unconsciousness. And when we shall have succeeded in studying this
unconsciousness more closely, when its mysterious adroitness, its
antipathies and preference, its helplessness, shall be better known to
us, we shall have most strangely blunted the teeth and nails of the
monster who persecutes us under the name of Fortune, Destiny or Chance.
At the present hour we are feeding it still as a blind man might feed
the lion that at last shall devour him. Soon perhaps the lion will be
seen by us in its true light, and we shall then learn how to subdue him.
Let us therefore unweariedly follow each path that leads from our
consciousness to our unconsciousness. We shall thus succeed in hewing
some kind of track through the great and as yet impassable roads that
lead from the seen to the unseen, from man to God, from the individual
to the universe. At the end of these roads lies hidden the general
secret of life. In the meanwhile let us adopt the hypothesis that
offers the most encouragement to our existence in this life; in this
life which has need of us for the solution of its own enigmas, seeing
that in us its secrets crystallise the most limpidly and most rapidly.
THE END
[1] His history is concisely summed up by Dr. Foissac as follows:--"On
the eighth Floréal of the year IV. the courier and postillion who were
taking the mail from Paris to Lyons were attacked and murdered, at nine
in the evening, in the forest of Senart. The assassins were Couriol,
who had taken a seat in the cabriolet by the side of the courier;
Durochal, Rossi, Vidal, and Dubosq, who had come to meet him on hired
horses; and lastly Bernard, who had procured the horses, and took part
in the subsequent distribution of plunder. For this crime, in which
five assassins and one accomplice shared, _seven_ individuals, within
the space of four years, mounted the steps of the guillotine. Justice,
therefore, killed one man too many: her sword fell upon one who was
innocent; nor could he have been one of these six individuals, all of
whom confessed their crime. The innocent man was Lesurques, who had
never ceased to declare that he was not guilty; and all his alleged
accomplices disavowed any knowledge of him. How then came this
unfortunate creature to be implicated in an affair that was to confer
so sad an immortality upon his name? Fatality so contrived that, four
days before the crime, Lesurques, who had left Douai with an income of
eighteen thousand livres, and had come to Paris that he might give a
better education to his children, happened to be lunching with a
fellow-townsman named Guesno when Couriol came in and was invited to
join them. Suspicion having at once fallen upon Couriol, the fact of
this lunch was sufficient to cause Guesno to be put under arrest for a
moment; but as he was able to prove an alibi, the judge, Daubenton,
immediately set him at liberty. Only, as it was late, Daubenton told
him to come the following day to fetch his papers.
"In the morning of the eleventh Floréal, Guesno, on his way for this
purpose to the Prefecture of Police, met Lesurques, whom he invited to
accompany him; an invitation which Lesurques, who had nothing special
to do, accepted. While they were waiting in the antechamber for the
magistrate to arrive, two women were shown in who had been asked to
attend in connection with the affair; and they, deceived by Lesurques'
resemblance to Dubosq, who had fled, unhesitatingly denounced him as
one of the assassins, and unfortunately persisted in this statement to
the end. The antecedents of Lesurques pleaded in his favour; and among
other facts that he cited to prove that he had not left Paris during
the day of the eighth Floréal, he declared that he had been present at
certain dealings that had taken place at a jeweller's named Legrand,
between this last and another jeweller named Aldenoff. These
transactions had actually taken place on the eighth; but Legrand, on
being requisitioned to produce his books, found that he had by a
clerical blunder inscribed them under the date of the ninth. He
thought the best thing he could do would be to scratch out the nine and
convert it into an eight. He did this with the idea that he would
thereby save his fellow-townsman Lesurques, whom he knew to be
innocent, whereas he actually succeeded in ruining him. The alteration
and substitution were easily detected; from that moment the prosecution
and the jury declined to place the least confidence in the eighty
witnesses for the defence called by the accused; he was convicted and
his property confiscated. Eighty-seven days elapsed between his
condemnation and execution, a delay that was altogether unusual at that
period; but grave doubts had arisen as to his guilt.
"The Directorate did not possess the right of reprieve; they felt it
their duty to refer the case to the Council of Five Hundred, asking
'whether Lesurques was to die because of his resemblance to a
criminal?' The Council passed to the Order of the Day on the report of
Simeon; and Lesurques was executed, forgiving his judges. And not only
had he constantly protested his innocence, but at the moment the
verdict was given Couriol had cried out, in firm tones, 'Lesurques is
innocent!' He repeated this statement both on the fatal hurdle and on
the scaffold. All the other prisoners, while admitting their own
guilt, also declared the innocence of Lesurques. It was only in the
year IX. that Dubosq, his double, was arrested and sentenced.
"The fatality that had attacked the head of the family spared none of
its members. Lesurques' mother died of grief; his wife went mad; his
three children languished in insignificance and poverty. The
government, however, moved by their great misfortune, restored to the
family of Lesurques, in two instalments, the five or six hundred
thousand francs which had been so iniquitously confiscated; but a
swindler robbed them of the greater part of the money. Sixty years
elapsed; of Lesurques' three children two were dead: one alone
survived, Virginia Lesurques. Public opinion had for a long time
already proclaimed the innocence and the rehabilitation of her
unfortunate father. She wanted more; and when the law of the 29th June
1867 was passed, authorising the revision of criminal judgments, she
hoped that the day had at last come when she might proclaim this
rehabilitation in the sanctuary of justice; but, by a final fatality,
the Court of Appeal, arguing on legal subtleties, declared by its
decree of 17th December 1868 that no cause had been shown for
re-opening the case, and that Virginia Lesurques had not made good her
claim to revision."
It is as though one were enthralled by a horrible dream, in which some
poor wretch was being delivered into the hands of the Furies. Ever
since the fatal meal, no less tragic than that of Thyestes, which
Lesurques took at Guesno's house, events have been dragging him nearer
and nearer the gulf that yawns at his feet; while his destiny, hovering
above him like an enormous vulture, hides the light from those who
approach him. And the circles from above press magically forward to
meet those from below: they advance, they contract, and then, uniting
at last, their eddies blend and fasten upon what is now a corpse.
Here, truly, the combination of murderous fatalities may well seem
supernatural; and the case is typical, it is formidable, it is as
symbolic as a myth. But there can be no doubt that analogous chains of
circumstances reproduce themselves daily in the countless petty or
ridiculous mortifications of merely ordinary lives which are beneath
the influence of an evil or malicious star.
[2] The misfortunes of the Stuarts are well known; those of the
Colignys are less familiar. Of these last the author we have already
cited gives the following lucid account:--"Gaspard de Coligny, Marshal
of France under Francis I., was married to the sister of the Constable
Anne de Montmorency. He was reproached with having delayed by half a
day his attack on Charles V., at a time when such might have been most
advantageously offered, and with having thereby let slip an almost
certain opportunity of victory. One of his sons, who had been made
Archbishop and Cardinal, embraced Protestantism, and was married in his
red cassock. He fought against the King at the battle of St. Denis,
and fled to England, where, in the year 1571, a servant of his
attempted to poison him. He escaped, however, and, seeking
subsequently to return to France, was captured at Rochelle, condemned
to death, and executed. The Admiral de Coligny, brother of the
Cardinal, was reputed one of the greatest captains of his time: he did
marvels at the defence of Saint-Quentin. The place, however, was taken
by storm, and he was made a prisoner of war. Having become the real
leader of the Calvinists, under the Prince de Condé, he displayed the
most undaunted courage and extraordinary fertility of resource; neither
his merit nor his military skill was ever called in question; and yet
he was uniformly unsuccessful in every one of his enterprises. In 1562
he lost the battle of Dreux to the Duc de Guise; that of St. Denis to
the Constable de Montmorency; and, finally, that of Jarnac, which was
no less fatal to his party. He endured yet another reverse at
Montcontour, in Poitou, but his courage remained unshaken; his skill
was able to parry the attacks of fortune, and he appeared more
redoubtable after his defeats than his enemies in the midst of their
victories. Often wounded, but always impervious to fear, he remarked
one day quietly to his friends, who wept as they saw his blood flow:
'Should not the profession we follow cause us to regard death with the
same indifference as life?' A few days before the Massacre of St.
Bartholomew, Maurevert shot him with a carbine from a house in the
cloister of St. Germain-l'Auxerrois, and wounded him dangerously in the
right hand and left arm. On the eve of that sanguinary day, Besme, at
the head of a party of cutthroats, contrived to enter the admiral's
house, and ran him several times through the body, then flinging him
out of the window into the courtyard, where he expired, it is said, at
the feet of the Duc de Guise. His body was exposed for three days to
the insults of the mob, and finally hung by the feet to the gibbet of
Montfaucon.
"Thus, though the Admiral de Coligny passed for the greatest general of
his time, he was always unfortunate and always defeated; while the Duc
de Guise, his rival, who had less wisdom but more audacity, and above
all more confidence in his destiny, was able to take his enemies by
surprise and render himself master of events. 'Coligny was an honest
man,' said the Abbe de Mably; 'Guise wore the mask of a greater number
of virtues. Coligny was detested by the people; Guise was their idol.'
It is stated that the Admiral left a diary, which Charles IX. read with
interest, but the Marshal de Retz had it flung into the fire. Finally,
a fatal destiny clinging to all who bore the name of Coligny, the last
descendant of the family was killed in a duel by the Chevalier de
Guise."
[3] It is a remarkable and constant fact that great catastrophes claim
infinitely fewer victims than the most reasonable probabilities might
have led one to suppose. At the last moment a fortuitous or
exceptional circumstance is almost always found to have kept away half,
and sometimes two-thirds, of the persons who were threatened by the
still invisible danger. A steamer that goes to the bottom has
generally fewer passengers on board than would have been the case had
she not been destined to go down. Two trains that collide, an express
that falls over a precipice, &c., carry less travellers than they would
on a day when nothing is going to happen. Should a bridge collapse,
the accident will generally be found to occur, in defiance of all
probability, at the moment the crowd has just left it. In the case of
fires in theatres and other public places, things unfortunately happen
otherwise. But there, as we know, the principal danger does not lie in
the fire, but in the panic of the terror-stricken crowd. Again, a
fire-damp explosion will usually occur at a time when the number of
miners inside the mine is appreciably inferior to the number that would
habitually be there. Similarly, when a powder factory is blown up, the
majority of the workmen, who would otherwise all have perished, will be
found to have left the mill for some trifling, but providential,
reason. So true is this, that the almost unvarying remark, that we
read every day in the papers, has become familiar and hackneyed, as: "A
catastrophe which might have assumed terrible proportions was
fortunately confined, thanks to such and such a circumstance," &c.,
&c.; or, "One shudders to think what might have happened had the
accident occurred a moment sooner, when all the workmen, all the
passengers," &c. Is this the clemency of Chance? We are becoming ever
less inclined to credit it with a personality, with design or
intelligence. There is more reason in the supposition that something
in man has defined the disaster; that an obscure but unfailing instinct
has preserved a great number of people from a danger that was on the
point of taking shape, of assuming the imminent and imperious form of
the inevitable; and that their unconsciousness, taking alarm, is seized
with hidden panic, which manifests itself outwardly in a caprice, a
whim, some puerile and inconsistent incident, that is yet irresistible
and becomes the means of salvation.
End of Project Gutenberg's The Buried Temple, by Maurice Maeterlinck