I had learned that the brother and sister were named Cæsar and Laura,
that she lived in Italy and was married.
Some days later, toward evening, they knocked at my house door. I let
them in, showed them to my garden, and conducted them to a deserted
summer-house, a few sticks put together, on the bank of the river.
Laura strolled through an orchard, gathered a few apples, and then, with
her brother’s aid and mine, seated herself on the trunk of a tree that
leant over the river, and sat there gazing at it.
While she was taking it in, her brother Cæsar started to talk. Without
any preliminary explanation, he talked to me about his family, about his
life, about his ideas and his political plans. He expressed himself with
ease and strength; but he had the uneasy expression of a man who is
afraid of something.
“I figure,” he said, “that I know what there is to do in Spain. I shall
be an instrument. It is for that that I am training myself. I want to
create all my ideas, habits, prejudices, with a view to the rôle I am
going to play.”
“You do not know what Spain is like,” said Laura. “Life is very hard
here.”
“I know that well. There is no social system here, there is nothing
established; therefore it is easier to create one for oneself.”
“Yes, but some protection is requisite.”
“Oh, I will find that.”
“Where?”
“I think those Church people we knew in Rome will do for me.”
“But you are not a Clerical.”
“No.” “And do you want to start your career by deceiving people?”
“I cannot choose my means. Politics are like this: doing something with
nothing, doing a great deal with a little, erecting a castle on a grain
of sand.”
“And do you, who have so many moral prejudices, wish to begin in that
way?”
“Who told you that accepting every means is not moral?”
“I don’t understand how it could be,” replied Laura.
“I do,” answered her brother. “What is individual morality today? Almost
nothing. It almost doesn’t exist. Individual morality can come to be
collective only by contagion, by enthusiasm. And such things do not
happen nowadays; every one has his own morality; but we have not arrived
at a scientific moral code. Years ago notable men accepted the moral
code of the categoric imperative, in lieu of the moral code based on
sin; but the categorical imperative is a stoical morality, a wise man’s
morality which has not the sentimental value necessary to make it
popular.”
“I do not understand these things,” she replied, displeased.
“The doctor understands me, don’t you?” he said.
“Yes, I believe I do.”
“For me,” Cæsar went on, “individual morality consists in adapting
one’s life to a thought, to a preconceived plan. The man who proposes to
be a scientist and puts all his powers into achieving that, is a moral
man, even though he steals and is a blackguard in other things.”
“Then, for you,” I argued, “morality is might, tenacity; immorality is
weakness, cowardice.”
“Yes, it comes to that. The man capable of feeling himself the
instrument of an idea always seems to me moral. Bismarck, for instance,
was a moral man.”
“It is a forceful point of view,” said I.
“Which, as I see, you do not share,” he exclaimed.
“As things are today, no. For me the idea of morality is attached to the
idea of pity rather than to the idea of force; but I comprehend that
pity is destructive.”
“I believe that you and Cæsar,” Laura burst forth, “by force of wishing
to see things clear, see them more vaguely than other people. I can see
all this quite simply; it appears to me that we call every person moral
who behaves well, and on the contrary, one that does wicked deeds is
called immoral and is punished.”
“But you prejudge the question,” exclaimed Cæsar; “you take it as
settled beforehand. You say, good and evil exist....”
“And don’t they exist?”
“I don’t know.”
“So that if they gave you the task of judging mankind, you would see no
difference between Don Juan Tenorio and Saint Francis of Assisi?”
“Perhaps it was the saint who had the more pleasure, who was the more
vicious.”
“How atrocious!”
“No, because the pleasure one has is the criterion, not the manner of
getting it. As for me, what is called a life of pleasure bores me.”
“And judging from the little I know of it, it does me too,” said I.
“I see life in general,” he continued, “as something dark, gloomy, and
unattractive.”
“Then you gentlemen do not place the devil in this life, since this life
seems unattractive to you. Where do you find him?”
“Nowhere, I think,” replied Cæsar; “the devil is a stupid invention.”