watch. With their teeth they make so exact a dial that when they wish
to tell someone the time they simply open their lips and the shadow of
their nose falling upon them marks the hour as if upon a dial. Now, in
order that you may know why every one in this land has a large nose,
learn that as soon as a woman is delivered the midwife carries the
child to the Prior of the Seminary. And, at the end of a year his nose
is measured before the assembly of experts by the Syndic, and if by
this measure it is found too short, the child is reputed a Snub-nose
and handed over to the priests, who castrate him. You will perhaps ask
the reason of this barbarity and how it happens that we, among whom
virginity is a crime, establish continence by force? Learn then that
we act in this way from thirty centuries of observation showing that
a large nose is a sign over our door that says, 'Here lodges a witty,
prudent, courteous, affable, generous and liberal man', and that a
small nose is the sign-post of the opposite vices. That is why we make
eunuchs of our snub-nosed children, for the Republic prefers to have
no children from them than children like them."
He was still talking when a man came in completely naked. I immediately
sat down and put on my hat to do him honour, for in that country these
are marks of the greatest respect one can show a man.
"The Kingdom", said he, "desires that you will advertise the
magistrates before leaving for your country because a mathematician has
just promised the council that if, when you reach your world, you will
construct a certain machine which he will show you corresponding to
another which he will have ready here, he will draw your world to him
and join it to our globe."
As soon as he was gone I asked the young host: "I beg you will tell me
what is meant by that bronze, shaped like our parts of shame, which
hung from that man's belt? During the time that I lived at the court in
a cage I saw quantities of them, but as I was almost always surrounded
by the Queen's waiting-women I feared I should be lacking in respect to
their sex and rank if I directed the conversation to so homely a matter
in their presence."
He replied: "Here the females no more than the males would be so
ungrateful as to blush at the sight of that which made them; the
virgins are not ashamed to respect upon us, in memory of their mother
Nature, the one thing which bears her name. Know then that the scarf
with which this man is honoured and upon which hangs like a medal the
shape of a virile member, is the symbol of a gentleman and the mark
which distinguishes a noble from a commoner."
I protest this paradox seemed to me so extravagant that I could not
keep from laughing.
"This seems to me a most extraordinary custom", said I to my young
host, "since in our world to wear a sword is the mark of nobility."
He was not moved by this but exclaimed: "My little man, the nobles
in your world are mad to parade an instrument which is the mark of a
hangman, which is only forged for our destruction and is indeed the
sworn enemy of everything that lives! And just as mad on the contrary
to hide a member without which we should be in the category of things
that are not, the Prometheus of every animal and the indefatigable
repairer of Nature's weaknesses! Woe to the country where the marks
of generation are ignominious and where those of destruction are
honourable! You call that member, 'the parts of shame', as if there
were anything more glorious than to give life and anything more
infamous than to take it away."
During this discourse we continued to dine and as soon as we arose from
our beds we went into the garden to take the air. The diversity and the
beauty of the place delayed our conversation for some time. But since
the noblest desire which then moved me was to convert to our religion
a soul so uplifted above the vulgar mob, I exhorted him a thousand
times not to smirch with matter the fair genius with which Heaven had
endowed him, to draw out of the throng of animals a spirit capable of
the Beatific Vision, in fine, to think seriously of uniting some day
his immortality with pleasure rather than with pain.
"What!" replied he, with a peal of laughter, "you think your soul
immortal to the exclusion of that of beasts? My dear friend, without
exaggeration your pride is very insolent! And, I beseech you, whence
do you deduce this immortality to the prejudice of the Beasts? Is it
because we are gifted with reason and they not? To begin with, I deny
that and whenever you please I will prove to you that they reason like
ourselves. But even if it were true that reason has been granted us
as a prerogative and that it was a privilege reserved to our species
alone, does that mean that God must enrich man with immortality when
He has already squandered reason upon him? I suppose I should give,
in that case, a _pistole_ to a beggar because I gave him a _crown_
yesterday? You yourself see the falsity of the argument and that, on
the contrary, if I am just, I ought to give a _crown_ to another rather
than a _pistole_ to the first, since the other has had nothing from
me. We must conclude from this, my dear friend, that God, who is a
thousand times more just than we are, will not have given everything
to some and nothing to others. To allege as an example the case of the
eldest sons in your world, whose share engulfs almost all the property
of the family, is simply a weakness of fathers, who are desirous of
perpetuating their names and fear they may be lost or dissipated by
poverty. But God is not capable of error, and has been careful not to
commit one so great; then, since there is neither before nor after
in God's eternity, with him the younger sons are no younger than the
elder."
I do not dissimulate that this reason shook me.
"Permit me", said I, "to break off upon this matter, for I do not feel
myself strong enough to reply to you. I shall go seek a solution of
this difficulty from our mutual Instructor."
Without waiting for his reply I immediately went to the room of
this able demon, and waiving any preliminaries I put before him the
objections to the immortality of our souls which I had just heard, and
this is what he replied:
"My son, this young hot-head is desirous of persuading you that
it is unlikely man's soul should be immortal because God, who has
called Himself the common Father of all beings, would be unjust if He
had favoured one species and abandoned generally all the others to
annihilation or misfortune. It is true these reasons glitter a little
at a distance. Although I might ask him how he knows that what is just
to us is also just to God, how he knows that God measures with our
measuring-rod, how he knows that our laws and customs, instituted only
to remedy our own disorders, serve also to cut out pieces from the
omnipotence of God; I will pass over all these things together with all
that has been so divinely answered on this point by the fathers of your
Church and I will discover to you a mystery not yet revealed.
"My son, you know that a tree is made from earth, a pig from a tree
and a man from a pig. May we not then believe, since all creatures in
Nature tend to become more perfect, that they aspire to become men,
whose essence is the result of the finest and best imagined mixture in
the world and the sole link between the life of brutes and of angels?
Only a pedant would deny that these metamorphoses occur. Do we not see
that an apple-tree sucks up and digests the surrounding turf by means
of the heat of its germ as if through its mouth; that a pig devours its
fruit and thereby converts it into a part of itself; and that a man
by eating this pig reheats this dead flesh, joins it to himself, and
so causes this animal to live again in a more noble species? Thus the
Great Pontiff upon whose head you see a tiara was a bunch of grass in
my garden sixty years ago. Since God is the common Father of all His
creatures and should love them all equally, is it not most credible
that by a metempsychosis more reasonable than that of the Pythagoreans
all sensible life, all vegetable life, in fine, all matter, will pass
through man and then the great day of Judgment will come, to which the
prophets direct the secrets of their philosophy?"
Fully satisfied I returned to the garden and began to repeat to my
companion what our Master had taught me, when the Physionome arrived
to take us to dinner and to the dormitory. I shall not particularize
these, because I ate and went to bed as on the preceding day.
The next morning as soon as I was awake I went to arouse my antagonist.
"'Tis as great a miracle", said I when I reached him, "to find a great
wit like yours buried in sleep, as to see fire without movement."
He was annoyed by this clumsy compliment. "But", cried he in a
passionate rage, "will you never free your mouth as well as your reason
from these fabulous expressions of miracles? Such words disgrace the
name of philosopher. Since the wise man sees nothing in the world
which he does not understand or which he considers incapable of being
understood, he ought to abominate all these expressions like miracles,
prodigies, supernatural events, invented by the stupid to excuse the
weaknesses of their minds."
I then felt conscientiously obliged to say something to disabuse him.
"Although you do not believe in miracles", I replied, "they do not
cease to occur, and many of them. I have seen them with my own eyes. I
have seen more than twenty sick people miraculously cured."
"You say", he interrupted, "that these people were cured miraculously,
but you do not know that the power of the imagination is able to combat
all maladies, because there is a certain natural balsam extended
through our bodies containing all the qualities contrary to all those
of every disease that attacks us. Our imagination is warmed by the pain
and seeks in its place the specific remedy to oppose the venom, and
so cures us. For this reason the ablest doctor in our world advises a
patient rather to take an ignorant doctor whom he thinks very skilful
than to take a very skilful doctor whom he thinks ignorant, because
he believes that our imagination works for our health and when only
slightly aided by remedies is capable of curing us, but that the most
powerful remedies are too weak when not applied by the imagination! You
are surprised that the first men in your world lived so many centuries
without having any knowledge of medicine? Their constitution was strong
and this universal balm had not been dissipated by the drugs with
which your doctors undermine you. To become convalescent they had only
to desire strongly and to imagine they were cured; immediately their
clear, vigorous and taut imagination plunged into this vital oil,
applied the active to the passive and almost in a twinkling they were
as well as formerly. Even to-day these astonishing cures continue,
but the populace attributes them to a miracle. For my part, I do not
believe in a miracle at all and my reason is that it is more easy for
all these talkers to be wrong than for the thing to happen. Let me
ask them this: A man has a fever and he has been cured. It is clear
that during his illness he wished very ardently to recover his health
and so made vows; it necessarily followed, since he was ill, that he
should die, that he should remain ill or that he should get better. If
he had died they would have said God had rewarded him for his pains;
they might have maliciously equivocated by saying that He had cured the
sick man of all his ills according to his prayers. If his infirmity
had persisted they would have said he lacked faith; but because he
recovered it is a visible miracle! Is it not far more likely that his
fantasy, excited by a violent desire for health, achieved this end? I
admit that many of these gentlemen who make vows recover; but how many
more do we see who have perished miserably with their vows?"
"But at least", I replied, "if what you say of this balsam is true, it
is a proof that our soul is reasonable, since without making use of
our reason and without leaning on the support of our will it knows of
itself how to apply the active to the passive as if it were outside
us. Well, if it is reasonable when it is separated from us we must
necessarily conclude that it is spiritual; and if you admit it is
spiritual I conclude that it is immortal, since death only happens to
animals through those changes of form whereof matter alone is capable."
The young man then sat up in bed and making me sit down also, spoke in
much these terms:
"I am not surprised that the souls of beasts (which are corporeal)
should die, since they are probably only a harmony of the
four qualities, the strength of the blood, a relationship of
well-proportioned organs; but I am very surprised that our incorporeal,
intellectual and immortal soul should be constrained to leave us for
the same reasons that make an ox perish. Has the soul made an agreement
with our body that, when the body receives a sword thrust in the heart,
a leaden bullet in the brain, a musket shot through the trunk, it
will abandon immediately its ruined house? But the soul often breaks
this contract, for some die of a wound which others escape; and so
every soul must make a separate bargain with its body. Truly this
soul which, as they make us believe, is so clever, is very foolish
to leave its lodging when it sees that by leaving this place it will
find its apartment marked out for it in Hell. And if this soul were
spiritual and reasonable by itself, as they say, if it were as capable
of intelligence when separated from our body as it is when invested by
the body, how is it that those born blind, with all the advantages of
this intellectual soul, are not able to imagine what sight is? Why do
the deaf not hear? Is it because they are not yet deprived of all their
senses by death? What! I cannot then make use of my right hand because
I have a left as well? To prove that the soul cannot act without
senses although it is spiritual, they allege the case of a painter who
cannot make a picture without brushes. Yes, but that is not to say
that when a painter, who cannot work without brushes, has lost his
colours, his pencils, and his canvases as well, he can then do better.
On the contrary, the more obstacles are opposed to his work the more
impossible it will be for him to paint. However, they maintain that
this soul, which can only act imperfectly when it has lost one of its
tools in the course of life, can work perfectly when it has lost them
all after our death. If they repeat to us that the soul does not need
these instruments, I shall repeat to them that they ought to whip the
blind who pretend they cannot see."
"But", said I, "if our soul dies, as I see you wish to deduce, the
resurrection you expect would be only a chimera, for God would have to
recreate our souls and that would not be resurrection."
He interrupted me and shook his head.
"Hey! Faith!" cried he, "who has deluded you with that fairy-tale?
What! You? What! I? What! My maid-servant be resurrected?"
"This is not an amusing tale", I replied, "it is an indubitable truth
which I will prove to you."
"And I", said he, "will prove to you the contrary. To begin with,
suppose that you ate a Mohammedan; you convert him consequently into
your own substance! Is it not true that when you have digested this
Mohammedan he is changed partly into flesh, partly into blood, partly
into seed? You embrace your wife and with the seed drawn entirely from
this Mohammedan's body you cast the mould of a pretty little Christian.
I ask; will the Mohammedan have his body at the resurrection? If the
earth yields it up to him, the little Christian will not have his body,
since it is only a part of the Mohammedan's. If you tell me that the
Christian will have his, God will have to take from the Mohammedan that
which the little Christian only received from the Mohammedan's body.
And so inevitably one or the other will be without a body! You will
reply perhaps that God will reproduce from matter a body to furnish
the one who is without a body? Yes, but another difficulty stops us.
Suppose the damned Mohammedan is resurrected and God gives him a new
body, because the Christian has stolen his old one, since the body
alone does not make the man, any more than the soul alone, but the
two joined together in one person, and since the soul and the body
each departed from the man whole, if God then makes the Mohammedan
another body, it is no longer the same individual. So God damns a man
who is not the man who has merited Hell. One body has whored, it has
criminally abused all the senses and, to punish this body, God casts
into the fire another, which is virgin and pure, and has never lent
its organs to the performance of the slightest crime. And what is even
more ridiculous is that this body will have deserved both Hell and
Paradise; for, in so far as it is Mohammedan, it must be damned, and
in so far as it is Christian, it must be saved. Thus God cannot put it
in Paradise without being unjust and rewarding with glory instead of
with the damnation it deserved as Mohammedan; and He cannot cast it
into Hell without being unjust and rewarding with eternal death instead
of the blessedness it deserved as Christian. Then, if He wishes to be
just, He must both save and damn this man eternally."
"I have nothing to reply", I answered, "to your sophistic arguments
against the resurrection; God has said it and God cannot lie."
"Not so fast", he retorted, "you are still at 'God has said'; you must
first prove there is a God, which for my part I wholly deny."
"I shall not waste my time", said I, "by repeating to you the obvious
demonstrations used by philosophers to prove it; I should have to
reiterate all that has ever been written by reasonable men. I simply
ask you what harm there is in believing it; I am assured you cannot
discover any. Then if nothing can be derived from it but what is
useful, why do you not accept it? If there is a God, and you do not
believe in Him, you will not only be mistaken but you will have
disobeyed the precept which bids you believe in Him; and if there is no
God, you will be no better off than we!"
"On the contrary", he replied, "I shall be better off than you, for
if there is no God, you and I will be equal. But if, on the contrary,
there is a God, I shall not have offended against something which I
believed did not exist, since to sin one must either know or will. Do
you not see that even a rather foolish man would not think that a
porter had injured him if the porter had done it accidentally, or had
taken him for someone else, or if he had been drunk? How much more then
should God, who is wholly steadfast, forbear to grow angry with us
for not having known Him since He Himself has refused us the means of
knowing Him. On your honour now, little animal, if belief in God were
so necessary to us, if it were a matter of our eternity, would not God
Himself have inculcated in us all a light as clear as that of the Sun
which hides itself from no one? To feign that He plays hide-and-seek
with men, says like children, 'Cuckoo, there he is!' that is to say
sometimes hides Himself, sometimes shows Himself, disguises Himself to
some and reveals Himself to others--that is to make oneself a God who
is either silly or malicious, for if I have come to know Him through
the strength of my genius, the merit is His and not mine, since He
might have given me an imbecile soul or imbecile organs which would
have made me incapable of knowing Him. And, on the contrary, if He
gave me a mind incapable of understanding Him, it is not my fault but
His, since He could have given me a mind so keen that I should have
comprehended Him."
These ridiculous and devilish opinions made me shudder from head to
foot. I began to look at this man with a little more attention and I
was startled to notice in his face something indefinably frightful
which I had not yet perceived. His eyes were small and deep-set, his
complexion swarthy, his mouth large, his chin hairy, his nails black. O
God! thought I at once, this wretch will be damned after this life and
he may even be the anti-Christ so much spoken of in our World.
I did not wish to let him know what I thought, because of the esteem
I had for his wit, and truly the favourable aspects of Nature towards
his cradle had made me conceive some friendship for him. Yet I could
not so wholly contain myself but that I broke out into imprecations
which menaced him with a bad end. But, throwing back my anger at me, he
exclaimed: "Yes, by death...." I do not know what he meant to say but
at this moment there was a knock at the door of our room and a large,
black, hairy man came in. He approached us, seized the blasphemer
by the middle and carried him off up the chimney. My pity for this
wretch's fate obliged me to clasp him in order to drag him from the
Ethiopian's claws, but he was so powerful that he carried us off both
and in a moment we were up among the clouds. I was obliged to grasp him
tightly now, not from love of my neighbour but from fear of falling.
After passing I know not how many days in travelling through the sky,
without knowing what would become of me, I saw I was approaching our
world. Already I could distinguish Asia from Europe and Europe from
Africa. And now I was so near that I could not lift my eyes beyond
Italy, when my heart told me that this Devil was no doubt carrying my
host to Hell, body and soul, and that he was passing by way of our
earth, because Hell is in its centre. I wholly forgot this thought and
all that had happened to me since the Devil had been our carriage,
through the fear I was cast into by the sight of a flaming mountain
which I almost touched. The sight of this burning spectacle made me
cry out "Jesus Maria!" I had scarcely finished the last letter when I
found myself lying upon the grass at the top of a little hill with two
or three shepherds around me reciting litanies and speaking to me in
Italian.
"Oh!" cried I, "praised be God! At last I have found Christians in the
world of the Moon. Tell me, my friends, in what province of your world
I am now?"
"In Italy", they replied.
"What", I interrupted, "is there an Italy in the world of the Moon
also?"
I had still reflected so little on this accident that I had not yet
perceived they were speaking to me in Italian and that I was replying
in the same tongue.
When I was altogether disabused and nothing further prevented me from
recognising that I was once more in this world, I let myself be taken
where these peasants wished to lead me. But I had not arrived at the
gates of ----, when all the dogs in the town came rushing upon me
and had not my fear caused me to rush into a house and shut the door
against them I should infallibly have been devoured.
A quarter of an hour afterwards, while I was resting in this house, all
the dogs of the Kingdom I verily believe could be heard in a turmoil
outside. All kinds from the bulldog to the lapdog could be seen howling
with a most terrible fury as if they were keeping the anniversary of
their first Adam.
This adventure caused no little surprise to all people who saw it;
but as soon as I had directed my reflections upon this circumstance,
I imagined at once that these animals were infuriated with me because
of the world whence I came. "For", said I to myself, "since they are
accustomed to bay the Moon on account of the pain she causes them from
so far, no doubt they would have thrown themselves upon me because I
smell of the Moon, whose odour annoys them."
I exposed myself to the Sun stark-naked on a terrace, to cleanse myself
from this bad air. I dried myself some four or five hours, at the end
of which I went down and the dogs no longer smelling the influence
which had made me their enemy all returned home.
At the port I inquired when a ship would leave for France and when I
was embarked my mind was wholly occupied in ruminating on the wonders
of my voyage. A thousand times I admired the providence of God, which
had placed those naturally impious men in a situation where they could
not corrupt His chosen, and had punished them for their pride by giving
them up to their own self-conceit. And I do not doubt that so far He
has put off sending someone who preached them the Gospel, because He
knew they would abuse the occasion and that this resistance would only
serve to make them merit a harsher punishment in the next world.
[Illustration: _Frontispiece to Lovell's expurgated edition._]
VOYAGE TO THE SUN