“Far be it from me to present to you the economy of a project whose vertiginous grandeur you have understood, and which you have already unanimously approved. I ask its henceforth-illustrious author to do me the honor of coming to take his place beside me during the discussion that he has demanded, with an intention for which, on behalf of the entire nation, I thank him with all gratitude.”
Almost carried by his colleagues, Philémon Singeoreille was installed to the right of the Minister of Agriculture, who kissed him on both cheeks in a patriotic accolade.
In the meantime, innumerable pieces of paper were transmitted by way of interested parties or that of the ushers to the President’s desk. Save for the members of the Government and Philémon Singeoreille, all the deputes, without exception, asked for a turn to speak, opening the perspective of five hundred and twenty-eight speeches whose authors had the columns of the Journal Officiel in mind.
Without apparent emotion, the President called upon the first name inscribed.
That honorable gentleman limited himself to celebrating in florid terms the narrow correlation established between the value of a country and the power of its fauna.
Another came forward, who tried to calculate the volumetric relationship that might exist between the vegetal and the animal. Becoming confused in his equations, he proclaimed a result that gave one cubic meter of flesh belonging to animals of average ferocity per cubic centimeter of ligneous matter of various species.
There was one who, in gripping images, saluted the creation of that double army of which animals and trees were going to be the faithful soldiers, destined to become the heroes of the sacred cause of reforestation.
Delights flourished in the imminent promise of conquests subsequent to those of the horse, of which nothing could nevertheless ever dethrone the supreme nobility.
In the sentimental order, wishes fell from the podium for every Frenchman, no matter what might emerge in the unknown of the future, to retain for the dog the first place in his heart.
Orators were enthusiastic to represent the neighborhood of ferocious beasts as the best and most efficacious school of courage and firmness.
Some sounded a melancholy note in requesting the assembly to address a fraternal adieu to the present landscapes that were the accustomed visages of old France.
Among the listeners, Philémon Singeoreille was perhaps the only one to lend an attentive ear to that interminable procession of hollow words and grotesque phrases, which faded away in the ever-more-active comings and goings established between the session hall and the corridors leading to the bar.
Everyone was waiting for the veritable start of the discussion, of which these speeches were merely the inoffensive hors-d’oeuvre, incapable of sating the hunger of experienced députés intent on playing a role susceptible of capturing public attention.
After observations carefully garlanded with rhetoric had identified the possible danger of tubercular illness in tropical animals transplanted to cold climes, legitimate esthetic preoccupations became manifest, provoking the first interruptions.
It was a matter of deciding whether or not the presence of monkeys in the Republican Jungle was desirable. The arguments for and against were eloquently presented.
“The monkey is the purest representative of primitive beauty,” a pharmacist asserted.
“It is the decadent instrument of synthetic ugliness!” retorted a priest. “A monkey is a human without a soul!”
“I remind you of the respect due to ancestors, with the inscription of an official warning!” said the President, severely, to applause from the left and murmurs from the right. By way of conciliation, he added: “In any case, monkeys are external to the debate; they probably cannot be considered as ferocious.”
“The Government reserves its opinion,” put in the Minister of Agriculture. “An intermediate order ought to decide.”
“I agree entirely with the Minister,” the President capitulated, courteously.
The debate became animated when an orator advocated the employment of French wolves to the formal exclusion of foreign wolves. A socialist, a zealous partisan of internationalism, interrupted violently.
“The wolves of France are not true wolves. They prowl around habitations in the indubitable search for easy prey, and perhaps also in the debased hope of some handout.
“You are slandering the French wolf despicably! I defy you to say that you have ever seen one put out its hand!” thundered the orator.
“They’re domesticated,” the socialist contented himself with adding.
“In matters of Government,” the Minister of Agriculture declared, “it’s as well not to hesitate to examine the reactive impacts of ideas and facts, as well as their consequences. Thus, it is necessary to envisage that it might be necessary to grant to animals coming to France in conformity with the dispositions of the present law, certificates of naturalization. Personally, and without engaging the responsibility of the Government in any fashion, I deem that many foreigners, men and women, have been able to acquire French nationality without having rendered to the Nation services comparable to those we expect of these animals...”
“On behalf of the revolutionary group, I ask the Government what its intentions are with regard to the social status of the animals. My friends and I dare to hope that they will be more fortunate than the members of the human family and that no inequality of rank and treatment will be imposed upon them.”
“Personally, I am an irreducible adversary of castes and privileges. However, first of all, it seems to me to be difficult to realize the unity of regime with regard to individuals recruited from various latitudes, representing multiple species whose needs are far from being the same. There are infinitely troubling problems therein, and extremely complicated questions,” the Minister argued.
The partisan of one rule for all, once and for all, cut in brutally, as if he were demanding the verdict of the Last Judgment: “Equality! Equality! Equality!”
“Equality is a lie,” put in a right-winger.
“I beg you, my dear colleague, not to charge lying with the testimony of your scorn,” implored the President. “You know that lying is the most energetic homage rendered by humans to the truth. I’m truly saddened that this debate, departing from such a high point, should be descending to the level of base moral brawling.”
The moral brawl nearly degenerated into a material brawl during the intervention of a professor of mimetics. That scientist, the spokesman of one of the black elements of the French people and black himself, developed his theory of the interplay of environmental influences, calling the attention of the Chambre to the adaptation of colors that would doubtless be realized externally by the inhabitants of the Republican Jungle.
“It’s high time that you did the same!” shouted a center-leftist whose legitimate wife, it was notorious in parliament, had an intractable weakness for ebon adultery.
“Black is better than yellow,” insinuated the native, in the smile of his white teeth.
“I forbid you to insult me!”
“We’re talking about colors! You started it!” The negro continued to smile, flattered by the publicity given to his good fortune.
“It’s lucky for the maison/is a good encornaison!”29 sang the extreme left in chorus, as the unfortunate Republican tried in vain to shut them up by waving his fists.
“The least gracious epithets were exchanged in the tumult inexplicably unleashed by that minuscule incident. The President shook his hand-bell and called for order. Between two repetitions of the chorus he attempted, with no more success, to talk about the majesty of the assembly. Without persisting further, as it was getting late, he embarked on a simulacrum of consultation, for the benefit of the drafter of the official record, with a view to suspending the discussion until the next day’s session, and, putting on his hat, abandoned the armchair whose occupation is indispensable to the legal standing of debates.
The newspapers celebrated, wit
h all due pomp, the sumptuousness of that parliamentary day, with the promise of even more admirable days to come. That stimulation of curiosity, checked as it was by the official notification of the absolute exhaustion of places available to the public, bore its fruit. There was a mass exodus in the direction of the Palais Bourbon of Parisians, ever ready to accept martyrdom in order to satisfy their need to witness a notorious and gratuitous spectacle. The people of Paris readily consider that presence as an active participation in events to which they are witnesses. Perhaps many revolutionary actions, especially those that have the streets and public places for their theater, are the simple result of that natural propensity, produced by curious vanity.
In a crowd, the individual loses himself to the extent of losing sight of himself, and as for his soul, it dissolves into the collective soul, composed not only of the sum of all the individual souls but also of innumerable reactions of those souls to one another. Those reactions escape the control of the subjects who experience them. They are manifest as a force comparable to cold and heat. Those who believe that they dominate it are, in fact, its most servile slaves. Without lightening their burden, they charge their neighbors with the weight of their own chains.
To put oneself at the head of a crowd is to abdicate one’s individual soul unreservedly; it is to push obedience to the collective soul to the point of annihilation. In the same way, in a block of metal, the molecule sensitive to temperature wrongly believes that it is imposing on the aggregate by its own will the variations to which it is subject, and it is expressing an elementary truth under a paradoxical appearance to say that leading a crowd is following it.
Sometimes, one sees clouds in the sky hot on one another’s heels, racing recklessly toward a certain point on the horizon. Suddenly the clouds stop, immediately resuming their rush toward a different point, no less certain, to judge by their urgency in approaching it. The clouds are the playthings of the wind, as crowds are the playthings of the atmosphere born of the collective soul. Some clouds interrupt their progress to precipitate them successively toward the four points of the compass; some crowds, set in movement in one direction, turn aside to throw themselves to the right or the left, or even to go backwards, sometimes with a sudden and utterly inexplicable violence.
Toward midday, a hundred thousand people, without the slightest preliminary agreement, found themselves gathered in a compact mass in the Place de la Concorde, the bridge of which was blocked by police forces. Violent eddies, precursors of a stampede, were agitating the crowd. The guardians of the peace were preparing to defend their pass of Thermopylae when the human tide, perhaps deceived by the sight of the church of the Madeleine, the other Greek temple with a colonnade similar to that of the Palais Bourbon, surged into the Rue Royale.
In the meantime, the President of the Chambre invited his colleagues to calm down, reminding them that the most moving pages of national history are those that require to be read with the most self-composure. Having said that, he gave the floor to Adrien Rezon.
Adrien Rezon was a former lion-tamer. The last representative of a family already illustrious in that arena, he had long been the unrivaled hero of the fairground. His popularity had exceeded the bounds of glory. While still young, his father having been mauled by his favorite lion before an audience petrified with horror, he had gone into the cage and, after a tense battle, had reclaimed the bloody body, already inert, from the furious beast. Slightly pale, an unknown man had come up to him, shaken his hand and, without a word, handed him a wallet. He was an Englishman who had been following the menagerie for twenty years in the daily hope of seeing the tamer eaten, and thought it only equitable to pay that supplement for the realization of his dream.
The contents of the wallet served to pay for a funeral for Père Rezon such as had never been seen in the circus world, which turned out in its entirety to pay its last respects to the greatest of its own. Immediately behind the hearse came the lion Brutus, lying motionless in his crepe-veiled cage, limp-maned, his half-closed eyes fixed on his master’s coffin.
That same evening Adrien Rezon had donned the white culottes and black dolman, put on the high boots of varnished leather, and without a weapon, strictly bare-handed, he had presented his wild beasts to staged benches crammed to breaking-point with a public amazed by his boldness.
His silhouette became legendary. Everyone knew his black hair, falling in curls over his shoulders, and his carefully-waxed beard and moustache, causing the mat pallor of his face and the fulgurant gleam of his gold-flecked gray eyes stand out.
But everything passes and lassitude afflicts the most refined pleasures. After years of frenetic infatuation, the vogue quit the menagerie in favor of other attractions. The most spectacular parades were impotent to retain attention. The personality of Adrien Rezon could not longer succeed in arresting the flow of strollers outside his tent. The crowd that had idolized him seemed not to know him any longer. Out of need as much as self-respect, Adrien Rezon had continued to work, often before rare devotees and the Englishman, who, having seen the father eaten, legitimately nursed the hope of seeing the son eaten.
Difficult days had come. The beasts had grown old; they perished and were not replaced. Finally, via the newspapers that consecrated stubs of articles to him akin to obituaries, it was learned that Adrien Rezon had retired. A modest auction sale dispersed his materials. The zoological gardens graciously welcomed the surviving borders, with the exception of the lion Brutus, which Adrien Rezon took with him to the rural corner of his native Auvergne where the old family house stood, fortunately restored during the prosperous days.
There, Adrien Rezon led the existence of a sage, kneading pellets of bread amalgamated with a little meat, with which he fed the now gout-stricken companion of his triumphant evenings, which he now carried, wrapped in blankets to the shadiest corner of the gardens in the hours of bright sunlight.
The man had changed too; the curls of his hair, his beard and moustache had become snowy; the flame of the gold-flecked eyes had gone out; his emaciated face seemed sculpted in old ivory.
A prophet in his own land, surrounded by the esteem and affection of all, Adrien Rezon wanted nothing more than to spend the time remaining to him in that retreat, when the electors of the arrondissement, faced with the prospect of making a selection between a physician and an advocate equally qualified to make a député and each furnished with an equal number of partisans, came to him to ask him to accept a candidacy offered with the certain guarantee of success. Adrien Rezon had refused flatly, putting forward his incompetence and alleging, in addition, the impossibility of leaving Brutus. The latter had died in his master’s arms, removing the pretext of amity, while the first invoked was rendered inadmissible by a convincing argument formulated by one of the ambassadors on behalf of them all:
“You know animals too well, Monsieur Rezon, not to understand humans and their petty affairs.”
More concerned to defend the interests of his electors that to make an impact on their imagination, Adrien Rezon only manifested himself in the Chambre by brief and always judicious interventions. However, by virtue of his career, he could not avoid taking part in the debate on the “Singeoreille law.”
His head, emerging in a symphony in complete white from the upright collar of a black jacket similar to a dolman, the former animal-tamer began: “Messieurs and dear colleagues, it is a friend—I almost said a brother—of beasts who does not want to let the debate concluded without making their voice heard. I have lived with them for so long, and I have loved them so much, that my speech, I hope, will not betray them
“I have no need to remind you of the interest a master has in treating his servants well, and far be it from me to suppose for a single instant that the government is capable of failing in the duty to ensure an appropriate existence to the animals. I would like to pay some attention to their morality, because among the beasts, morality has a greater importance than it has among humans. We have, in fact, been the
prisoners of frontiers, laws, conventions and prejudices for so many generations that not the slightest memory of liberty remains to us outside of the three syllables of its name, which we are pleased to repeat without giving any real significance to them. Wild beasts, on the other hand, have not had time to lose the sense of their liberty—which rends their exile and their captivity infinitely sad.
“That exile and that captivity are useful to us. Let us accept the necessity without remorse and without hypocrisy. It is not humans, the inventors of war, in which they massacre one another with unusual refinements of cruelty, that it is necessary to reproach for egotism. Human beings are animals, perhaps, in sum, the best and worst of them all. As such, they are submissive to the universal and ineluctable law of blood, which dictates that death is the ransom of life.
“To be born is to kill. To exist is to destroy. To grow is to eat. Let us therefore yield to the necessities of our role, without which we could neither be nor subsist; but let us be content to have pity for our victims; let us also respect their souls. I have known strange subtleties in them, which pierce instinct as a ray of light pierces the darkness.
“How many times I have read, in the somber golden eyes of my beasts, thoughts that were neither of anger nor of hatred, but of resigned acquiescence to a role similar to the one I was playing myself. How many of them, gentle and affectionate in intimacy, understood that in order to satisfy the excitement-loving public they had to show themselves in their terrible aspect, roaring with all their might, with menacing expressions. How many marks of tender repentance my old lion Brutus testified to me before his death for the minute of aberration that cost my father his life...
“Believe the old animal-tamer who later became your colleague: animals have a heart that knows how to love, and perhaps better than the human heart. You should not charge them with unnecessary pain. Let them know that it is not for our pleasure alone that you make them suffer and you will obtain all their devotion.
The Petitpaon Era Page 28