truth which should give me the key to all knowledge, I made the
acquaintance of one of those same seekers, possibly mad, or possibly
gifted with more than ordinary intelligence, who applied all his mental
energy to the solution of the problem of the construction of the world,
and to answering the questions raised by the presence of man on earth.
He was one of those "unfrocked priests" whom people usually blame
because they refuse to preach what seems to them a lie. I do not give
his name, his express desire having been to pass unknown among men. He
left the priesthood quietly, and after a fairly long stay in Paris,
during which he studied medicine, returned to his native village, where
two small farms brought an income more than sufficient for his needs.
He lived alone, despised by pious relatives, who besieged him with
flattering attentions aimed at his inheritance, but were kept at a
respectful distance by his witty and well-directed shafts of sarcasm. A
veritable Doctor Faustus. Fifty years he spent in assiduous study of the
great minds that make up the history of human thought. His door was open
to the poor, but he did not seek them out, absorbed as he was in
problems allowing him neither diversion nor respite. He had no curiosity
as to what was going on in the world. His spirit lived in the perpetual
tension of reaching out toward the unknown, feverishly importuned to
deliver up its mystery, and he did not wish to know anything of men,
their conflicts, their often contradictory efforts to better their fate.
Had he lived in the midst of the Siberian steppes, or on some Malay
Island, he would not have been more entirely cut off from the
surrounding social life. The Franco-Prussian war and the Commune were as
remote from him in the depths of the Vendée as Alexander's expedition to
the Indies. When one of the farmers once tried to recall that period to
his mind: "Yes, yes, I remember," he answered, "all the fruit was frozen
that year." It was the only vestige in his memory of those terrific
storms.
He was naturally considered mad, but it could not be denied that he
reasoned pertinently on all subjects. Absorbed in books, he had for
sole company the men of all time, and felt himself far better acquainted
with Leucippus, Democritus, Epicurus, Newton, Laplace, Darwin, and
Auguste Comte than with Bismarck or General Trochu. Shut up day and
night in a great room to which no one had admittance, he lived over with
delight the vast poem of the creation of the world. In waking to
consciousness, the universe, he was wont to say, had set us a riddle,
after the manner of the Sphinx, and he, a new Oedipus, was challenging
the monster. He would tear out its secret, he would proclaim it from the
earth to the stars, while disdaining the glory dear to ordinary mortals.
For he had taken every precaution to ensure the author's name remaining
absolutely unknown when his great work should be published. In order to
avert suspicion, the book was first to be printed in a foreign tongue.
If the Abbé was mad--the peasants still called him by his ecclesiastical
title, either from old habit, or respect for his mysterious
investigations--his madness was certainly not a mania for
self-aggrandizement. Disinterested truth, truth with no other reward
than success in the effort to reach it, was the single impulse moving
this monkishly cloistered existence. One might say that there was proof
of an unbalanced mind. I will not argue the point. Absolute truth is
undoubtedly beyond our reach. It is none the less true that the
sustained effort to attain truth remains the noblest distinction of
man. If it is reasonable to desire to know, who shall say at what point
it becomes folly, through aspiration outstripping the possibility of
satisfaction? Since, furthermore, this possibility increases with the
progressive evolution of the mind, might not it follow that one who had
been thought mad, in olden days, would be called wise to-day and that
the madman of to-day will in future ages be a prodigy of luminous
intellect? Find the boundary line between reason and unreason in this
inextricable tangle!
But to return to our excellent "Abbé," with whom, by a curious chance, I
became intimately acquainted, a few months before his death, I must say
that he never troubled himself with these considerations, to him inane.
He did not deny that there were maladies of the mind, but he professed
complete scorn for the "collection of low prejudices" to which the name
of "reason" was given by the general public. "I have come too soon," he
said to me. "In a few thousand years they will erect statues to the man
who will be a repetition of me. So far, men have parted at the
cross-roads where the paths of science and faith diverge. Some day there
will be one broad highroad to knowledge. The time has not come to lay
that road. As barbarism covered over the premature flowering of Greek
thought, so our present savagery would soon crowd out truths too newly
arrived at, which only very gradually will take root in men's minds."
"Tell me," I said to him one day, "since you stand on such a height that
you are free from the pride of the precursor, that you are insensible to
human glory, that you do not even intend to leave to posterity your name
as a seeker, have you never, alone with your conscience, and stripped of
all personal interest, asked yourself whether you were sure, after all,
entirely sure, of possessing this total and absolute truth?"
The Abbé's little gray eyes twinkled. He answered with a melancholy
smile: "The final and irreparable failure of my religious faith was a
fearful blow to me. I no longer believed. What had appeared to me good
evidence on the day before looked to me from that day onward like the
irrational wanderings of delirium. But I realize to-day, after so many
years of meditation, that although my old conceptions of existence could
not stand the test of experience, yet the framework of my mind has
remained the same. I had abandoned the Theological Absolute; I was in
search of a Scientific Absolute, no more to be found than the other. I
do not regret my error, for I owe to it the greatest joys of my life.
For thirty years the marvel of seeing the veil of Isis slowly raised,
and the world, bit by bit, taken to pieces and put together again,
according to infallible laws, brought me the supreme delight of
grasping the world by thought. When I had exhausted analysis and
synthesis, I undertook to tell my discoveries, and such was my mastery
of my subject that in ten years I wrote a volume of five hundred pages,
in which, I can say it now, for I have burned it, was contained what, in
incalculable centuries to come, will be considered the treasure of human
knowledge."
"You burned this work of yours?"
"Yes, to replace it by another."
"And is this other one final?"
"You want my complete confession? I am so near death that I will afford
you this pleasure. Having finished my book, I decided to devote the rest
of my life to going over it, pen in hand, and annotating it. Alas! When
I became my own critic I found the fine frenzy of creation replaced by a
power of keenly reasoning destructiveness which I had up to that time
not suspected in myself. The creators of systems in the past were only
gifted with the power of induction and prophecy. I had the power to
dissect, to undermine my own inductions and prophecies. What we term
truth is but an elimination of errors. I thought, I still think, that I
had attained truth, pure and simple, but the edifice so laboriously
built could not escape the pitiless criticism of the builder. The same
mental gymnastics which had led to my replacing former doubts by
demonstrated affirmations now raised fresh doubts in the face of my new
demonstrations. What would have been their effect upon the unprepared
intelligences for which the result of my labour was intended? I spent
five years of painful spiritual tension in rewriting and condensing my
work."
"And this time you were satisfied?"
"No more than before. While I am writing, I am, in spite of myself,
possessed by the absolute. I take too vaulting a leap toward truth. Then
I realize that men will shrug their shoulders and call me mad, and I
question whether it is not in fact madness to try to bring to
intelligences of to-day knowledge which belongs to the far future.
Furthermore, no matter how strongly I have felt myself fortified on all
sides by evidence, a fury of criticism has hurled me to the attack of my
fortress of truth. It took two years to reduce my five-hundred-page book
to two hundred pages. Four more years of work--and a notebook of perhaps
fifty pages is all that is left--the bone and marrow of the whole
matter, for my aim has been to eliminate, one by one, every element of
possible uncertainty."
"And now there remains no doubt, I suppose?"
"Nay, doubt remains. Is it strength or weakness of mind? I cannot say.
If I have time to go on working, nothing will be left of my work, and I
shall have made the great journey, from reason that seeks to folly that
finds, and from folly that knows to reason which, very wisely, still
doubts."
The Abbé died six months later, leaving all he had to the poor. Besides
his will, not a single page of writing was found among his belongings.
The village priest came to see him in his last hour. He spoke to him of
God--bade him believe, alleging that science led to doubt--whereas
faith----
"Then you yourself are sure, are you?" asked the dying man.
"Certainly--I know with absolute certainty."
"Reverend sir, I once spoke as you are speaking. Only ignorance is
capable of such proud utterances. Grant to a dying man the privilege of
delivering this lesson. I who have aspired to know, know that you know
no more than I--even less--I dare affirm it. It is really not enough to
justify taking up so much room in the sunshine!"
X
BETTER THAN STEALING
The man from Paris is a natural object of hatred to the poacher. I refer
to the hunting man from Paris, who raises game for his own sport in
carefully preserved enclosures. This ostentatious personage, who comes
and fills the countryside with special guards to keep the aggrieved
pedestrian out of glades and plains and bypaths, seems to the rustics a
pernicious intruder, in a state of legal warfare against the countryman,
who feels himself the friend and legitimate owner of the animals, furry
or feathered, with whom his labour in the fields has made him well
acquainted. All is fair play against this "maker of trouble." The only
thing is not to get "pinched."
Then begins a warfare of ambushes and ruses with the band of
gamekeepers, who, having the law on their side, always end by getting
the better of those whose only argument of defence is the "natural
right" of a man to destroy wild life.
During the season there are almost daily exchanges of shot. Often a man
is killed, which means jail, penitentiary, scaffold. All for a miserable
rabbit! Remnants of the feudalism of birth which the effort of
revolutions has merely replaced by the feudalism of money.
The worst of it is that gamekeepers and poachers, mutually exasperated,
cling to their quarrel, and that a taste for brigandage develops in men
diverted from the unremunerative tilling of the soil by the daily
temptation of booty. Deal as harshly as you may with the poacher, you
will not succeed in discouraging him. Has anything ever cured a devotee
of roulette? And to the excitement of gambling, in this case, is added
the attraction of danger. There is no cure for it. The question of
increasing the penalty for poaching often comes up. There will be long
discussion before anything is ever done. The discrepancy would be too
great between the misdeed and the punishment. And the matter of
elections enters into it. No one is anxious to make too violent enemies
among the citizen electors.
Entirely different is the question of poaching in the happy
regions--there are not many left in France--where preserved hunting is
still at the rhetorical stage. There the poacher is merely a hunter
without a permit, and as no such thing exists as a peasant whom a hare
has never tempted to use his gun, and as a natural understanding unites
all those who are compelled to pay taxes against the State which
represents taxation and statute labour, never will you find a field
labourer ready to admit that a shot, in order to be lawful, needs the
seal of a tax gatherer.
The poacher on free territory, therefore, does not hide as does the
poacher on preserved lands. He plays a sort of tag with the rural guard,
who is by no means eager to meet him, and with the occasional
_gendarmes_, whose cocked hats and baldricks make them conspicuous from
afar. Following along hedges, looking for burrows, keeping his eyes
steadfastly on the ground, he scents out the wild creatures and knows
the art of capturing them.
How often, in the days of my youth, have I accompanied the redoubtable
Janière on his Sunday expeditions, when he would ostensibly leave the
village by the highroad, his hands in his pockets, then dash into the
fields, and miraculously find his gun hidden in a bush, a few feet from
a rabbit hole. Nor man nor beast was ever known to get the better of
him. He was an old Chouan of 1815 who, having been a poacher all his
days, and a marauder now and then, died without ever having had a writ
served on him. The entire district took pride in Janière. When he left
us for a better world: "He never once went to prison," said the peasants
by way of funeral oration. What that man could deduce from a blade of
grass lying over on one side or the other at the edge of a thicket
really approached the miraculous. He would consult the wind, the sun,
and would construct for me the train of reasoning which must have
brought the hare to the precise spot where we invariably found him. His
accommodating gun made no more noise than the cracking of a whip. The
victim, hidden in the hollow of a pollard, would at nightfall find its
way under Janière's blouse.
But whither have I let myself wander? It was of the water poacher that I
meant to speak. He, one might say, is the enemy of no man on earth.
Fish, of dubious morals we are assured, find no such personal sympathy
among us as do the furry and feathered folk. A carp, gasping on the
grass, does not bring tears to our eyes, he seems to belong to a
different world, and the police officer at war against illicit fishing,
backed up by more or less convincing arguments relating to the
restocking of rivers, has no one on his side. For this reason, my
compatriot Simon Grelu counted as many friends as there were inhabitants
in the canton. The killing of a hare in his lair rouses enmity among the
poachers who alike had their eye on him. No quarrel results from a tench
landed. Simon Grelu, besides fishing at once for profit and the love of
it, gave freely of his catch, whence came the universal good-will
accompanying him on his nightly or daily expeditions.
Our river in the Vendée, the Lay, wends its leisurely way amid reeds and
waterlilies, sometimes narrowing between rocks covered with broom and
furze and oak trees, sometimes widening under overarching alders,
onward to the meadows, where it attracts the flocks. Everywhere are
mills with their gates. It is a populous river, and no one could be said
to "populate" it more than Simon Grelu, nominally a miller's assistant,
living in the ruin of what was thought to have been a mill at the time
of the wars between the Blues and the Whites.
Simon Grelu is a great tall fellow, all legs and arms and joints, with a
long neck leading up to a long nose, which gives him the look of a
heron. From the Marshland to the Woodland there is no more noted spoiler
of rivers; he is celebrated for the constancy of his relations with the
police. Hampered by his lengthy appendages, he is perpetually letting
himself be caught, and disdaining what will be thought of it. Every
angle of every rock, every stump by the water's edge, is so familiar and
homelike to him that he cannot bear to leave his river, and rather than
make good his escape on land, prefers to have a warrant served on him,
secure in the fact that he has nothing wherewith to pay a fine.
When the police sergeant rebukes his men for their laziness, they cry
with one accord:
"Let us go and look up Grelu!"
They go, and find him without the least trouble.
That was what happened last week, and owing to it I had the pleasure of
witnessing the interview I am about to relate. I was taking a walk with
the Mayor, when Simon Grelu suddenly stood before us. More elongated
than ever, with his bony, sallow face, his pointed skull topped by a
little tuft of white hair, his mouth open in a smile truly formidable
from the threat of a single great black tooth which the slightest cough
would inevitably have flung in one's face, the heron-man stood before
us, motionless in his wooden shoes.
"I have come for my certificate, _monsieur le maire_," said he with a
sort of clucking which might express either mirth or despair.
"What certificate?"
"Why, my certificate of mendicancy, as usual, when I am caught."
"What! Again? Is there no end to it?"
"It is better than stealing, isn't it, _monsieur le maire_?"
"But you have not the choice between poaching and stealing only, Simon.
You could work."
"And do you suppose I don't work? Many thanks! Who drudges more than I
do? The whole night in the water! Those accursed policemen played a
trick on me!"
"They caught you?"
"That's nothing. They made a fool of me, _monsieur le maire_. No, it
can't be called anything else. I shall never forgive myself for being
made a fool of----"
"What happened?"
"What happened is that those policemen laughed at me all the way up and
down the river. They were half a mile away, and I could still hear them
roaring with laughter. No, I never knew I was such a dunderhead."
"But, come to the point, what did they do to you?"
"Ah--the villains! Imagine, _monsieur le maire_, it was just before
daylight, and I was quietly fishing below the mill of La Rochette. The
idea, anyway, of forbidding fishing before sunrise! Is it my fault if
fishes come out to play at night?"
"Well--what happened?"
"I was in my boat----"
"You have a boat, then?"
"No, _monsieur le maire_, I may as well tell you, for you'll know it
to-morrow, anyway, that it was your boat, which I had taken from your
dike by the big pasture."
"And where did you get the key?"
"Ah--you know--with a nail--and there is no chain----But I shut
everything up again without damaging the lock. I should not like to give
you any trouble. I washed the boat, too, where the fish had left it
muddy."
"You had caught a great deal of fish?"
"No. Ten pounds, perhaps. I had only just begun."
"I never caught that much fish in my life. How do you do it?"
"Oh--they know me. As I was telling you, I was in my--in your boat, when
I heard those d----policemen calling me. 'Hey! Grelu, come ashore! We
are serving your warrant on you!' Well, I landed, of course. I am used
to it. We chatted like friends. They carried away my fish to fry for
themselves. You won't tell me there is any justice in that, will you,
_monsieur le maire_?"
"Is that the trick they played on you?"
"Oh, no! When the police had gone, I said to myself: 'Now I'm fined, I
may as well go on fishing. I shan't be able to pay the fine, whether I
do or not. So I'll stay.' I fished and I fished. I was doing first rate.
I was happy. When, suddenly, I hear voices. The police again! Two
warrants in one night! I couldn't have that! The boat was giving me
away. But they might think I had left it there. So I hide in the water,
with nothing out but my head, and I wait. What do you think they do?
They stretch out on the grass, they light their pipes, and they begin to
talk. They had got lost, the idiots! And finding themselves back at the
mill, were looking for me to ask their way.
"As for me, I was none too comfortable in the mud. Those loafers
wouldn't go away. When one pipe went out, they lighted another. I saw
there was going to be nothing for it but to get caught again. Suddenly
one of the men says: 'Father Grelu,' says he, 'you must be cold in
there. Come and warm yourself at my pipe.' I come out, all covered with
mud, and I shake my fist at him. 'If you serve another warrant on
me----!' says I to him. 'A second warrant?' says he. 'No danger of that.
The law prevents it. We can only serve one warrant in twenty-four hours
on the same person for the same offence. What! You didn't know that,
Grelu? And that is why you stayed in the water? We were just saying: "I
wonder why he does that?" Ah, Father Grelu, we are sorry! We thought you
knew better.' And they laughed. And they laughed. I was in no mood for
laughing. Did you know that, _monsieur le maire_, that two warrants
could not be served at once?"
"No."
"Well, I know it for another time, you may be sure. And now, may I have
my certificate of mendicancy, which releases me from liability to fine?"
"Very well. Your bath might have given you pneumonia. How old are you?"
"Over seventy. No harm will ever come to me from water."
"Nor from wine, eh? It is funny, all the same, to be giving you a
certificate of destitution when I see you so often at the tavern."
"They give me credit, _monsieur le maire_. I pay them in fish. It is
better than stealing, anyway."
XI
THE GRAY FOX
After the poacher the vagabond has the place of honour in the disfavour
of the licensed citizen. A man without an abode inscribed in the tax
collector's book comes near to being a man without a country, in the
eyes of the bourgeois, inclined to regard the land of his fathers as
exclusively what one of them has frankly called it, "the native land of
the landed proprietor."
It is easy to pronounce against the unfortunate nomad the withering
sentence: "He pays no taxes." No taxes, the barefoot tramp who halts on
the edge of a ditch to eat his succinct meal? I defy him to spend the
penny just tossed him, without the State stepping in between him and his
poor bite and taking a portion of it away. How can he be fed, clothed,
and warmed without the State making its existence felt by the exaction
of a tithe? Merely tithes levied upon beggars would amount to a
considerable revenue. The beggar takes no pride in this fact, being
carelessly ungrudging of the sacrifices demanded by public duty, and
this very modesty does him wrong, for under the pretext that he is of no
social utility, householders, under-prefects, army corps commanders,
and directors of the Bank of France, all unite in imputing to him most
of the evils from which they are supposed to protect us.
In country places, the blame for whatever happens falls on the
vagabonds. Theft, arson, trespassing, who could be guilty of these
offences, if not the homeless wanderers going over the roads afoot, when
all self-respecting men have at least the use of an automobile? What
trade can they ply but taking other people's belongings, seeing that
they have nothing of their own? Hence the execration of those who have
belongings. I once knew an old philosopher who maintained that it was
better to throw bread than stones at them. Ordinarily stones are readier
to hand. When there are enough of them, the tramp gathers them into a
pile at the roadside and breaks them for honest wages. Never for a
moment believe that any one, from the President of the Republic down to
the road mender, will express the slightest gratitude to him. Like Timon
of Athens, he expects nothing from human kind.
And yet, his defence, should he take the trouble to make one, would not
be lacking in interest. Lost sentinel of the army of labour, he might
relate strange adventures in the industrial warfare, no less cruel than
the other warfare. He might find it difficult to deny a share of
shortcomings on his side--but what of the consciences of "the
righteous," oftentimes, if one could see them in nakedness?
Humanity means weakness. If the vagabond can own as much for himself, he
can bear witness to the same in the case of others. Oftener, perhaps,
than is generally believed, for peasants, like city people, are tempted
by their neighbours' property, and as the caught thief always accuses
some unknown personage of the crime attributed to him, the vagabond is
in all countries the easy expiatory victim of "the respectable."