“But who is this young man-at-arms traveling with you?” asked Abbé Coignard. “To judge by the salad covering his head, he’s some squire of Seigneur Don Quixote.”
“No,” declared Mr. Pickwick. “We encountered him under the cedar, where he had taken refuge, like us. He’s a French traveler, who told us that he’s come to this region to distract himself, and in order to visit the tomb of Achilles and Candide’s orchard.”
He went to fetch the stranger, who was modestly distancing himself from such important people and poking the fire.
The rain continued to rage.
Mr. Pickwick introduced him: “Monsieur le sous-lieutenant Vaissette, bachelor of philosophy.” He added: “We’ve been chatting together about archeology, morality and military art. He’s a true scholar!”
“He’s a true soldier!” declared Don Quixote, soberly. And he smiled at Vaissette, who was embarrassed by these introductions, with a warm fraternal bounty.
“Excuse me, Monsieur, said Abbé Coignard, “but that salad ornamenting your head led me to believe that you were some sixteenth-century adventurer.”
“I’m a humble professor,” replied Vaissette, “Who teaches sleepy youngsters in a southern lycée, boring them with the theories that you rendered so limpid and charming to your disciples; but if your grace is lacking, Monsieur l’Abbé, still it has nourished my mind—and if I wear this salad, it’s because I was, before being killed in an attack, one of the soldiers of the Armies of the Republic. You’re doubtless not unaware that war has burst out between France, Prussia and a few other nations.”
“We’re not unaware of it,” said Candide, who did not care about that, only being concerned with the storm over his garden.
Meanwhile, the tempest was increasing. Thunder broke window-panes; gusts of wind penetrated the room. Smoke, chased from the fireplace by the wind, blinded them. Swirls of water invaded the pathways in the grounds. The branches of trees and bushes were borne away by waves. The sea could be heard roaring.
“I know what it is,” said Candide. “It’s an earthquake. I’ve seen one before, in Lisbon.”
“Well, you didn’t die of it,” said the abbé, philosophically.
“No,” Candide replied, “but I was so amply spanked on that occasion that I still remember it, and that was when I doubted the perfection of the world for the first time.” Then he cried: “Mercy! Now the water’s rising. We’re going to be inundated, and doubtless engulfed.”
Abbé Coignard wanted to take account of the progress of the inundation. The door was threatening to give way. He went to the threshold.
“Seigneur!” he shouted. “There are two unfortunates at the bottom of the perron, enduring the tempest stoically...”
But the others paid no attention. Egotistically, they were warming themselves around the hearth.
“They’re mad, they’re mad!” the abbé went on. “They’re not trying to come in. God knows, though, they’re soaked! It’s as if the rain were going to strip them naked. Strange people…one is half-naked, with a spear and a big helmet surmounted by a big crest; one might think that he had come down from the fronton of some Hellenic temple. The other is wearing a black robe and square bonnet, like some physician or advocate. I assure you that they’re mad!”
The abbé opened the door abruptly. “Come in, Messieurs!” he shouted.
The man in the robe approached. “Is this not,” he asked, in an embarrassed fashion, “the farmhouse of Candide, Westphalian gentleman become French by the will of Monsieur Voltaire? Are you not Abbé Jérôme Coignard? Have we not already seen Mr. Pickwick, Don Quixote and Monsieur Vaissette come in here?”
“Indeed,” said the abbé. “But come in quickly—you’re going to freeze to death and I’ll catch a chill.”
The cleric withdrew swiftly and returned at a run to his companion. He seemed frightened.
“Come in, then!” shouted the abbé.
“Come in!” howled Candide “And shut the door!”
“It’s just…,” shouted the wretched individual.
“What?” said the abbé.
“I’m a Boche,” he confessed.
“I’m Greek,” added the other.
“Ah!” said he abbé, perplexed. He was about to close the door, but then said: “God forgive you. Come in anyway.”
The poor fellows did not make him ask again. They irrupted into the room.
“I’m Achilles, son of Thetis and Peleus,” said the Greek.
“And I’m Dr. Faust,” declared the German.
IV. Why the Tempest is Growling
“Make yourselves comfortable, Messieurs,” said the abbé, in such an amiable voice that everyone felt at ease.
Candide had courageously reconciled himself to the ruination of his farm. His calm and good humor were coming back. At his invitation, they went into another room; pine-logs were burning in the fireplace; mimosas and palms were flourishing in amphoras; a slight odor of myrrh perfumed the air; thick rugs from Smyrna and Persia covered the floor; divans offered their softness to the travelers; on the low tables, incrusted with nacre and gold there were boxes of snuff, cigarettes and narghilas; a negro was pouring an excellent fuming mocha into cups.
“This will make mock of the tempest,” said Candide.
At a sign from him a tall fellow dressed in white, beardless and wrinkled like a old woman, introduced young women, the sight of whom was an enchantment.
“They’re my maidservants,” the master of the house explained.
Everyone kept his reflections to himself, although Jérôme Coignard said: “I can see why you’re not bored.”
Each of the maidservants attacked one of the strangers; they had soon rid them of their wet clothes and helped them put on beautiful silk garments. It was necessary to see how graceful Monsieur Coignard was in a little pink jacket, Mr. Pickwick in a yellow turban and Don Quixote in ample green culottes!
“Here we are,” said the abbé, “dressed like pachas or mamamouchis!”
The forgot about the storm; while drinking the hot coffee they ate little pink pastries, jam, pistachios, roasted almonds, cherries and candied violets.
“Have you noticed, Messieurs,” said the abbé, “that there are seven of us: Candide, Don Quixote, Mr. Pickwick, Achilles, Dr. Faust, Monsieur Vaissette and me?”
“We could form a club and elect a president,” proposed the gallant Englishman.
“Seven,” the abbé went on, “like the sages of Greece. But while the names of the latter have been forgotten, so completely that no one could name them for me without consulting a dictionary, it seems to me that our names remain in human memory; we’re a little like the adornment of each people, and whatever our origin might be, we’re reconciled in the eternal domain of Letters!”
“We’re of countries and all times,” affirmed Dr. Faust delightedly, having not said a word thus far.
A more violent thunderclap made the Sages jump. Candide began to sing:
It’s raining, shepherdess!
Bring in your white sheep...
“I seem to have heard that song before,” said the abbé. “It was, if I’m not mistaken, shortly after 1789. It was addressed to Queen Marie Antoinette, who had played the shepherdess in the Petit Trianon.”
“And she paid no heed to the rain,” said Vaissette. “This storm is even more terrible, though—but we don’t realize it.”
“Do you think it is more terrible?” Candide asked.
“It seemed so to me in Europe,” Vaissette affirmed.
“Shall we ever see again,” said the abbé, “the Conventional poet who wrote that song, Fabre d’Églantine, of the spring-like name? Shall we see proud Danton, cold Robespierre, ferocious Marat, the incorruptible and accursed Saint-Just, who haunted dreams of patriotism, fraternity and blood? Shall we see Brunswick, Pitt and Coburg? Shall we see Kellermannn, Hoche, Kléber, Narceau and the brown locks of young Bonaparte?”
“I scarcely bother with politics,” said Vaissette. “I only know th
at the great men of these times are named Lloyd George, Monsieur Briand and Marshal Hindenburg.”
“Right!” agreed Don Quixote.
Now the lightning flashes are becoming so numerous that their eyes are fatigued; the cyclone is threatening to knock the house down, the hail is falling like an avalanche, scything down branches; the torrents are carrying trees away and hurling them like battering rams against the farmhouse.
Everyone feels anxious.
Now the din increases and the walls shake. This unchaining of the earth, the sea and the sky seems to be coming from the shores of the Hellespont and the Dardanelles.
“Ah!” cried Vaissette suddenly. “I understand the cause of the tempest!”
“Well?” interrogates Candide.
“Can you hear that noise?” asks the sub-lieutenant.
“Yes,” say the philosophers, in unison.
“That noise,” Vaissette declares, “is cannon fire!”
V. War
“War—who would have believed it?” said Candide, overwhelmed. “The sound of cannon horrifies me. I haven’t heard it since the great battle that set the King of France at odds with the King of Prussia—the battle that marked the beginning of my catastrophic adventures.”
The noise reminded Don Quixote of Lepanto, Monsieur Coignard of the worst days of the Terror. Vaissette was obliged to explain the events that he had witnessed, of which Candide and the abbé were completely unaware, and were only partly known to Mr. Pickwick and Don Quixote, and of which Achilles and Dr. Faust were ashamed. The sub-lieutenant told them about the overturning of the Old World, the fury of a tempest that unfurled all the way from the ancient ports of China to the young American shores, all the races running from the four points of the horizon to slaughter one another on the poor soil of France, the crisis that was the most tragic in human history, the pity that was the saddest in the annals of humankind.
The seven philosophers were invaded by amazement and dolor. Night fell, The rain was falling steadily now.
“Let’s stay here together,” Candide proposed, “if you find my modest hospitality sufficient. Let’s stay here for a few days, until the sun affirms its sovereign authority again.”
“We won’t have any lack of curious conversation,” the abbé remarked. “We’ll be able to rise above the facts, into the domain of general ideas.” He added: “War is the greatest crime that a sovereign can accomplish, and the greatest stupidity that a republic can commit.”
“It’s a long misery,” Vaissette affirmed, “even when it’s a duty—which is to say, when the maternal earth imposes on our love, in order for us to defend her sacred frontiers, the future of generations to come, and her ideal inherited from the series of centuries past.”
“It’s a crisis of madness of our poor humanity,” said Dr. Faust. “A bloody phase in its quest for happiness.”
Achilles had no idea that war was such a complicated affair; in his estimation it was another hunting party, perhaps more dangerous, but certainly more glorious, and just as simple.
Candide remarked: “If everyone were content to cultivate his farmland...”
“It would be necessary,” remarked Mr. Pickwick, pragmatically, “to defend his crops against brigands and pirates. I have no desire to sow in order for a thief to harvest my field. Here, my interest and my British dignity are at stake.”
Don Quixote concluded: “Dignity did you say, my dear Pickwick? Duty, declares Monsieur Vaissette, ensign of the French infantry. Personally, I say honor. The three words have the same meaning. It’s for honor that I undertook the exploits of my chivalry—and that high ideal has conserved no more dazzling symbol than my charge against the windmills!”
VI. Barracks and Armies
“Crime, stupidity or madness—I can’t get away from that,” insisted the good Abbé Coignard.
“I can see,” Vaissette replied to him, “that antimilitarism is going to become fashionable. It will no longer be elegant, after the war, to prevail upon its great deeds. The French have a false modesty regarding its virtues; they aren’t like the Greeks, who love to sing its glory; Achilles and I don’t resemble one another much. People will deny us, and we’ll deny ourselves.”
Don Quixote said, gravely: “That bitter word has been reported to me. As a mutilated man was passing by, a woman said: ‘There goes one of our glorious wounded.’ ‘Yes Madame,’ the invalid replied, with a resigned smile, ‘glorious wounded today, but mere cripple tomorrow.’ Was that man right, even in the moral domain? Three centuries ago, I recall that pamphleteers mocked my friend Cervantes because he only had one arm. He’d lost his hand in an attack on a Turkish galley.”
“That’s why we ought to react now,” the philosophical officer, “if it’s true that the souls of the dead create the spiritual atmosphere of the world.”
The Knight of La Mancha pronounced, nobly: “The most terrible thing of all is that your generation has died in the flower of its youth solely to assure Europe of more equitable frontiers. It’s also necessary to hope that people will draw some education from the drama, so that such an atrocious war will not be entirely futile in their life and in their consciousness.”
That was, alas, doubted by Monsieur Coignard, whose scorn for humankind equaled that of the cynics, in spite of the charity that his Christianity put into his heart. He declared, in all candor: “I can’t perceive the good that a earthquake, or any cataclysm of that sort, does—but on the other hand, I can see the ruins it causes.”
“What relationship is there between an earthquake and what we’re talking about?” said Achilles.
“For the few noble souls that war exalts,” said Dr. Faust, “and whose virtue it causes to shine, for the thousands of humble and passive individuals that it awakens to the consciousness of duty and sacrifice, what a bleak lesson in violence, ugliness and crime it will have given, I don’t only say to the future, but to the past! Will the world emerge better from this ordeal? I dare not reply.”
“Perhaps, all the same, thanks to the suffering,” the abbé conceded.
“It doesn’t matter!” said Don Quixote, violently. “The light of a few souls will have been projected in broad daylight. What does it matter if they shine over a worse century? The just have always been few in number, in the time of the Galilean as in ours—what does that prove against justice?”
“Let’s hope,” said Vaissette, “that pity won’t be forgotten so soon. When it becomes fashionable in society to laugh at it or treat it as folly, it will be necessary for some people to conserve its dolorous pride!”
“I fear that turn of your mind,” said Monsieur Coignard. “A patriot quickly becomes a chauvinist. You love your motherland, and the sacrifices she imposes; that’s fine—but you approve as certainly of war, and you tolerate barracks; that’s less praiseworthy.”
Thus, the abbé gave proof of an irrefutable logic, and a philosophical audacity that he pushed to its limits. But Vaissette had a sufficiently subtle intelligence to grant seemingly contradictory postulates, in order to show that he was not guilty of any misjudgment in being simultaneously patriotic and an enemy of war, and being, at the same time, desirous of safeguarding the military spirit and contemptuous of barracks.”
“Do you like, Monsieur l’Abbé,” he asked, “plague, tuberculosis and cholera?”
“God forbid!” replied the abbé. “I remember, in that regard...”
Vaissette did not let him continue. “I don’t like war any more than you do,” he said. “I observe that it exists, like all those maladies, that’s all. You’ll grant me that it’s as old as humankind and that it’s natural to it, by virtue of its extreme malignity.”
“I’ll even grant you,” the abbé said, “that it will last as long as humankind, which will always be as wicked.” Looking into himself and divining, beyond the sadness of our times, the dawn of new days, he added: “It’s true that, while remaining wicked, it would suffice for humankind, in order not to fight any longer, to be a little l
ess stupid...”
He had not realized that he had expressed that thought aloud, that it was only a meditation; nevertheless, it was heard and welcomed by a murmur of approval.
Vaissette went on: “I don’t think much of physicians, who are often charlatans, and whose science is almost as uncertain as in the era of Doctors Tant-Pis and Diafoirus.28 Physicians are like you, Monsieur l’Abbé; they worship a god in whom they don’t believe.”
“I don’t want to get into a theological discussion here,” said Monsieur Coignard, “but know that I’m irreproachable with regard to doctrine and faith.”
“Well,” said Vaissette, “Skeptical or credulous, whether they’re ignorant or deceitful, and however impotent they are, I judge them useful to humankind, so long as the plague and the other miseries I mentioned exist. Similarly, as long as there are people who are pillagers, uncivilized, friends of vice, rapine and brigandage, forgetful of sworn oaths and scornful of the weak, as long as wars are susceptible of breaking out, like other epidemics, I’ll remain a partisan of barracks and armies, because I don’t know of any better means to defend ourselves. I know their defects, however, as well as you do.”
The abbé countered: “A doctor in theology and professor of eloquence, secretary by turns of a kind Huguenot gentleman, an archbishop and an opera dancer, on occasion an actor, a lackey, a popular writer, I’ve tried many métiers and experienced many vicissitudes, but, less naïve than Candide, I’ve never enlisted. I’ve never been a soldier.”
“I have,” said Vaissette, “and I’m speaking from experience. I even departed for my garrison town with the best intentions, for, a socialist and already an antimilitarist, I believed nonetheless in the necessity of arming the entire nation. It was the armed nation, ill-equipped and in clogs, that defeated Brunswick’s troops at Valmy, whose soldiers knew the mysteries of the goose-step even then. It was the armed nation that triumphed, by a strange turnabout, over Napoléon in 1813; the German burgers, more accustomed to drinking their beer and smoking their pipes than wielding weapons, stood up against the Emperor’s professional armies as our heroes of the year II had risen up against the military professionals of the King of Prussia and the Emperor of Austria; clad in the same sky-blue frock-coats that they wore on Sundays to go to the temple, in the villages of Saxony, or to church in the Bavarian towns, they triumphed over Napoléon’s soldiers.
The Engineer Von Satanas Page 23