Hermann Coffre had observed the treason without complaint, as one does an incurable wound; he even affected an intangible indifference to safeguard male vanity—which is often the only love of which a man’s heart is capable—in the eyes of the unfaithful wife and the gallery. He had taken mistresses, and, even in the presence of the lover, lauded the most secret charms of his wife, to which he referred, in his banking terminology, as her “liquidation.”
Wearying as quickly as she had been smitten, to the extent of the most profound disgust, of her actor, who was playing the comedy of love in pitiful fashion to the entire city, Madame Coffre implored her husband’s pity. The latter did not have the courage to refuse forgiveness of a lapse for which, in his conscience, he felt responsible, a woman of twenty—almost a child—having the right to the vigilant care of her spouse to defend her against others and herself. Monsieur Coffre took his wife back as one would take back an unfaithful mistress, because she is beautiful and voluptuous and one has a pronounced taste for her flesh.
Distraught, the unfortunate woman sought in a new amour, in vain, a remedy for her distress; then, her soul and senses perturbed, devoid of will, incapable of resistance, she yielded to any man who attacked her boldly. It was known that she had civilian and military lovers, advocates, physicians, artists and vulgar sporting heroes or men of the world.
However, whether because the joys dispensed by swordsmen were more intense or because their recruitment was easier, as well as their discreet dismissal—by virtue of discipline and the complaisance of the Ministry of War, ever-ready to recompense with a stripe or a medal any officer offering to quite Paris voluntarily after an expedition in Madame Coffre’s bed—the banker’s wife devoted herself exclusively to the army.
She began with generals, whose starry emblems caused her to desire embraces that were more virile although less elevated in the hierarchy; rank by rank she sampled the science of seasoned campaigners of amour and the impetuosity of conscripts of sensuality; for more than fifteen years, all units, including the specialist ones, beat the retreat of pleasure upon her senses.
Having reached the autumn of her life as a woman, on the brink of forty, experience had taught her that vice, like virtue, has a real advantage in seeking the juste milieu. For preference, she clasped to her bosom heads coiffed in kepis with three stripes, because captains, without yet having the hesitant gait of laggards fearful at every stage of not being able to achieve the goal, no longer have the so-often-deceptive ardor of adolescents.
Monsieur Coffre consoled himself as best he could by telling himself that his wife, who did not make him happy, was not making anyone else happy either; his self-esteem suffered less from knowing that she had lovers than from knowing that she had only one lover; in sum, he had no rival and could not be jealous of all men as a species.
Captain Sylphe, however, lingered, and the banker began to feel some hatred in his regard. To rid his bed of him, he had had him assigned as orderly officer to General Foiraubilles, of whom, according to custom, he had become the designated son-in-law—but the war, by provisionally removing the captain’s official existence, cast his plan into disarray. A dead man, in fact, could not contract a legitimate union, and Madame Coffre had too tender a heart to close the door abruptly on an unfortunate soldier fallen victim to his professional duty.
Monsieur Coffre considered violence as a remedy always worse than the disease it was a matter of curing. Instead of resorting to manifestations as ridiculous as they would be futile, he limited himself to joining the party, in categorical fashion, of those whose deemed it just and necessary to maintain Captain Sylphe on the register of the living. Under cover of reasons of a patriotic order, he put pressure on the public powers for Captain Sylphe to recover his entitlements as a living man, which would permit him to marry Mademoiselle de Foiraubilles and force him to break with Madame Coffre.
As was customary, General Croppeton had the Cabinet castigated by one of those députés who, in parliamentary matters, play the same role as stimulators of the crowd in fairground wrestling booths. The orator seemed genuinely indignant to see France yielding to foreign pressure; he reproached the Government for lack of energy and summoned it, in grandiloquent terms, to declare its intention.
The Minister of Foreign Affairs, Henri Verbuis, replied that a France that was strong within would always be respected without, if it took for its only rule honestly considering treaties as inviolable and war as a measure of extreme rigor, only to be employed after the failure of all means of conciliation.
He made it known that the case of Captain Sylphe would be submitted to a tribunal of arbitration and that an accord could probably be reached that would give satisfaction to everyone, friends as well as enemies of France.
The majority applauded these declarations confidently, which left the present as it was and reserved the future.
Louis Méripal asked to speak and, as the rules of the Chambre safeguard all rights except the right to silence, President Perruquet corroborated with violet shakes of the hand-bell the appearance at the podium of Abbé Mortol, who, it appeared, had priority by right of inscription.
The abbé gave an unctuous explanation of the motives and reasons that would henceforth assure Petitpaon warfare the support of Catholics. He invoked the truth, momentarily hidden by God from his representatives, for a purpose whose mystery it would be sacrilegious to attempt to penetrate.
He declared that he was speaking on behalf of Cardinal-Archbishop Pecari, who had received precise instructions directly from the Holy Father, ensured by infallibility against the error of a long procession of miseries and pains visible and palpable only in the other world.
Taking as his witness the omnipotence of God, perfected to the point of having become capable of annihilating in an unappreciable lapse of time that which he had taken six days to edify, Abbé Mortol qualified Petitpaon warfare as the most radiant flash of enlightenment of all those that had traversed the Christian world since the most obscure times. He begged the Government not to dishonor France by sacrificing one of her noblest children, Captain Sylphe, to pretentions as injurious as they were misplaced.
“War if need be: war with Europe, war with the world! France will be victorious if God wishes it!” cried the bellicose ecclesiastic, quitting the podium, to which Louis Méripal climbed by the opposite staircase, avoiding the hands of the ushers trying to retain him in the hemicycle.
“What sinister hopes have made you retract your loud anathemas today, Monsieur Mortol? What odor of cadavers has brought back the briefly-distanced vultures?”
“It is God who, via my mouth…!” Abbé Mortol protested, from his bench.
“It’s God who is shutting up via your mouth!” snapped Méripal, imperiously. “We know, anyway, what he wants, your God, in that he’s just like all the other gods: monsters hatched in the dark abysms of the nightmares of the unknown! What he requires is bodies, bloodied to make them howl in their torture! It’s souls to rip apart fiber by fiber, until death effaces them to plunge them in nothingness! Yes, you preach obedience, humility and resignation! And you make them into virtues—which you are careful not to practice—and you treat as crimes liberty, self-esteem and the spirit of revolt, because you know that you will be swept away by them, as dust is swept from the highway by the wind that watches over the fecund earth! You always talk about sacrifice...”
“Jesus died on the cross!” shouted a voice from the far right.
“And it’s in the blood of that man, that man that you have led to theatrical torture in order to proclaim him God, that the Faith, the most formidable house of commerce, has been founded!”
Catholics, Protestants, Israelites, freethinkers and sectarians of every stripe remained as mute and motionless as statues.
“To make it prosper, Messieurs its inheritors, you need force! Flattering the vanity of the soldier, you have proclaimed your weakness before him, and, as his heart is simple, he has made himself your champion. He has re
placed you on the fields of battle, braving Death for you who fear it, in spite of your Paradise to which it opens the door! Soon, dulled by the burden of his equipment, hallucinated by the miserable flame that you have lit in the depths of sanctuaries, the soldier has become the blind instrument of your ambition and your power. And the portion of wealth that you have not been able to detain in your own hands, you have confided to accomplices. Since the commencement of the centuries, priests have marched hand in hand with men of war and men of money. In their footsteps, roads have been changed into torrents in which black floods of blood run. Cut one another’s throats—that has been your maxim!”
“The Gospel orders loving one’s neighbor as one’s brother,” Abbé Mortol rectified.
“Lying words, like all those that emerge from your mouth! And it’s not for you alone that I’m speaking, but for all the inventors of gods, the exploiters of the afterlife, the priests of all times and all religions, who soil the earth in order to render it hateful, so that no one will dispute its possession with you! The god that you Christians call the true and only God has only come along after many other gods; he has redoubtable competitors and he will have successors when his symbol is outdated in the attention of humans. Gods pass; the priest remains! And gods will pass into the hands of priests until life becomes beautiful enough to be venerated in isolation! On that day, the temples will crumble! The sun will give birth to flowers between their scattered stones! The only law will be happiness, and everyone will find it by freely following his own instinct!”
“The instinct of the brute and the criminal!” mocked a legislator of the ethical school.
“There are neither brutes nor criminals! It’s because you have misappropriated the goals of life that they have gone astray. You have created darkness on the road, and crouched in the shadows, with a hooded lantern in hand, you wait for the traveler’s foot to slip into some rut, or for his head to collide with another head; then, abruptly, you project the searchlight of your laws upon him. You take possession of his person and put him in prison, on the pretext that his eyes were unable to guide him. No, it is not an inviolable law for men to cut one another’s throats. Why does humanity not rid itself this very day of the odious yoke that constrains them to pillage, murder and the inexpiable crime that is war?”
“Petitpaon warfare does not offer the slightest danger!” declared General Croppeton, spitting out his beard and moustache violently. “Even children could wage it! During the entire African campaign not a single accident occurred!”
“Do you recognize, then, that no hatred results from a difference of race or nationality?” Méripal interrogated.
“General Croppeton did not say that!” President Perruquet intervened.
“Then how do you explain that white men and black men, confronted with one another, did not tear one another limb from limb?”
“Discipline was in control!” General Croppeton declared, solemnly. “Besides which, it’s not as so many individuals that men are enemies, but as so many collectivities obedient to the same laws, ranged under the same flag, pursuing the same goal...”
“What goal?”
“All those that the fatherland proposes! That of speaking more loudly than one’s neighbor! Of having the right to make modifications to the land-registry of the world! Of being able to chastise those who take insult to a country as far as eating the flesh of its children!”
“And what vengeance did you extract from the cannibals?”
“France does not avenge herself, Monsieur,” replied Henri Verbuis, aristocratically. “We vanquished Haricot VII. We maintained our discretion! We could have taken possession of his realm. We limited ourselves to recovering the remains of our unfortunate compatriots. The incident is closed, honor is satisfied. What more do you want?”
“And it’s to recover those four shoulder-blades engraved with facetious verse that you caused the deaths of six thousand Frenchmen?”
“Diseases are not imputable to us!” said Croppeton, defensively.
“And that you spent five hundred millions?” Méripal continued, furiously.
“Consumption is the soul of commerce, as labor is the wealth of a people,” thundered Pierre Phosphène. “Petitpaon warfare is an inexhaustible source of wealth, since it permits the utilization of all the resources of a country without shedding a drop of blood.”
“We have what we need to maintain an army ten times as numerous!” agreed Thunasol.
“And thanks to the rigorous training of our soldiers,” Croppeton continued, “to the perfection of our artillery and our methods of combat, we shall not take long to obtain a higher coefficient in the international casualty-reckoners.”
Applause supported the President of the Council’s words, while abuse and insults rose up toward Louis Méripal.
Very calmly, as if a complete change of direction had taken place within him, the latter concluded: “There are madmen whose dream it is necessary not to break. There are sleepwalkers who, in their hypnotic slumber, stand on the edge of the most dangerous precipices, sometimes for a long time, but who would fall at the slightest gesture made to awaken them. May your dream continue! May nothing come to trouble your slumber! Only remember that peoples who play with war are like children who are playing with fire. May the deadly work of armaments be undone! May the force of Petitpaon warfare not end in bloodshed!”
Louis Méripal came slowly down from the podium. Large tears were running down his cheeks. Abbé Mortol denounced that he was weeping in shame.
Before ending the session, President Perruquet put forward a motion ordered that the victory of Cirajoum be added to those inscribed on the sides of the Arc de Triomphe at the Étoile, but someone, in the midst of an indescribable enthusiasm, passed a motion for the removal of all those names, and their replacement by the names of the President of the Republic, the ministers, the senators and the députés who had opened the Petitpaon Era of the World.
V
Diplomacy is a bizarre and tenebrous art.
In order to practice it with distinction, it is necessary to renounce everything that is frankness and simplicity. A perfect diplomat is a man who disguises his thoughts to the point of absence, in the same way that he ordinarily accepts for truth the opposite of what he hears.
Like those animals to which nature forbids rectilinear progress, the diplomat cannot go straight toward the goal that he secretly wants to attain; his preoccupation to deceive others is so constant that he often falls victim to his own ruses.
In the Sylphe affair, it was important, above all, that France put everyone else off the track. The official newspapers reported and repeated that the glorious Captain was perfectly resigned to his fate and that he was awaiting the decision of the arbitration tribunal in title tranquility.
Insidious notes credited Mademoiselle Hermine de Foiraubilles with the intention of entering religion by taking the veil of “Novices of Love” if God stole her fiancé from her.
In the meantime, a plenipotentiary minister, charged with the instructions of the Government and sumptuous gifts for which Monsieur Coffre had insisted on paying, left for Cirajoum in a secrecy known only to a few tens of millions of readers of the newspapers who reported the fact over the surface of the continents. It was a matter of obtaining from Haricot VII a written declaration in which he admitted having abused the credulity of the arbitrator-evaluators in having a mortal coefficient of one nine-hundredth attributed to his warriors.
By fixing that coefficient at the infinitesimally inferior figure of one thousandth, only two French soldiers would have lost their lives, and Captain Sylphe would recover the full rights of his civil and military authority.
That plan, which Machiavelli would not have denied, had been imagined by Henri Verbuis; it was adopted by the Council of Ministers unanimously, plus the voice of Bernard Petitpaon, enthused by the coup de théâtre that the revelation of the document in question would produce if the arbitration tribunal decided on the definiti
ve death of Captain Sylphe.
King Haricot VII received the French envoy with all due respect. Military honors were rendered by the women, old men and children, the men in a condition to bear arms having been deprived of all official existence.
Under the layer of ceruse that coated them from head to toe, they could be seen wandering from hut to hut like white phantoms with black heads, and their fate appeared to them to be so sad that many of them allowed themselves to die, accusing the demons of the coconut trees of twisting their entrails.
Although the matter was not of any interest to him, the potentate refrained from immediately agreeing to what was requested of him. He feigned complete indifference to the presents, and only deigned to place a gray top hat with a broad red and gold band on his curly hair. By dint of eloquence, the diplomat succeeded thereafter in persuading him to put on a gendarme’s shoulder-sash and a sub-prefect’s épée, which, with knee-length boots and fencing-gloves, composed an outfit before which all his subjects prostrated themselves in admiration.
The promise of a certain quantity of tins of tuna similar to those that he was persuaded to consume under the pretext that they were human flesh, combined with the terrible fear that he felt in regard to a phonograph, which he took for the white men’s god, whom the ambassador could cause to speak or shut up at will, convinced Haricot VII, after much procrastination, to set his seal on the parchment, which arrived in Paris just as the arbitration tribunal opened its sessions,
The discussion was long and obscure; each camp had its moments of emotion, in which triumph was as probable as defeat.
Around the green baize on which the existence of Captain Sylphe was being gambled, the most ludicrous nonsense was talked, thanks to the whole collection of interpreters charged with serving as points of intersection between the multiple languages present.
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