by Jan Potocki
One day the knight asked Busqueros what the love affair was with which the Duke of Arcos had been occupied for so many years, and whether the woman in question was attractive enough to have held his attention for so long.
Busqueros looked very solemn and said to Toledo, ‘In asking me to divulge my patron’s secrets, Your Excellency proves to me that he knows how devoted I am to him. On the other hand, I have the advantage of knowing Your Excellency well enough to realize that a certain inconstancy which can be detected in his behaviour has never had any unfortunate consequences except for women who, as it happens, have forgiven him for it, and furthermore of knowing that Your Excellency is incapable of compromising his faithful servant.’
‘Señor Busqueros,’ the knight said, ‘I didn’t ask you for my eulogy.’
‘I know,’ said Busqueros, ‘but the praises of Your Highness spring naturally to the lips of those who have the honour of knowing him. I had begun to tell the story that Your Excellency asks of me, using assumed names, to the young merchant whom we’ve just married to fair Inés…’
‘I know the story up to that point,’ said the knight. ‘Lope Soarez told little Avarito, who told me. You had reached the point where Frasqueta had told you her story in the garden, after which the Duke of Arcos, dressed up as Frasqueta’s lady friend, had approached you to tell you that it was imperative to hasten Cornádez’s departure. The Duke even hoped Cornádez would not stick just to the pilgrimage but that he would do penance for a certain time at some shrine or other.’
‘Your Excellency,’ Busqueros broke in, ‘has a remarkable memory. His Highness the Duke of Arcos really did utter those words to me. Since Your Excellency already knows the story of the wife, it is necessary – to keep things in their historical order – to acquaint you with the husband and to tell you how he came to know Hervas, that terrible pilgrim.’
The Knight of Toledo sat down and told us that he envied the Duke of Arcos a mistress like Frasqueta, that he had always loved brazen women and that she was the most brazen of them all. Busqueros smiled an equivocal smile and began his tale as follows:
CORNÁDEZ’S STORY AS TOLD BY BUSQUEROS
The husband, whose name is as illuminating as a rebus,1 was the son of a citizen of Salamanca. He had long held a somewhat obscure position in the magistracy, which he combined with a small wholesale business supplying a few retailers. Having come into a large legacy, he decided, like many Spaniards, to do nothing at all other than go often to church and other public places and to smoke cigars.
You will tell me that having a taste for nothing other than complete tranquillity, Cornádez should not have married the first mischievous girl to make faces at him from a window. But therein lies the great mystery of the human heart. No one does what he should do. One person may imagine there to be no happiness except in marriage and dies single; another, who swears never to take a wife, marries and remarries. So Cornádez was married. He congratulated himself on it at first, but then he repented. When he found himself not only with the Conde de Peña Flor on his hands but also his ghost, which had come back from hell to torment him, he became worried and introspective. Soon he had his bed moved into his study, where his prayer-stool was, together with a basin of holy water. During the day he would see little of his wife and would spend more time than usual at church.
One day he found himself there beside a pilgrim, who stared at him in such a disturbing way that he was forced to leave the church. That evening he came across him again while out walking, and then discovered him everywhere he went; and everywhere the pilgrim’s fixed and penetrating stare caused him indescribable anguish.
At last Cornádez, overcoming his natural shyness, said to him, ‘Señor, I’ll go and complain to the alcalde if you continue to haunt me.’
‘Haunt, haunt!’ said the pilgrim in a sepulchral voice. ‘Yes, you are haunted, much haunted. A hundred doubloons; a head; a murdered man who died without taking communion. Well, have I guessed correctly?’
‘Who are you?’ said Cornádez, petrified with fear.
‘I am a reprobate, but I trust in divine mercy. Have you heard of Hervas the scholar?’
‘I know his story more or less. He had the misfortune of being an unbeliever and came to a bad end.’
‘Quite so. I am his son and I was imprinted at birth with the sign of reprobation. But I have been given the power to recognize the sign on the foreheads of sinners and to bring them back to the paths of salvation. Come with me, wretched plaything of the devil, I shall make myself better known to you.’
The pilgrim led Cornádez to one of the lonely walks in the garden of the Celestine fathers. He sat down with him on a seat and spoke to him as follows:
THE STORY OF DIEGO HERVAS TOLD BY HIS SON,
THE REPROBATE PILGRIM
My name is Blas Hervas. My father, Diego Hervas, was sent while still very young to the university of Salamanca, where he quickly distinguished himself by his extraordinary hard work. Soon he was unrivalled by any of his comrades and some years later he knew more than his teachers. Then, ensconced in his study with the masters of every branch of knowledge, he conceived the seductive hope of attaining the same glory and seeing his name one day inscribed among theirs. Diego combined this hardly modest ambition with another. He wanted to publish anonymous works, which, when they were known, he would acknowledge and thereby obtain an instant reputation. While engaged on this plan, he decided that Salamanca was not a horizon on which the glorious star of his destiny would shine brightly enough, so he turned his eyes to the capital. There, perhaps, men distinguished by their genius enjoyed the respect due to them, and the homage of the public, the confidence of ministers, even the favour of the king.
So Diego thought that only in the capital would his talents be recognized for what they were worth. Our young scholar scrutinized Descartes’s geometry, Harriot’s analysis and the works of Fermat and Roberval.2 He realized that while these great minds were blazing the trail of science, they were still advancing unsteadily. He brought together their discoveries, added solutions which up till then had not been tried, and suggested modifications to the algorithm which then was still the most used. Hervas spent more than a year writing his text. Geometry books were then always written in Latin. Hervas wrote his in Spanish to make it more accessible and to bring it out with a title which would excite curiosity. He called it The Secrets of Analysis Revealed, together with the Science of Infinite Dimensions.
When the manuscript was ready, my father was on the point of attaining his majority and he was informed of this by his guardians. They told him at the same time that his fortune, which seemed as though it ought to be of the order of eight thousand pistoles, was reduced to eight hundred through a variety of circumstances, and that this sum would be handed over to him when he had signed a legal release for his guardians. Hervas considered that eight hundred pistoles was exactly the sum required to have his book printed and transported to Madrid. So he hurriedly signed the document discharging his guardians, accepted the eight hundred pistoles and submitted his manuscript to the censors.
The theological censors made certain difficulties on the grounds that the analysis of infinitesimals seemed to entail the atoms of Epicurus, whose doctrines were condemned by the Church. It was pointed out to them that what was in question was abstract quantities and not material particles, and they withdrew their objection.
From the censor the text passed to the printer. It was quite a thick quarto book, for which it was necessary to cast the algebraic characters which were lacking and even make new punches, with the result that the publication costs for a printing of a thousand copies was seven hundred pistoles. Hervas paid this sum all the more willing because he expected to sell the copies for three pistoles each. Hervas was not at all acquisitive but the thought of owning this little capital sum certainly pleased him.
The printing took more than six months. Hervas corrected the proofs himself, and this fastidious task took him longer than composi
ng the work itself. At last the biggest cart that could be found in Salamanca brought the heavy bales, on which his present reputation and future immortality were based, to his house.
The very next day a deliriously happy Hervas, full of expectations, loaded his books on to eight mules, mounted the ninth himself and took the road to Madrid. On his arrival in the capital he went straight to Moreno the bookseller’s and said to him:
‘Señor, these eight mules have brought nine hundred and ninety-nine copies of a book. Here is the thousandth. One hundred copies sold on your account will bring in three hundred pistoles. You will be kind enough to credit the remainder to me. I am bold enough to think that the whole edition will be sold out in a few weeks and I will be able to produce a new edition to which I shall add a few clarifications which I thought of while the work was being printed.’
Moreno seemed to doubt that the work would sell as quickly as that, but as he noticed that there was a licence from the Salamanca censors he didn’t object to the bales being stored in his shop and a few copies being displayed in front of it. Hervas went off to find lodgings in an inn and without delay he began to work on the notes and appendices which were to accompany the second edition of his work.
Three weeks went by in this way and our mathematician thought that it was time to go to see Moreno and recover the money from the sale, which must amount at least to a thousand pistoles or so. He went there, and was very mortified to discover not a single copy had yet been sold.
Soon he had an even more painful reason to be mortified. For on returning to his inn he found an alguazil from the court, who obliged him to step into a closed carriage and took him to the tower of Segovia. It is surprising for a mathematician to be treated as a state prisoner but this is what had happened. The two or three copies put on sale by Moreno soon fell into the hands of curious people who frequented the shop. One of them read the title, The Secrets of Analysis Revealed, and said that it might well be an anti-governmental pamphlet. Another, scrutinizing the same title-page, said with a sly smile that the satire must be directed towards Don Pedro Alanyes, the minister of finance, because analysis was the anagram of Alanyes;3 and the second part of the title, Infinities of All Dimensions, was also directed at the minister, who was physically infinitely small and infinitely fat, and mentally infinitely low and infinitely high. It is easy to deduce from this joke that Moreno’s customers had a licence to say whatever they liked and that the government tolerated this small satirical assembly.
Those who know Madrid know that its common people are in a certain respect equal to the highest classes, are interested in the same events and share the same opinions, and that the witticisms of high society soon find their way down to the streets, where they circulate freely. So Moreno’s customers’ jokes were soon repeated in all the barbers’ shops and eventually at all the crossroads.
It wasn’t long, either, before the minister Alanyes was called Señor Analysis, Infinite in Every Dimension. This financier was quite inured to the people’s criticisms and paid them no attention. But when the same nickname came to his ears more than once he asked his secretary to explain why. He in turn replied that the origin of the joke was an alleged book of geometry on sale at Moreno’s shop. Without making further inquiries, the minister first had the author arrested and then confiscated the whole edition.
Locked up in the tower of Segovia, Hervas was not aware of this and was deprived of pen and ink. He did not know when his detention would come to an end, and in order to dispel his boredom decided to recall all his knowledge, that is to say, to recall all that he knew about every science. He then realized, to his great satisfaction, that he had really altogether grasped the whole range of human knowledge and that he would have been able like Pico della Mirandola to defend a thesis De omni scibili.
Hervas was ambitious to make a scientific name for himself and conceived of the project of a work in a hundred volumes, which was to contain all that men knew in his time. He decided to publish it anonymously. The public would not fail to be duped by this into believing that it was the work of a learned society; then Hervas would reveal that he was the author and would obtain immediately a reputation and the title of Universal Man. Hervas had a mind whose power was equal to such a vast enterprise. He had a belief in it and gave himself entirely up to a project which flattered the two passions of his soul: vanity and the love of knowledge.
Six weeks went swiftly by for Hervas. At the end of this period he was summoned by the castle governor. There he met the first secretary of the minister of finance. This man greeted him with a sort of respect and said:
‘Don Diego Hervas, you decided to enter society without a protector, which is extremely imprudent. For when you were accused no one presented himself to defend you. You are accused, in your Analysis of Infinities, of having had the minister of finance in mind. Don Pedro Alanyes, rightly angered, has had the whole edition of your work consigned to the flames. But his honour is satisfied, and he has decided to pardon you, and offers you a post as contador4 in his department. You will be given calculations to do whose complicated nature occasionally causes us problems. Leave this prison and make sure that you never return to it.’
Hervas was at first extremely upset that nine hundred and ninety-nine copies of a work which had cost him so much effort had been burned. But as he had staked his reputation on other projects, he was soon consoled and went to take up his post in the ministry. There he was given the register of annuities, the accounts concerning deductions for payment in cash and other calculations, which he managed with a facility which earned him the respect of his superiors. He was given an advance of a quarter of his annual salary and assigned a place to live in a house in the gift of the minister.
When the gypsy had reached this point in his story, he was summoned to his band, so we had to wait until the next day for our curiosity to be satisfied.
The Forty-ninth Day
We reassembled in the cave at dawn. Rebecca observed that Busqueros had presented his story very skilfully.
‘An ordinary intriguer,’ she explained, ‘would, to frighten Cornádez, have introduced phantoms dressed in winding-sheets to his house, and these would, it is true, have had a certain effect on him. But this would have been dispelled when he had thought about it a little. Busqueros proceeds in a different way. He tries to act on Cornádez entirely through words. Everyone knows the story of the atheist Hervas, which the Jesuit Granada1 recorded in the notes to his work. The reprobate pilgrim claims to be his son to make an even greater impression on Cornádez’s mind.’
‘Your judgement is premature,’ said the old chief. ‘The pilgrim could well be the son of Hervas the atheist and it is certain that the facts which he relates are not to be found in the legend you mention, where what we mainly find are a few details about the circumstances of his death. So please have the patience to listen to the end of the story.’
THE STORY OF DIEGO HERVAS CONTINUED
So Hervas was restored to himself, and his livelihood was assured. The work required of him could only occupy him for a few hours in the morning and he had before him an immense project which would bring into play all the powers of his genius and give him all the enjoyment which knowledge affords. Our ambitious polygraph decided to write an octavo volume on every branch of knowledge. Noting that speech is the distinctive attribute of man, he devoted the first volume to universal grammar. There he revealed the infinitely varied artifice of grammar, by which different parts of speech are expressed in every language and different forms are given to the fundamentals of thought.
Then, passing from the inner thoughts of man to the ideas which come to him from things about him, Hervas devoted the second volume to natural history in general; the third to zoology, which is the study of animals; the fourth to ornithology, which is the study of birds; the fifth to ichthyology, which is the study of fish; the sixth to entomology, which is the study of insects; the seventh to scoleology, which is the study of worms; the eighth to c
onchyliology, or something like it, which is the study of shells; the ninth to botany; the tenth to geology or knowledge of the earth’s structure; the eleventh to lithology, or the study of stones; the twelfth to oryctology, or the study of fossils; the thirteenth to metallurgy, or the art of extracting and working metals; the fourteenth to docimastics, or the art of assaying.
The fifteenth volume, bringing the study of man back to himself, dealt with physiology, or the study of the human body; the sixteenth volume dealt with anatomy; the seventeenth was devoted to myology, or the study of muscles; the eighteenth to osteology; the nineteenth to neurology; the twentieth to phlebology, or the study of the system of veins.
The twenty-first volume was devoted to medicine. This was then divided into parts: in the twenty-second volume nosology, or the study of illnesses; in the twenty-third aetiology, or the study of their causes; in the twenty-fourth pathology, or the study of the ills which they give rise to; in the twenty-fifth semiotics, the knowledge of symptoms; in the twenty-sixth clinical medicine, or study of the procedures to be followed at the patient’s bedside; in the twenty-seventh therapeutics, or the art of curing patients – the most difficult part of all; the twenty-eighth volume dealt with dietetics or the study of diet; the twenty-ninth with hygiene or the art of staying healthy; the thirtieth, surgery; the thirty-first, pharmacology; and the thirty-second veterinary medicine.
Then, in the thirty-third volume, came general physics; in the thirty-fourth, specific physics; in the thirty-fifth, experimental physics; in the thirty-sixth, meteorology; in the thirty-seventh, chemistry and the pseudo-sciences which are derived from it, such as alchemy in the thirty-eighth volume and hermeticism in the thirty-ninth. After these natural sciences came those which arise from the state of war, which is also believed to be a state natural to man. Thus the fortieth volume dealt with strategy, or the art of war; the forty-first, castramentation, or the art of siting camps; the forty-second, fortification; the forty-third, underground warfare, or the art of the sapper; the forty-fourth, pyrotechnics, which is the artificer’s art; the forty-fifth, ballistics, or the art of projecting heavy bodies. The artillery had lost this art but Hervas had, as it were, brought it back to life through his learned researches on the machines used in antiquity.