The Engineer Von Satanas

by Albert Robida

  “O Muses!” said the patriarch of Ferney, at the end of La Princesse de Babylone, “prevent reckless continuers from spoiling with their fables the verities of which I have informed mortals in this true story, as they have dared to falsify Candide, L’Ingénu and the chaste adventures of the chaste Jeanne.”

  In fact, we have had no more respect for the great Voltaire than he had for the powers and the ideas of his century. We have been obliged to recount an event that took Candide by surprise in 1914, and report at length a conversation that he had at that time with various individuals.

  Voltaire’s desire was poorly heeded. Three operas and a pantomime have been made of La Princesse de Babylone! Marmontel and a few other malefactors of his species have based comedies on L’Ingénu! As for Candide, barely two years after it was printed, it was falsified by the publication of a “second part,” a literary hoax attributed to a certain Thorel de Campigneulles, a former guardsman and treasurer of France of the generality of Lyon.19 The latest imitation of Candide, due to an excellent writer of our epoch, Abel Hermant, dates from this year.20 And that will not be the last, if we can judge by our own attempt; others will follow.

  Between those extreme there are so many sequels, imitation, refutations of Candide and works inspired by him that it is impossible to count them. They range from philosophical dissertation to comic opera!21 Their study would be fine material for a doctoral thesis. Sub-Lieutenant Vaissette, former pupil of the École Normale Supérieure and the Institut Thiers, was about to devote himself to that work when he was killed, in the course of the Great War at the dawn of the victory.22

  It seems to us that all the imitators of Candide, our predecessors, are culpable; what interest was there in showing us the lover of Mademoiselle Cunégonde in Demark or the two Indies,23 when M. de Voltaire had taken him, between Eldorado and Constantinople, everywhere that he thought necessary and sufficient?

  We alone find grace in our own eyes! That is not merely an indulgent weakness on the part of the author; it is because our time has been so fertile in accidents, which have surpassed anything that Voltaire imagined, and of which it appeared indispensable to us to see the traces that they have left, all the way to the inoffensive Ottoman farmhouse of the naïve Westphalian.

  The French Revolution has passed, along with the European upheavals of the eighteenth century, those of the nineteenth and even those of the twentieth, which is seeing the revolution of young Turkey, a sad parody of ours, but no one has thought to tell us whether Candide was informed of those cataclysms. We would, however, not be sorry to know what the pupil of Pangloss and Martin—the brainchild, to say all, of Monsieur de Voltaire—thought of Robespierre, Talleyrand, the Emperor, and even Prince von Bismarck and Monsieur Thiers.

  It has been given to us to know the reflections that current events have suggested not only to Candide but also to various other individuals as celebrated as him. Those events surpass in horror and range all previous events. That is why we thought it our duty to consign the following conversation to print.

  Monsieur de Voltaire, the sovereign of French prose, will pardon us for our awkwardness, by reason of our good intention and our good will. Nor will Anatole France, his heir and our master, think that we are in the wrong.24

  I. In Candide’s Garden

  Candide was living alone in his little farmhouse.

  It was on the shores of the Sea of Marmora, not far from the Bosphorus, a few leagues from Brousse, which hides its white houses, its fountains, its minarets and its terraces beneath climbing roses and the shade of mulberry-trees. He had lived there happily since he had been able to discover the virtues of work, inner peace, and the joys of the heart and the mind; since he had decided no longer to ask of life what it is not capable of giving us, and his skepticism prevented him from seeking the best of all possible worlds; since he had found an infinity of beautiful adventures in the cultivation of his vegetables, the equilibrium of his thoughts and the love of Cunégonde, his wife, whose beauty was for him an illusion voluntarily conserved, and who cooked him delicate dishes and excellent pastries.

  The Old Woman had died first, then faithful Cacambo, who went to town to sell the aubergines, the pistachios and the lemons that they harvested. Pangloss and Martin had followed them, converted to Candide’s mildness, the one without regret for not having taught at Leipzig or some Westphalian university, the other estimating that existence, although not being the greatest benefit there is, was at least bearable. A little later, Cunégonde had joined them under the mounds of a lawn irrigated by a spring and shaded by high blue cypresses.

  Candide could only console himself for all those losses by going to dream on the graves in the depths of his orchard, while surrounding himself, in accordance with the custom of Muslim countries, with several young and beautiful maidservants and cultivating his enclosure better than ever.

  He told himself that twenty centuries before, beyond the waves into which he saw the sun sink every evening, further away than Lemnos, Skyros and the Cyclades, on the other shore of the Archipelago, a man had possessed, like him, a modest garden. He had gathered a few friends there, and the divine Epicurus had expounded his doctrine; by virtue of the charm of his mind, the vigor of his thought and the grace of the Hellenic Muses, the meek Athenian’s doctrine was what the adventures of his life had caused Candide to adopt. Thus, the charming philosopher of genius, like the naïve and simple man, encountered happiness, one by divine inspiration and the other by human experience, in a small garden.25

  In his turn, on a warm Oriental evening, Candide went to sleep in the peace of the tomb. His companions perfumed his body and buried him next to his friends, under a cedar, at the foot of a myrtle bush and under a carpet of asphodels. But the next day, by the first rays of the sun coming over the orange groves and the village mosque, they saw Candide, smiling and rejuvenated, contemplating his red tomatoes and his golden grapes. As they had learned, from the wisdom of Islam, to resign themselves to not being able to understand, they were not astonished, and life pursued its course.

  That was because Candide was immortal.

  II. Candide Encounters a Philosopher

  The most beautiful months of summer were manifesting their glory, and the heat would have been difficult to bear but for the neighborhood of the waves of the Propontide26 and the springs that sang at the feet of the laurels, the bamboos and the plant-trees.

  Toward the evening of one magnificent day the wind rose; it blew from Europe violently, stripping the leaves from the melons, causing the peaches and nectarines to fall like hail, and scything through the aubergine plot. A yellow and livid sun announced rain.

  Anxiously, Candide went through the olive grove to the end of his field, which sloped toward the stream of a valley. That area was planted with vines; it was a matter of checking the condition of the grape harvest; at that time of year abundant rain risked drowning it.

  As Candide’s gaze alternated between the menacing sky and the already-heavy grape-clusters, he perceived a strange individual coming toward him. The other was clad in a long robe, in the manner of the muezzins and muftis—or, rather, of Syrians and Persians. When the person came closer, Candide discovered that he was a priest. For a moment, he was afraid, dreading that it might be a Jesuit.

  He had often heard laudatory mention of the work of the Jesuits in Asia Minor, but he retained a bad memory of them because if his adventures in Paraguay and those of his brother-in-law, the Baron de Thunder-ten-Tronckh, he feared that his tranquility might be troubled. For a long time, he had only known the worries caused by droughts or, as this evening, sudden tempests.

  He reassured himself, however; a fine collar under a worn and modest robe showed him that he was dealing with some good priest who had strayed in this direction. The other possessed, in spite of his open soutane, which lacked buttons and was secured by several pieces of string, a great air of dignity; the benevolence legible in his eyes was indescribable.

  The abbé lifte
d his soutane with one hand, allowing a glimpse of his thick white woolen stockings, panting because of the temperature and the corpulence of a jovial and complacent midriff. He advanced over the labored ground with difficulty, between the vines.

  “Don’t disturb yourself!” he called to Candide as soon as he could make himself heard. “Excuse me, but the wind is fierce and the rain is already starting to fall. I thought of asking you for shelter for a little while.”

  “Be welcome, Monsieur l’Abbé,” said Candide, “And come into to the house with me.

  “Also, Monsieur,” the abbé went on, “I’m very pleased to meet you. I’ve wanted to see you for a long time, and even though you’re the son in spirit of that rogue of genius Arouet, we have a thousand ideas in common. I’m a priest, and a submissive son of our holy mother the Church, but also of Saint Thomas Aquinas, Saint Augustine, the meek Saint Francis of Assisi, and above all of the Gospel—so I am, therefore, very glad to meet you, Monsieur Candide.”

  “You’re very honest,” the latter replied.

  “My name is Jérôme Coignard,” said the abbé.

  “Monsieur l’Abbé Coignard!” exclaimed Candide. Is it really you I see? Weren’t you assassinated more than a century ago by an accursed Jew on the road to Lyon? Is it really you that I see, Monsieur Coignard, and will my roof, which sheltered Pangloss and Martin, the wisest of men, and shelters your servant, the moist philosophical of all, have the honor of sheltering the eloquent and savant theologian who possessed as much scorn for his fellows as forbearance in their regard, who was truly humane in his actions—his poor human actions—but who tried, by means of his discourse and his thoughts, to raise himself up as far as the divinity and show himself to be truly divine, in imitation of Plato? Are you not dead, Monsieur l’Abbé Coignard? Is it really you that I’ve met in the midst of these grapes whose juice is so dear; is it really you that I see?”

  “I’ve certainly been killed,” replied Monsieur Coignard, “and I died in a Christian fashion—but to tell the truth, like you, I received immortality, and you see me confused by it. In consequence, here we both are, meeting in your orchard.”

  In fact, Abbé Jérôme Coignard had not had to wait long for the blissful resurrection. While his body reposed in a Burgundian cemetery, on a hillside, in the midst of the grapes that produced the best vintages in the world, his soul had presented itself at the threshold of Paradise. Saint Peter had not made any difficulty about admitting him, for he was irreproachable in his doctrine, his repentance and his confidence in the grace of God. There had been no hesitation at the divine tribunal; his morals and his conduct, often reprehensible, were those of all mortals, the brother in misery of whom he had not failed to be, by virtue of his sins; but his faith and his good will had distinguished him among them all. And as he had written: “Blessed are the merciful, for they shall obtain mercy,” and as the Master had said: “Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth,” it had been given to him to see his body, like those of Lazarus and the daughter of Jairus, resuscitated from death.

  Since then, having forgotten Zozime the Panopolitan and all the follies of Spagyric philosophy, Abbé Coignard had lived in Benedictine abbeys, most often on Monte Cassino, and sometimes also in a certain convent in the Orient, sunlit and cool, and filled with precious manuscripts. At this precise moment he was undertaking a studious retreat there, and it was while walking in the country that he had strayed as far as the farmhouse that had been indicated to him by the local people as Candide’s. He still read, with a rejuvenated passion, Dr. Boethius, who flourished, as scholarly as a doctor of the Sorbonne, in the dusk of Latinity; St. John Chrysostom, who led his troubled existence in all the countries of Asia and Turkey, whose eloquence perfumed like honey the supreme moments of Hellenism; and, above all, Cicero, to whom no orator had ever got close, who was the finest artisan of the manipulation of the most beautiful language ever forged by humans, who manifested so much grandeur and so many weaknesses, but who loved justice enough to die for it.

  The reading of those cherished writers only furnished Abbé Coignard with a distraction, but he also worked on writing his history of the great revolutions that have agitated peoples. The idea of it had come to him in Rome. It was from there that he had witnessed the French Revolution, which had not astonished him. In fact, he had expected it, and seen it coming. In the Eternal City, moreover, he had encountered Abbé Capmartin de Chaupy, who had just discovered the country house that Horace possessed in the Sabine, and who had written three octavo volumes about that discovery.27 That excellent archeologist also expected the Revolution, and had told Abbé Coignard, for he had noticed that it was predicted in Horace, and he had shown him the passages that had clearly announced it.

  At any rate, the sequence of events that went from the Constituent Assembly to the Consulate struck the indulgent philosopher so forcefully that he had set about relating them. He wanted to find their origins. That was what had caused him to undertake his famous work on tempests, De tempestatibus, that word being taken in an allegorical and moral sense, signifying the storms that disrupt the course of the human chronicle. The principal ones seemed to be the ending of the Roman Republic by Marius and Octavius, the invasion of the German barbarians, the Renaissance and the Lutheran and Calvinist heresies.

  From those past events, considered in their development, their relationships and their ends, related without wishing to put them at the service of the quarrels of the present time, but with the sole concern of philosophy and truth, one could doubtless extract some information regarding their consequences, which would form the unfathomable future.

  It was thus that Jérôme Coignard penetrated Candide’s farmhouse.

  III. The Storm

  It was raining.

  Winds were blowing from the four corners of the horizon, seemingly converging precisely on the farmhouse. The downpour stripped the yellow and crimson roses of summer that decorated the flower-beds and scaled the walls of the house. Fruits that were still green fell from the orange trees. Clumps of reeds were flattened like ripe wheat over which the scythe has passed. The Alep pines resounded with the rattle of their needles.

  “The earth and the heavens have gone mad!” said Candide. The instinct of property, menaced by the heavens, awoke in him.

  “We need a good log fire,” said Abbé Coignard.

  Vine-branches were already burning in the fireplace; they illuminated the faience walls, which were decorated with the precepts of the Koran, the Bible and various philosophers. The abbé dried his big shoes.

  “It’s insane, insane,” Candide repeated. “In the middle of summer, in the heart of the Orient...”

  “Think what it must be like in Westphalia,” said the Abbé, to console him.

  But that did not console Candide, who was thinking about his lost harvests. Standing at the window, he watched the rain and hail fall.

  “Here come some more strangers,” he said. “I’ll go open the door for them.”

  Abbé Coignard stood up in order to present his civilities. Candide opened the door. Immediately, three unfortunate individuals, streaming with water, hurtled into the room. They were in a lamentable state, filthy and bewildered. Rain was dripping from their clothes, their hair and their noses. On the mosaic around their feet a little lake formed. Under the layer of mud that covered them, neither their faces nor their garments could be distinguished.

  “We had taken refuge under the great cedar in the grounds,” said one of them, “but it has just been struck by lightning.”

  “Malediction!” exclaimed Candide.

  “You weren’t hurt?” asked the abbé, charitably.

  His interlocutor was as round and jovial as he was. “Bah!” he replied, laughing. “It’s just one more adventure after a hundred others.” Then, remembering that he had not yet introduced himself, he said, with British stiffness: “My name is Pickwick.”

  He dipped his head, in order to offer the abbé a reverential bow, his si
lk hat in his hand, and his gold-rimmed spectacles slid down his nose. His white twill culottes squeezed his buttocks to bursting point, and two trickles of water ran down the tails of his blue frock-coat.

  “I’ll introduce you to my traveling companion,” he said. “You’ll know the name: it’s His Grace the ingenious hidalgo Don Quixote de la Mancha.”

  “Don Quixote! Mr. Pickwick!” exclaimed Candide and the abbé, in astonishment, with one voice.

  Don Quixote bowed, breaking his tall silhouette in two. He was, in fact, wearing his strange armor, covered in damp earth: leggings, thigh-pads, tassets, breastplate, shoulder-pads and armbands, all more corroded by rust than ever; but he was bare-headed, for the morion that ornamented his head, as you will remembered, was made of cardboard, and it had dissolved in the rain. The green ribbons that had attached the morion to his high collar were dangled with wisps of his hair and the whole fell down over his eyes and his big hooked nose. In spite of that, Don Quixote conserved a certain Castilian nobility.

  “Are we in a castle,” the knight errant asked, “like those presented by my imagination, or in a hostelry, like those into which reality made me penetrate?”

  “You’re in my farmhouse,” Candide told him, “and you’re welcome here.”

  “We had decided,” Mr. Pickwick exclaimed, “in order to complete our adventures, to make a tour of the world together, but to do it without making any fuss, for experience has served us. Fundamentally, we resemble one another, and are almost the same person, full of idealism and faith, as nearly identical as a paladin from the luminous banks of the Tagus and a free citizen of the foggy banks of the Thames can be.”

  “You’ll be mistaken for Sancho Panza,” Candid remarked, naively.

  “He’s dead, and so is his donkey,” replied Mr. Pickwick, good-humoredly.

  “And also Rosinante,” added Don Quixote.