"Do you wish to see him?" A horse's hoof shows itself, the devil takes
the saint on his horns and bears him through space, through the heavens
of modern science, wherein the planets are as abundant as grains of
dust. And the firmament expands with the thoughts of Antonius. "Higher,
higher!" he exclaims. Infinity reveals itself to his gaze. Timidly
he inquires of the devil for God. The devil answers him with new
queries, new doubts. "What you call form is perhaps but a delusion of
your senses," he says; "what you call substance is only a conceit of
your mind. Who knows if the world is not an eternal stream of facts
and occurrences, the semblance the only truth, the illusion the only
reality!"
"Adore me!" suddenly exclaims the devil, "and curse the mockery you
have called God!" He vanishes, and Antonius awakens, lying on his back
on the brink of his rock.
But his teeth are chattering, he is ill; he has no longer either bread
or water in his hut, and his hallucinations begin anew. He loses
himself in the swarm of fabulous animals that throng about him, the
fantastic monsters of the earth. He finds himself on a strand amid
the inhabitants and plants of the sea and land, and he can no longer
distinguish plants and animals. The twining plants wind and curve
like serpents; he confuses the vegetable and mineral world with that
of mortals. The gourds look like human breasts; the Babylonian tree
Dedaim, bears human heads as its fruit; pebbles seem like skulls;
diamonds glitter like eyes. He experiences the pantheistic yearning to
blend with universal nature, and this is his last wail:--
"I have a desire to fly, to swim, to bark, to roar, to howl. Would that
I had wings, a homy plate, a shell, a beak! Would that I could coil my
body like a serpent, divide myself, be in everything, be wafted around
like a perfume, unfold myself like a plant, sound like a tune, shine
like a light, conceal myself in all forms and penetrate every atom!"
The night is at an end. It was only a new incubus. The sun rises, and
in its disk the face of Christ beams upon him. Then follows the last
discreet irony of the author. Antonius makes the sign of the cross, and
begins anew the prayer that was interrupted by these visions.
In this work of fiction we have Flaubert complete, with his sluggish
blood, his gloomy imagination, his intrusive erudition, and his need of
bringing to a level old and new illusions, ancient and modern faiths.
The almost savage vehemence of his temperament reveals itself when
he thrusts the god Crepitus before the God Jehovah. That he chose the
legend of St. Antonius as a medium through which to free his mind, and
utter some bitter truths to mankind, was because he was brought into
contact by this material with antiquity and the Orient which he loved.
Through it he could use the large cities and landscapes of Egypt as a
background on which to lavish brilliant colors and gigantic forms. And
with this theme he no longer painted the helplessness and stupidity of
a society, but of a world. He depicted, quite impersonally, humanity
as having waded up to its ankles until that hour of its existence, in
mire and in blood, and pointed to science--which is as much shunned and
dreaded as the devil--as the sole salvation.
The idea was as grand as it was new. The execution by no means attained
the level of the plan. The book was crushed by the material used in
its preparation. It is not a poetic work; it is partly a theogony,
partly a piece of church history, and it is moulded in the form of a
psychology of frenzy. There is in it an enumeration of details that
is as wearisome as the ascent of an almost perpendicular mountain
wall. Certain parts in it, indeed, are only thoroughly intelligible to
savants, and seem almost unreadable to the general public. The great
author had gradually passed into abstract erudition and abstract style.
"It was a sorrowful sight," Emile Zola has pertinently remarked, "to
see this powerful talent become petrified like the forms of antique
mythology. Very slowly, from the feet to the girdle, from the girdle to
the head, Flaubert became a marble statue."