where the recesses were covered with those trestles on which the
second-hand booksellers expose a conglomeration of romances and books
of devotion. There one may find at twopence apiece the complete
_Astrée_ and the _Grand Cyrus_, worn and thumbed by provincial readers,
with the “Ointment for Burns,” and divers works of the Jesuits. My
good master was accustomed, in passing, to read some pages of these
works, of which he made no purchase, being out of funds, and wisely
keeping for the _Petit Bacchus_ the sixpence he happened by a rare
chance to have in his breeches’ pocket. For the rest, he did not thirst
to possess the good things of this world, and the best works did not
make him envious so long as he could get acquainted with the noble
passages in them, on which he expatiated afterwards with admirable
wisdom. The trestles of the Pont Neuf pleased him in that the books
were impregnated with the smell of frying from the near neighbourhood
of the hot-potato sellers, and this great man inhaled at the same time
the welcome fragrance of cooking and of science.
Adjusting his spectacles, he examined the display of a second-hand
dealer with the contentment of a happy soul, to which all things are
gracious, for all things gain a grace from their reflection in it.
“Tournebroche, my son,” he said to me, “there are books to be found on
the stall of this good man, fashioned in the days when printing was,
so to speak, in its swaddling-clothes, and these books still suffer
from the effects of the roughness of our forbears. I find a barbarous
chronicle of Monstrelet, an author said to have been more frothy than
a pot of mustard, and two or three lives of Ste. Marguerite, which the
gossips of old put as a compress on their stomachs during the pains
of childbirth. It would be inconceivable that men could be so idiotic
as to write and to read similar absurdities, if our holy religion
did not teach us that they are born with a germ of imbecility. And
as the light of faith has never failed me, not even, happily, in the
sins of the couch or of the table, I can more easily understand
their past stupidity than their present intelligence, which, to speak
frankly, appears to me illusory and deceptive, as it will seem to
future generations, for man is in his essence a stupid animal, and the
progress of his mind is but the empty consequence of his restlessness.
That is the reason, my son, that I mistrust what they call science
and philosophy, which are, to my mind, but an abuse of visions, and
fallacious figures, and, in a certain sense, the advantage gained by
the evil spirit over the soul. You will understand that I am far from
believing all the devilries with which popular credulity frightens
itself. I think with the Fathers that temptation is within us, and
that we are to ourselves our own demons and bedevilments. But I bear
a grudge against Monsieur Descartes and against all the philosophers
who, following his example, have searched for a rule of life and the
principles of conduct in the knowledge of nature. For, after all,
Tournebroche, my son, what is knowledge of nature if it be not a
fantasy of the senses? And what does science add to it, I ask you,
with its savants, from the time of Gassendi, who was no donkey, and
Descartes and his disciples, down to that precious fool, Monsieur de
Fontenelle? Large spectacles, my son, spectacles like those which sit
on my nose. All the microscopes and telescopes which we make a show
of, what are they but glasses a little clearer than these of mine, that
I bought last year at the fair of St. Laurence, of which the glass
for the left eye, the one I see the best with, was unhappily cracked
this winter by a footstool flung at my head by the lame cutler, who
fancied I was kissing Catherine the lace-maker, for he is a coarse
man, and utterly obfuscated by his visions of carnal desires. Yes,
Tournebroche, my son, what are these instruments with which the savants
and the curious fill their galleries and their cabinets? What are
spectacles, astrolabes, compasses, if not the means of helping the
senses to keep their illusions, and to multiply our fatal ignorance
of nature while we multiply our relations with her? The most learned
among us differ merely from the ignorant by the faculty they acquire
of amusing themselves with manifold and complicated errors. They see
the world in a faceted topaz, instead of seeing it as does Madame, your
mother, for instance, with the naked eye the good God has given her.
But they do not alter their eyes in donning spectacles; they do not
alter dimensions in using apparatus proper to the measurement of space;
they do not alter the weight of things in using very sensitive scales.
They discover new appearances merely, and are but the plaything
of new illusions. That is all! If I were not convinced, my son, of
the holy truths of our religion, there would be left to me in this
conviction, which I hold, that all human knowledge is but a progress
in phantasmagoria, nothing but to throw myself from this parapet into
the Seine, which has seen many others drown since she began to flow, or
to go and ask of Catherine that form of oblivion from the ills of this
world which one finds in her arms, and for which it would be indecent
for me to look, in my position, and above all, at my age. I should not
know what to believe in the midst of all this apparatus, whose powerful
deceptions would increase immeasurably the falsehood of my outlook and
I should be an entirely miserable academician.”
My good master was talking in this fashion before the first recess
to the left, counting from the Rue Dauphine, and he was beginning to
frighten the dealer who took him for an exorcist, when he suddenly
picked up an old geometry, illustrated with sufficiently bad cuts by
Sebastien Leclerc.[7]
“Perhaps,” he said, “instead of drowning myself in love or in water,
if I were not a Christian and a Catholic, I should decide to throw
myself into the study of mathematics where the mind finds the aliment
of which it is most in need, to wit: sequence and continuity. And I vow
that this little book, quite ordinary as it is, gives me a certain good
opinion of man’s genius.”
At these words he opened the treatise by Sebastien Leclerc so widely,
at the section concerning triangles, that he nearly broke it clean in
two. But soon he flung it down in disgust.
“Alas,” he murmured, “numbers depend on time, lines on space, and these
again are but human illusions. Without man there is neither mathematics
nor geometry, and it is, after all, but a form of knowledge which does
not draw us out of ourselves, although it affects an air of quite
magnificent independence.”
Having spoken, he turned his back on the relieved bookstall-keeper, and
drew a long breath.
“Ah! Tournebroche, my son,” he continued, “you see me suffering from an
ill that I have brought on myself, and burnt with the fiery tunic with
which I have been at such pains to clothe and deck myself.”
He spoke thus in a fanciful fashion, being in reality clad in a
shocking old overcoat generally held together by two or three buttons
which, moreover, were not even fastened in their own button-holes, and,
as he was accustomed to say laughingly, when one spoke to him of it, it
was an adulterous connection, a presentation of city manners!
He spoke with warmth:
“I hate science,” said he, “for having loved it too much, after the
manner of voluptuaries who reproach women with not having come up to
the dream they formed of them. I wanted to know everything, and I
suffer to-day for my culpable folly. Happy,” added he, “oh! very happy
are those good people assembled round that vendor of quack medicines.”
And he pointed with his hand to the lackeys, the chambermaids, and the
porters of St. Nicolas, forming a circle round a practitioner who was
giving a demonstration with his attendant.
“Look, Tournebroche,” said he, “they laugh heartily when that funny
fellow kicks the other man’s behind. And in truth it is a pleasant
sight, quite spoilt for me by thinking about it, for when one looks
for the essence of this foot and the rest of it, one laughs no more.
I ought, being a Christian, to have recognised earlier the malignity
of that heathen saying, ‘Happy is he who knows the cause of things.’ I
ought to have shut myself in holy ignorance as in an enclosed garden,
and remained as the little children. I should not truly have been
amused with the coarse play of this Mondor (this Molière of the Pont
Neuf would have had little attraction for me when his prototype already
appears to me too scurrilous[8]), but I should have found pleasure in
the plants of my garden, I should have praised God in the flowers and
fruit of my apple-trees.
“An immoderate curiosity has led me astray my son; I have lost, in
the intercourse with books and learned men, the peace of heart,
holy simplicity, and that purity of the simple-minded, all the more
admirable in that it falters neither in the tavern nor in the hovel;
as may be seen in the example of the lame cutler, and, if I dare say
so, in that of your father, the cook, who retains much innocence
though drunken and debauched. But it is not thus with him who has
studied books. They leave, eternally, a bitter superiority, and a proud
sadness.”
Talking thus, his speech was cut off by the roll of drums.
FOOTNOTES:
[7] The geometry of which Jacques Tournebroche speaks is decorated
with designs by Sebastien Leclerc which I, on the contrary, admire for
their precise elegance and delicate exactitude, but one must endure
contradiction (ANATOLE FRANCE).
[8] It is a priest speaking thus (ANATOLE FRANCE).
X
THE ARMY
So, being on the Pont Neuf, we heard the roll of drums. It was the call
to attention of a recruiting-sergeant, who, hand on hip, was strutting
in an open space in front of a dozen soldiers, who were carrying bread
and sausages spiked on the bayonets of their guns. A circle of beggars
and youngsters looked on open-mouthed.
He twirled his moustache and made his proclamation.
“Do not let us listen to him,” said my good master to me. “It would
be waste of time. This sergeant speaks in the king’s name. He has no
talent for speaking. If it would please you to hear a clever discourse
on the same subject you should go into one of those bakehouses on the
Quai de la Ferraille, where the crimps cajole the lackeys and bumpkins.
These crimps, being rascals, are bound to be eloquent. I remember, in
my youth, in the time of the late king, having heard the most wonderful
harangue from the mouth of one of these dealers in men, who kept shop
in the Unhappy Valley, which you can see from here, my son. Recruiting
men for the Colonies: ‘Young men who surround me,’ said he, ‘you have
no doubt heard tell of the Land of Cockayne; it is to India you must
go to find this land of fortune, where one is in clover. Do you wish
for gold, pearls, diamonds? The roads are paved with them, one has but
to stoop to pick them up. And you need not even stoop. The savages
will pick them up for you. I do not even mention the coffee, the
lemons, pomegranates, oranges, pineapples, and the thousand delicious
fruits which grow without cultivation as in an earthly paradise. Did
I speak to women and children I might extol all these dainties, but
I am talking to men.’ I omit, my son, all that he said about glory,
but you may believe he equalled Demosthenes in vigour and Cicero in
fluency. The result of his discourse was the sending of five or six
unhappy beings to die of yellow fever in the swamps, so true is it
that eloquence is a dangerous weapon, and that talent for the arts
exercises its irresistible force for evil as well as for good. Thank
God, Tournebroche, in that, not having given you talents of any kind,
He does not expose you to become one day the scourge of nations. One
recognises the favourites of God by their lack of wit, and I have
experienced that the fairly quick intelligence heaven has given me has
been but an unceasing cause of danger to my peace in this world and in
the next. What would it be if the heart and thought of a Cæsar dwelt in
my head and my breast? My desires would recognise no sex and I should
be untouched by pity. I should light the fire of inextinguishable war
at home and abroad. And yet the great Cæsar had a delicate soul and a
certain gentleness. He died decently under the dagger of his virtuous
assassins. Day of the Ides of March! Ever fatal day, when sententious
brutes destroyed this charming monster! I am fain to weep over the
divine Julius along with Venus, his mother, and if I call him a monster
it is from affection, for in his equable soul nothing was excessive
save power. He had a natural feeling for rhythm and proportion. He
found equal pleasure in his youth in the beauties of debauchery or
those of grammar. He was an orator, and his beauty doubtless ornamented
the purposed dryness of his speeches. He loved Cleopatra with that
geometric exactitude that he brought to all his doings. He put in his
writings and in his actions his talent for clarity. He was the friend
of order and peace, even in war, sensitive to harmony, and so able
a maker of laws that we still live, barbarians as we are, under the
majesty of his rule, which has made the world what it is to-day. You
see, my son, I am not sparing in praise or love for him. Commander,
dictator, sovereign-pontiff he moulded the world with his beautiful
hands. And I—I, have been professor of eloquence at the college of
Beauvais, secretary to an opera-singer, librarian to my Lord Bishop of
Séez, public-writer at the cemetery of the Holy Innocents, and tutor
to the son of your father at the sign of the _Reine Pédauque_. I have
made a beautiful catalogue of precious manuscripts, I have written some
pamphlets, of which it is best not to speak, and set down on wastepaper
certain maxims scornfully declined by the booksellers. Nevertheless,
I would not change my existence for that of the great Cæsar. It would
cost my innocence too much. And I would rather be an obscure man,
poor and despised, as indeed I am, than rise to the height whence new
destinies are opened to the world through paths of blood.
“This recruiting-sergeant, whom you can hear from here promising
these vagabonds a halfpenny a day, with bread and meat, fills me, my
son, with profound reflections on war and armies. I have worked at
all trades save that of a soldier, which has always filled me with
disgust and terror, by the characteristics of servitude, false glory,
and cruelty, attached to it, which are in direct opposition to my
peaceful temper, to my wild love of freedom, and to my turn of mind,
which, judging sanely of glory, estimates at its rightful worth that
attainable by a musketeer. I am not speaking at all of my incorrigible
leaning to meditation which would have been exceedingly thwarted by
sword and gun exercise. Not desirous of being Cæsar you will easily
understand that neither do I wish to be a La Tulipe or Brin-d’Amour.
And I own to you, my son, that military service seems to me to be the
most terrible pest of civilised nations.
“This is the opinion of a philosopher. There is nothing to show that it
will ever be shared by a large number of people. And in actual fact,
kings and republics will always find as many soldiers as they want for
their parades and their wars. I have read Machiavelli’s treatises at
Monsieur Blaizot’s, at the sign of the _Image de Sainte Catherine_,
where they are all very nicely bound in parchment. They deserve it
my son, and, for my part, I hold an infinitely high opinion of the
Florentine secretary, who was the first to remove from political action
the legendary foundation of justice, on which they set up nothing but
highly respectable villainies. This Florentine, seeing his country at
the mercy of its hireling defenders, conceived the idea of a national
and patriotic army. He says somewhere in his books that it is right
that all citizens should unite for the safety of their country and all
be soldiers. I have likewise heard this theory sustained at Monsieur
Blaizot’s by Monsieur Roman, who is very zealous, as you know, for
state rights. He has no care save for the general, and the universal,
and will never be content until the day when every private interest is
sacrificed to the public interest. Thus Machiavelli and Monsieur Roman
wish us all to be soldiers, since we are all citizens. I do not say,
as do they, that it is just, nor do I say that it is unjust, because
justice and injustice are matter for debate, and it is a subject which
only sophists can decide.”
“What! my good master,” I cried in sorrow and surprise, “you hold that
justice depends on the reasoning of a sophist, and that our actions are
just or unjust according to the arguments of a clever man! Such a maxim
shocks me more than I can say.”
“Tournebroche, my son,” replied Monsieur l’Abbé Coignard, “you must
consider that I speak of human justice, which is different from God’s
justice, and generally opposed to it. Men have never upheld the idea
of justice and injustice save by eloquence which is prone to embrace
the for and against. Perhaps, my son, you would seat justice on
sentiment, but beware lest on this petty site you merely raise some
humble domestic hovel, some cabin of old Evander, or hut for a Philemon
and Baucis. But the palace of law, the tower of State institutions,
needs other foundations. Ingenuous nature alone could not support such
weight of inequity, and these redoubtable walls rise from a foundation
of most ancient falsehood, by the subtle and fierce art of law-givers,
magistrates, and princes. It is folly, Tournebroche my son, to enquire
if a law be just or unjust, and it is the same of military service as
of other institutions of which one cannot say if they be good or bad on
principle, since there is no principle saving God, from Whom all things
come. You must protect yourself, my son, against this kind of slavery
to words, to which men submit themselves with such docility. Know
then, that the word justice has no meaning, if it be not in theology,
where it is terribly expressive. Recognise that Monsieur Roman is
but a sophist when he demonstrates to you that one owes service to a
prince. Nevertheless, I think if the prince ever orders all citizens
to become soldiers, he will be obeyed, I don’t say with docility, but
light-heartedly. I have noticed that the profession most natural to
man is that of a soldier; it is the one to which he is drawn the most
easily by his instincts, and by his tastes, which are not always good.
And beyond some rare exceptions, of which I am one, man may be defined
as an animal with a musket. Give him a fine uniform with the hope of
fighting, and he will be happy. Also, we make the military calling the
noblest, which is true, in a sense, for it is the oldest calling, and
the earliest of mankind made war. The military calling, moreover, has
this appropriateness to human nature, that it never thinks, and clearly
we are not made for thought.
“Thought is a malady peculiar to certain individuals which cannot
propagate itself without promptly ending the race. Soldiers live in
company, and man is a sociable animal. They wear blue-and-white,
blue-and-red, or grey-and-blue coats, ribbons, plumes, and cockades,
which give them the same advantage over women as the cock over the
hen. They march to war and pillage and man is naturally thievish,
libidinous, destructive, and easily touched by glory. The love of glory
decides us Frenchmen, above all, to take up arms. And it is certain,
that in public opinion, military glory eclipses all. To be assured of
this, read history. La Tulipe may be held excused if he was no more a
philosopher than Titus Livius.”
XI
THE ARMY (_continued_)
My good master continued in these terms:
“One must consider, my son, that men joined one to another in the
succession of the ages by a chain of which they see but a few links,
attach the notion of nobility to customs whose origin was lowly and
barbarous. Their ignorance feeds their vanity. They found their glories
on old, unhappy, far-off things, and the nobility of the profession of
arms is due entirely to that savagery of early times of which the Bible
and the poets have preserved the remembrance. And what, in fact, is
this military nobility flaunted with so much pride over us, if not the
debased legacy of those unfortunate hunters of the woods whom the poet
Lucretius has depicted in such a way that one does not know if they be
men or beasts? It is wonderful, Tournebroche, my son, that war and
the chase, of which the thought alone should overwhelm us with shame
and remorse when we recall the wretched needs of our nature and our
inveterate wickedness, serve on the contrary, as matter for vain-glory
to men, that Christian peoples should continue to honour the profession
of butcher and executioner, when it is of old standing in families,
and that finally one estimates among refined people the celebrity of
citizens by the quantity of murders and carnage that they bear so to
speak, in their veins.”
“Monsieur l’Abbé,” I said to my good master, “do you not think that the
profession of arms is looked upon as noble because of the danger one
runs therein and the courage that it is necessary to display?”
“Truly, my son,” answered my good master, “if the state of man is noble
in proportion to the danger that he runs I do not fear to state that
peasants and labourers are the noblest men in the kingdom for they risk
death every day by fatigue or hunger. The perils to which soldiers and
commanders expose themselves are less in number and in duration, they
last but a few hours in a lifetime, and consist in facing cannon-balls
and bullets which kill less surely than poverty. Men must needs be
light and frivolous, my son, to give more honour to a soldier’s doings
than to the work of a labourer and to place the destruction of war at a
higher price than the arts of peace.”
“Monsieur l’Abbé,” I asked again, “do you not consider that soldiers
are necessary to the safety of the state and that we should honour them
in recognition of their usefulness?”
“It is true, my son, that war is a necessity of human nature and
one cannot imagine nations who will not fight, that is to say, who
are neither homicides, pillagers, nor incendiaries. Neither can you
conceive a prince who is not in some measure a usurper. They would
reproach him too much on that score, and they would despise him for
it as one who was no lover of glory. For war is necessary to men; and
is more natural to them than peace which is but war’s interval. Thus
one sees princes hurling their armies on one another on the worst
of pretexts, and for the most futile of reasons. They invoke their
honour, which is excessively touchy. A mere breath suffices to make a
stain on it which cannot be washed save in the blood of ten, twenty,
thirty, or a hundred thousand men, in proportion to the population
of the contending principalities. If only one thinks of it, it is
inconceivable that the honour of a prince can be cleansed by the blood
of these unhappy beings, or rather one realises that it is a mere
form of speech, void of meaning; but for words men go willingly to
their death. What is yet more wonderful, is that a prince gains much
honour from the theft of a province and the outrage that would be
punished by death in the case of some daring private individual becomes
praiseworthy if it is carried out with the most outrageous cruelty by a
sovereign with the help of his hirelings.”
My good master, having thus spoken, drew his box from his pocket and
sniffed up a few remaining grains of rappee.
“Monsieur l’Abbé,” I said, “are there no wars that are just, and fought
for a good cause?”