Abel’s face announced delicacy and naivety combined in a character of affection, mildness, love and courage, which would have made him, at the age of eighteen, the most handsome page that the court of a princess could ever have seen, but the chemist had plans for him that were too bizarre for him ever to be seen at a princely court.
That great man, always meditating, always seeking, had ended up by finding; his reflections told him that there were, for social human beings, far more evils than goods. He claimed that Adam and Eve had only been happy in Paradise because they had lived in ignorance, and that their depiction in the Bible shows us the way to happiness: that civilization provided, it is true, astonishing enjoyments, but that desires and troubles were as cruel there as the pleasures were exquisite. In a state of nature, therefore, one had the fewest evils, plus the ignorance of pleasures—that, in sum, one enjoyed little, but the little in question was unalloyed, like spring water.
It was that doctrine that had brought him to the cottage where his wife, Caliban and he led a life exempt from alarms, a rustic life, broad and even poetic. Love, gratitude, benevolence and light labor filled their souls, and the sweet alliance of everything that nature presets to humans, combined with the simplest sentiments, composed their code. Fruits ornamented their table; the light of the sky was theirs; pure water slaked their thirst; their clothing was modest; Caliban found himself there as a humble friend whose heart could only conceive one idea, a dog-like gratitude and touching fidelity, obedience without a murmur and passive meekness.
What did they lack? The chemist adored his wife, the wife adored her husband; their hearts were only one, and all their nights were illuminated by the “honey moon.” How many women would trade their houses, diamonds, adornments, etc., for the simple clothing of the chemist’s wife, the cottage and “the rest,” as La Fontaine puts it.
The chemist, happy with his experiment, had therefore decreed that his dear Abel would be nourished in such principles; that his heart would be left to develop, as well as his fine body, as indulgent nature pleased; that he would not be tormented by trying to teach him dismal sciences too soon. His mother, his tender mother, who looked at him fondly, his father, who loved him, Caliban and the dog became his entire universe, the cottage his temple of innocence, the garden his greatest space; and when he was playing, six pebbles and the mud kept him amused or a long time. Thus, the chemist kept him in a reasoned, and perhaps reasonable, obscurantism.
His happy child never complained; the naïve laughter of ignorant infancy was his language, his slightest gesture a caress, his speech a sequence of curious interrogations, to which the chemist always responded in such a manner as to further the system that he had adopted for his dear Abel’s future life. He flattered himself all the more with regard to its success because his science gave him the hope of a long old age; he would have the time to render his son as philosophical as himself.
The mother, certain that her husband was a living image of God, believed that he was acting for the best and conformed to his designs; in any case there was not a great enough force of mind within her to perceive objections. She would, as we have seen, have made an excellent government minister, thinking of nothing but her son, finding everything good, and believing what was said to her as an article of faith. As a wife, she was right, for she felt a tranquil and pure happiness invade her through all her pores, and, owing that happiness to her husband, she said to herself: My son will be as happy as him, and like me.
However, the good chemist, prescient and wise, calculated everything, for he informed his wife that he had buried under the hearth of the great fireplace in his laboratory a talisman against all the difficulties that she and his son might encounter if he were to die as a result of some accident—but he warned her that she should only raise the stone when she and her son left the cottage in order to go to live somewhere else. Then, having gathered all his books together in one place, arranged his test tubes, his instruments his bottles and his retorts, he did not devote himself to chemistry as much as before. He made a little treasure to subsidize the expenses the Abel might cause, and set up a bed at the back of the laboratory in order to have the dear child always before his eyes.
All that only happened gradually; Abel, in the midst of joy and a veritable child of nature, grew up and soon reached the age of fifteen. The chemist was then fifty and the mother forty. The father with white hair—for study and application produce that effect of aging—devoted all his time to guiding Abel in his preferred route, and only devoted himself to chemistry occasionally, in order not to lose what he had acquired The tradition regarding the devil’s cottage still endured, and no event troubled the happiness of the charming family.
Chapter III
The Worthy Chemist Dies
The lapse of time that went by between the tableau presented in the first chapter and the epoch with which we are about to occupy ourselves had brought about changes that require a further description.
They no longer went to bed with the sun. In winter, at five o’clock, Caliban lit a lamp filled with an oil fabricated by the chemist. The latter sat on the worm-eaten armchair, his wife took the stool, Caliban cleaned his grains at one end of the table and the door was closed. The old man with white hair, the jaundiced complexion and the visage full of wrinkles that the lamplight rendered even more obvious, held the Cabinet des fées, and, seduced by the supplications of a handsome young man, had consented to teach him to read the tales of enchantment whose illustrations had been the charm of his childhood. The mother listened to her son spell them out as if his difficult, repeated and fastidious tones were the music of the heavenly angels.
For her part, she had learned to embroider, and to decorate the turned-down collar of her son’s shirt with a festoon that the father had drawn in blue ink, or sowed a Medieval garment that she had succeeded in copying from an illustration of Prince Charming. Now, as people in Paris at that time were wearing short frock-coats and trousers ceased in the middle and at the bottom like those of Turks, that garment was not at all ridiculous, and rendered her son a thousand times more handsome than Percinet, the lover of Gracieuse.
Indeed, between the chemist’s wife and her husband, a young man of sixteen was standing respectfully. He was a good enough height, admirably well-proportioned, with a distinguished stance and an uncommon elegance. His fiery eyes radiated candor and innocence, his brow, as pure as Diana’s and as pale as ivory, brought out the jet-black of his hair, which fell in waves over his snow-white shoulders. His face had the flower of youth, the vivacity of color and elasticity of the features, the virginal appearance and gracious pride, which realize in our eyes the idea we have of young Greeks or angels. His almond-shaped eyes with long lashes only quit the book over which his rosy fingers were wandering to obtain a soft glance from his mother, and often, when he had read an entire sentence, he deposited on the serene forehead of the old man one of the kisses that a young adolescent, still ignorant, imprints with the torment of a secret fire.
Caliban often stopped work to admire surreptitiously, as a masterpiece of nature, the idol of his mother; and it seemed that everything was smiling on the virtuous group gathered under the black vault, in the midst of the furnaces and the chemical apparatus, like a bouquet of wild flowers blooming in a lair cluttered with rubble.
In his childhood, Abel had derived his sweetest joy from looking at the illustrations of tales of enchantment; at sixteen, he was trying to read them; those magical adventures were the subject of all his meditations, and the force of his reason in all the sap of its first development, was directed toward the charm of enchantments. His ignorance and naivety contributed to make him believe in the charming creatures known as fays, for he never conceived the thought of casting doubt on the veracity of storytellers; then again, that cheerful mythology of modernity was so much in rapport with his tender soul, disposed to the mild religion of mystery, that it would have hurt him to be disillusioned. He was so convinced of the reality of
tales of enchantment and the brilliant inventions of the Orient that he never even asked any questions of his father.
Thus, for two or three years, helping his father in his chemical endeavors, helping Caliban to look after the garden, walking in the forest with his father, and in the evening, reading to his family the dreams of the Thousand-and-One Nights, etc., made up an existence of joy and happiness for him. His naivety and generosity, the excellence of his good qualities, blossomed, and the good chemist applauded himself, along with his wife, in anticipating that their son, their happiness and joy, would be as delighted as they were in that modest habitation, with a pretty wife by his side and some other Caliban.
But heaven had decided that it would be otherwise.
In fact, one day, when the chemist was working at his furnaces, his son and his wife left him alone and closed the laboratory door. The old man, who was on the point of discovering the secret of making gold, had spent several sleepless nights; he fell asleep with fatigue, and the deleterious vapors of the charcoal stifled him.
On returning from their walk in the forest, the chemist’s wife and Abel found Caliban weeping, on his knees before his master. The wife was rooted to the spot; Abel tried to lift his father up, but found him cold; then he held the old man’s head on his knees and tried to bring him back to life by the force of kisses. In the end, he understood the idea of death, and covered his expired father with tears. The chemist had on his face the mildness that had made the charm of his life and that of those around him. The scene, eloquent with dolor, resembled the one in which Raphael represents Christ brought down from the cross, between his mother, an apostle and an angel.
At night, covered by the mantle of soft light that the moon casts upon such dolorous scenes, the three inhabitants of the cottage laid the body of their friend in a ditch that Caliban dug while weeping. The wind was agitating the foliage, and the queen of the night, sending one of her purest rays, seemed to be participating in the death of the just man; the dawn found the group kneeing before the mound of earth. No one had yet pronounced a word, and the silence was only troubled by the concert of birds.
“They’re announcing to us,” Abel said, then, “that my father’s soul has risen to the heavens…but it has passed through the flowers with which his grave is covered.”
“Do you believe that?” the mother replied, looking alternately at Abel and the grave.
“Certainly,” said Abel.
“Oh, let me think,” the chemist’s wife went on, “that it is all as you say!” And, a sweet hope slipping into her desolate heart, she leaned her head on her son’s bosom, as if to drown her chagrin there.
Caliban, without hearing anything, never ceased gazing at his adored master’s grave; and, far from regretting that all the sciences were buried there with him, he only saw one thing: his master; which is to say, his whole existence. The mute expression of that profound dolor was well worth that of a city maidservant who, when her mistress dies, on receiving one of her dresses, asks whether there are any remnants of the fabric.
The three inhabitants of the cottage went silently back into the laboratory, all of whose furniture still reminded them of the beloved chemist. They found a little sweetness in those memories, but for a long time their interior offered them the image of the grief painted in The Return of Sextus.4 The mother and son often remained idle, gazing at the furnace, and Caliban wept when he lit the lamp, because the oil that the chemist had made would eventually run out, and he thought that he could not make any more of it for them.
It was not until some time after that painful epoch that Abel engraved on the chemist’s grave words that the Oriental jinni living in his head doubtless dictated to him:
As the young woman on the banks of the Ganges consults the future of her amours by putting a light boat made of palm-leaves on the river, and follows with her eyes the light that she has placed therein, we have laden a frail hull with all our hope and happiness; our light shines therein; the shipwreck is complete.
A year later, Abel had to change his epitaph slightly, because the chemist’s wife did not have enough, in the love of her son, to keep her alive, and she was buried beside the man whose faithful companion she had been.
Abel, who was inconsolable, did not leave the cottage; he no longer opened the Cabinet des Fées and knew no universe but the laboratory where he had played with his beloved father and mother. At dusk he went outside and went slowly to sit down beneath a weeping willow beside his parents’ graves.
Caliban did not say a word, but ardently respired the sweet emanations of flowers that the breeze rocked gently over the two graves, believing that he was breathing in his masters’ souls. The evening star often surprised them in the middle of a somber reverie.
Abel, the child of nature, pleased himself in his grief, without seeking to shake it off like a city-dweller, and sometimes, when his excessively oppressed heart could not contain the host of pure and virgin thoughts of his chaste soul, he spoke to Caliban with the poetic energy of the savage.
“Listen,” he said. “The light of that star is not as brilliant as the brightness spread over our lives by their sweet presence. We lived through them; why have we not died, since they are no longer?
“This garden is a desert; its flowers no longer please me; the moon, which smiled at me once, hides in the clouds without my regretting her light; and I only like the harmonious sound of the wind in the forest, because it sometimes brings me the debris of their voices, speaking to me from the height of heaven.
“Let us cultivate these roses; they are born among their ashes, and their odor is their soul; this lily is my mother and that lilac with odorous clusters is my father, whose knowledge is resolved in perfumes...”
Caliban understood that song of dolor, and if some bird sang he chased it away gently, for its joy was importunate to them. It was thus that those two innocent souls were always confounded in the same dream, and the same regrets. They were Christians without knowing it.
One evening, Caliban said to Abel: “Abel, the storm curbs the flower, but it gets up again...”
“There are some that it breaks,” the young man replied.
Caliban was unable to reply, but he wept—was that not a response?
Those two beings remained devoid of ideas, knowledge and help for a long time, in the midst of society, as if on a desert island surrounded by the Ocean.
After a few months, however, Abel began to read tales of enchantment again in the evening—but soon he only read them in the morning, because Caliban observed to him that they were using up the oil fabricated by his father, and that it was necessary to conserve it in order that it might last them for as long as they lived.
Caliban listened to the tales, and they soothed one another by sharing their thoughts about the nature of fays. Eventually, Abel ended up desiring to see a fay, but he did not know what to do in order to evoke one. He read and reread, and saw that fays always came of their own accord when someone was unhappy. Then he said to Caliban: “Why have we not seen fays already…? Oh! I’ve guessed it…my father was a djinni, my mother a fay…and they’ve abandoned us! They’ll come back!”
That day, he crowned himself with roses, and hope was born in his heart; he became cheerful again, as in the days when he played on his mother’s bosom, when he had called her the Good Fay, and the desire often took him to lift the stone in the fireplace; but, remembering that his mother had told him that it was necessary for him to be unhappy and ready to go live somewhere else, he could not resolve to leave his father’s cottage. He even paid scrupulous attention to not disturbing anything in the laboratory, which remained in the same state in which the chemist had left it. The cult of children of nature for objects of their veneration is full of the most gracious attentions, and their mourning is nobler than that depicted by garments; the mourning of the soul is the religion of pain; that of the body is a devotion.
“I’m sure,” Abel said to Caliban, gazing at the fireplace with a
keen curiosity, that there is an entrance to a subterranean palace under there, like the garden from which Aladdin obtained his lamp; that the steps are made of sapphire, the columns of diamond, the fruits of gold, the pomegranates filed with ruby pips; that in shaking the roses there would be showers of gold and silver; that a little fay with her magic wand is sitting on a throne of mother-of-pearl there, and that she is as beautiful as a morning in spring; there are hummingbirds there, and she has a chariot harnessed to doves, and she would enable me to see my father and mother again.”
“But Abel,” said Caliban, “you talk like a book...”
It was a curious spectacle to see that old and deformed servant beside Abel, whose forms, beauty, soft gaze and disordered hair gave the idea of an angel conversing with a demon.
Often Abel said to Caliban: “You’re ugly, Caliban, because you’re not the son of a fay, like me. Look how the flower reddens and fades away, how the nightingale dies after having sung, how often a storm flattens our rose-bushes, and how the other day an oak much taller than me was felled…but I don’t change, my voice is resounding, my cheeks are colored, my eyes shine, and I remain handsome, because I’m the son of a fay.”
“That’s true,” said Caliban. “I’m from Le Mans.”
“What is Le Mans?” asked Abel.
“It’s a place where there are a lot of people and authorities; it’s a city.”
“A city like those in our tales, with princes, mandarins and princesses?”
“And fattened pullets,” added Caliban—but when he tried to explain what a fattened pullet was,5 he could not do it; it seemed that he would never be able to explain what influence a fattened pullet might exert on the conduct of a man.”
The Last Fay Page 3