the old wives who have spread
it abroad. You have too much good sense, sir, to deduce from this
ridiculous fable the Christian custom of serving red eggs on Easter
Day?”
“I do not indeed believe,” replied Monsieur Nicolas Cerise, “that this
usage is derived from the egg of Alexander Severus. The only conclusion
that I wish to draw from the fact, as reported by Lampridus, is that a
red egg, among the heathen, presaged supreme power. For the rest,” he
added, “that egg must have been reddened in some manner, for hens do
not lay red eggs.”
“Excuse me,” said my mother, who was standing by the fire-place
decorating the dishes, “in my childhood I saw a black hen who laid
eggs shading into brown; that is why I am ready to believe that there
are hens whose eggs are red, or of a colour approaching red, as for
instance brick-colour.”
“That is quite possible,” said my good master, “and Nature is more
diverse and varied in her productions than we commonly believe. There
are oddities of every sort in the generating of animals, and one sees
in natural-history collections far stranger monsters than a red egg.”
“For instance, they keep a calf with five feet, and a child with two
heads, in the King’s collection,” said Monsieur Nicolas Cerise.
“They can better that at Auneau, near Chartres,” said my mother,
putting on the table, as she spoke, a dozen strings of sausages and
cabbage, whence a pleasing odour rose up to the joists of the ceiling.
“I saw there, gentlemen, a new-born infant with goosefeet and a
serpent’s head. The midwife who received it got such a shock that she
threw it in the fire.”
“Be careful,” said Monsieur l’Abbé Coignard, “be careful, for man is
born of woman to serve God, and it is unimaginable that he could serve
Him with a serpent’s head, and it follows therefore that there are no
children of the kind, and that your midwife was dreaming or making fun
of you.”
“Monsieur l’Abbé,” said Monsieur Nicolas Cerise, with a slight smile.
“You have seen as I have, in the King’s collection, a bi-sexual fœtus
with four legs, preserved in a jar filled with spirits of wine, and in
another jar, a child without a head and with an eye over the navel.
Could these monsters serve God any better than the child with the
serpent’s head our hostess speaks of? And what is one to say of those
who have two heads, so that one does not know whether they have two
souls? Acknowledge, Monsieur l’Abbé, that nature, while amusing herself
with such cruel sport, puzzles the theologian no little?”
My good master had already opened his mouth to speak, and doubtless
he would have entirely demolished the objection of Monsieur Nicolas
Cerise, had not my mother, whom nothing could stop when she wanted to
speak anticipated him by saying very loudly that the child at Auneau
was no human creature, and it was the devil himself who had fathered it
on a baker’s wife. “And the proof is,” she added, “that no one thought
of having it baptized, and that it was buried in a napkin at the bottom
of the enclosed garden. If it had been a human being it would have been
buried in consecrated ground. When the devil fathers a child it takes
the shape of an animal.”
“My good woman,” replied Monsieur l’Abbé Coignard, “it is marvellous
that a villager should know more of the devil than a Doctor of
Divinity. I admire the way you interest yourself in the matron of
Auneau, to the extent of knowing if such fruit of a woman is one with
mankind, redeemed by the blood of God. Believe me, these devilries are
but unclean fancies which you should purge from your mind. It is not
written in the Fathers that the devil fathers children on poor girls.
All these tales of satanic fornication are disgusting imaginings, and
it is a disgrace that the Jesuits and Dominicans have written treatises
on them.”
“You speak well, Abbé,” said Monsieur Nicolas Cerise, impaling a
sausage from the dish. “But you give no answer to what I said, that the
children born without heads are far from being adapted to the destiny
of mankind, which, the Church tells us, is to know God and to serve
Him and to love Him, and in that, as in the amount of germs which
are wasted, nature is not, speaking plainly, sufficiently theological
and Christian. I may add that she exhibits no religious spirit in any
of her acts, and seems to ignore her God. That is what frightens me,
Monsieur l’Abbé.”
“Oh!” cried my father, waving on the end of his fork a drum-stick of
the chicken he was carving, “Oh! this is indeed gloomy and dreary talk,
ill-suited to the feast we celebrate to-day. And it is my wife who is
to blame, who offers us a child with a serpent’s head as if it were an
agreeable dish for honest company. That out of my beautiful red eggs
should come so many diabolical tales!”
“Ah, mine host,” said Monsieur l’Abbé Coignard. “It is true that
everything comes out of the egg. From this idea the heathens have drawn
many philosophical fables. But that from eggs, so Christian under their
antique purple as those we have just eaten, should escape such a flight
of wild impieties, that is what amazes me.”
Monsieur Nicolas Cerise looked at my good master, winking his eye, and
said, with a thin laugh:
“Monsieur l’Abbé Coignard, these eggs, whose beetroot-tinted shells lie
scattered on the floor under our feet, are not in their essence as
Christian and Catholic as it pleases you to think them. Easter Eggs, on
the contrary, are of heathen origin, and recall, at the time of spring
equinox, the mysterious burgeoning of life. It is an ancient symbol
which has been preserved in the Christian religion.”
“One might equably reasonably uphold,” said my good master, “that it
is a symbol of the Resurrection of Christ. I, for one, have no wish
to load religion with symbolical subtleties. I would most willingly
believe that the pleasure of eating eggs, denied to us during Lent,
is the sole reason why on this day they appear on the tables with
honour and clothed in royal purple. But no matter, these are mere
trifles, serving to amuse the learned and the bookmen. What is worth
considering in your talk, Monsieur Nicolas Cerise, is that you bring
into opposition nature and religion, and you want to make them inimical
to each other. Impiety! Monsieur Nicolas Cerise. And so horrible that
this good fellow of a cook trembles at it without understanding it.
But I am not a whit disturbed; and such arguments cannot, even for one
minute, seduce a mind which knows how to govern itself.
“In truth, Monsieur Nicolas Cerise, you have proceeded by that
rational and scientific route which is but a narrow, short, and
dirty blind-alley, on coming to the end of which we break our noses
ingloriously. You argue in the manner of a thoughtful apothecary,
who thinks he understands nature because he can smell some of her
manifestations. And you have concluded that natural generation
producing monsters is no part of the secret of God, Who creates men to
celebrate His glory, ‘_Pulcher hymnus Dei homo immortalis_’: It was
very generous of you to omit mention of the new-born who die as soon as
they see the light, of the mad, and the imbecile, and all creatures who
are not, from your point of view, what Lactantius calls a worthy hymn
to God, _Pulcher hymnus Dei._ But what do you know of it all, and what
do we know of it all, Monsieur Nicolas Cerise? You take me for one of
your readers at Amsterdam or at the Hague, to wish to make me believe
that the unintelligibility of nature is an objection to our holy
Christian faith. Nature, sir, shows to our eyes but a succession of
incoherent images in which it is impossible for us to find a meaning,
and I grant you, that according to her, and in tracking her footsteps,
I fail to discern in the child that is born either the Christian,
the man, or even the individual; and the flesh is an absolutely
indecipherable hieroglyphic. But that matters nothing, and we are
looking at the wrong side of the tapestry. Do not let us fix our gaze
on that, but understand that from that side we can know nothing. Let us
turn entirely to the understandable, which is the human soul united to
God.
“You are amusing, Monsieur Nicolas Cerise, with your nature and your
generation. You are, to my mind, like some good fellow who thinks he
has surprised the King’s secrets because he has seen the paintings
which decorate the council chamber. In the same way that the secrets
are to be found in the conversation of the King and his ministers, so
is the fate of man in the thought which proceeds alike from the created
and the Creator. All the rest is but folly and amusement, fit to divert
the loungers, of whom one sees many in the Academies. Do not talk to me
of nature, except of what one sees at the _Petit Bacchus_ in the person
of Catherine the lace-maker, who is plump and well-made.
“And you, mine host,” added Monsieur l’Abbé Coignard, “give me to
drink, for I have a thirst on me, all the fault of Monsieur Nicolas
Cerise, who thinks nature an atheist. And, by a thousand devils, so
she is, and perforce must be, to some extent; and if at all times she
declares the glory of God, it is without knowing it, for there is no
knowledge, save in the mind of man, which alone proceeds from both the
finite and the infinite. Give me to drink!”
My father poured out a brimming glass for my good master, Monsieur
l’Abbé Coignard, and for Monsieur Nicolas Cerise, and forced them to
clink their glasses, which they did right heartily, for they were good
fellows.
VI
THE NEW MINISTRY
Mr. Shippen, who practised the trade of a locksmith at Greenwich,
dined every day, during his short stays in Paris, at the _Sign of the
Reine Pédauque_, in the company of his landlord and of my good master,
Monsieur l’Abbé Coignard.
That day, at dessert, having called for a bottle of wine as was his
custom, lighted his pipe, and drawn from his pocket the London Gazette,
he set himself peaceably to smoke, drink, and read; then folding his
paper, and placing his pipe on the edge of the table, he said:
“Gentlemen, the Government is defeated.”
“Oh!” said my good master, “it is of no consequence.”
“Pardon me,” said Mr. Shippen, “it _is_ a matter of consequence,
for the former ministry being Tory, the new one will be Whig, and
moreover, everything that happens in England is of importance.”
“Sir,” replied my good master, “We have seen greater changes than
that in France. We have seen the four officials known as Secretaries
of State replaced by six or seven Councils of ten members apiece, and
the Secretaries of State hewn in ten pieces and then re-established
in their original shape. At each of these changes there were some who
swore that all was lost, and others that all was saved. And rhymes were
made about it all. For my part, I take little interest in what is done
in the King’s cabinet, for I notice that the course of life is in no
way changed, and after reforms men are as before, selfish, avaricious,
cowardly, cruel, stupid and furious by turns, and there is always a
nearly even number of births, marriages, cuckolds, and gallowsbirds,
in which is made manifest the beautiful ordering of our society. This
condition is stable, sir, and nothing could shake it, for it is founded
on human misery and imbecility, and those are foundations which will
never be wanting. The whole edifice gains from them a strength which
defies the efforts of the worst of princes, and of the ignorant crowd
of officials who assist them.”
My father, who, larding-pin in hand, was listening to this
conversation, made this amendment with deferential firmness: that good
ministers are to be found, and that he could remember one, who had
recently died, as the author of a very wise regulation protecting cooks
against the devouring ambitions of butchers and confectioners.
“That may be, Monsieur Tournebroche,” retorted my good master, “and
it is a matter to discuss with confectioners. But what is necessary
to consider is that empires subsist, not by the wisdom of certain
Secretaries of State, but by the needs of millions of men, who, to
live, work at all sorts of lowly and ignoble arts such as industry,
commerce, agriculture, war, and navigation. These individual hardships
make up what is called the greatness of a people, and neither prince
nor ministers have a part in them.”
“You are mistaken, sir,” said the Englishman, “ministers do their part
by making laws, of which a single one may enrich or ruin the nation.”
“Oh, as for that,” replied the Abbé, “it is a risk that must be run.
Since the affairs of the State are so widespread that the intelligence
of a single man cannot embrace them, we must forgive ministers for
working blindly thereat, and harbour no resentment against the good or
evil they do, but suppose that they moved as in a game of blind-man’s
buff. Moreover, this evil and this good would seem less to us if
estimated without superstition, and I doubt, sir, if a general order
could have the effect that you mention. I judge by the women of
the town, who are themselves alone, in a year, the object of more
regulations than are put forth in a century for all other classes in
the kingdom, and who, none the less, carry on their business with an
exactitude based on the forces of nature. They laugh at the simple
blackening which a magistrate named Nicodème[4] meditates in regard
to them, and make fun of Monsieur Baiselance, the mayor[5] who has
formed, along with several attorneys and treasury officials, an
impotent association for their ruin. I can tell you that Catherine, the
lace-maker, is ignorant of the very name of Baiselance, and that she
will remain ignorant of it until her end, which will be a Christian
one—at least I hope so. And I infer that all the laws with which a
minister swells his portfolio, are but useless papers which neither
enable us to live nor prevent us from living.”
“Monsieur Coignard,” said the locksmith from Greenwich, “it is easy to
see by the baseness of your talk that you are accustomed to servitude.
You would speak differently of statesmen and laws if you had, as I
have, the happiness to enjoy a free Government.”
“Mr. Shippen,” said the Abbé, “true liberty is that of a soul
enfranchised from the vanities of this world. As for public liberty, I
do not care a cherrystone for it! It is an illusion which flatters the
vanity of the ignorant.”
“You confirm me in the idea,” said Mr. Shippen, “that the French are
mere monkeys.”
“Allow me,” said my father, brandishing his larding-pin, “there are
lions also to be found amongst them.”
“Only citizens fail you then,” retorted Mr. Shippen. “All the world
discusses public matters in the Tuileries Gardens, without one
reasonable notion resulting from their squabbles. Your population is
but a turbulent wild-beast show.”
“Sir,” said my good master, “it is true that when human societies
attain to a certain degree of refinement, they turn aside from the
manners of a menagerie, and that it is evidence of progress to live in
a cage, instead of wandering miserably in the woods. And this tendency
is common to all the countries of Europe.”
“Sir,” said the Greenwich locksmith, “England is no menagerie, for she
has a Parliament on which her Ministers depend.”
“Sir,” said the Abbé, “it may be that one day France will also have
Ministers obedient to a Parliament. Better still. Time brings many
changes in the constitution of empires, and one can fancy that, in
a century or two, France may adopt popular government. But, sir,
secretaries of State, who count for little in our day, will then no
longer count for anything. For instead of depending on the King, from
whom they derive their period and power, they will be subject to
public opinion, and will share its instability. It is to be remarked
that statesmen only exercise their power, with any force, in absolute
monarchies, as is seen in the example of Joseph the son of Jacob,
Pharaoh’s Minister, and in that of Haman, Minister to Ahasuerus, who
played a great _rôle_ in the government; the first in Egypt, the second
among the Persians. It needed the coincidence of a strongly established
crown and a weak king, in France, to strengthen the arm of a Richelieu.
Under popular government, ministers will become so impotent that even
their wickedness and stupidity will do harm no more.