“I believed, therefore, in the irresistible strength of a people defending their land and their liberty; such was, for me, the education of our revolutionary victories, and the sad lesson of 1813. Since then, the miracle of the Marne has confirmed that doctrine. That’s why I departed for the regiment full of good will; after a week, I was thinking of deserting!
“I didn’t leave the barracks for a month; that privilege is forbidden to recruits, who don’t know how to wear their trench-coat, their kepi and their bayonet in a military fashion. I was stifling, as in prison. I was excited the day when, designated for a work detail, I went into the town and saw the housewives in the streets, and men dressed other than in smocks and denims. In the canteen I saw myself in a mirror: shaven-headed, I had a face like a bandit and the expression of a man condemned to death. I was no longer anything but serial number 777.
“The sergeant was scornful of me because I swept the room poorly. Not a soul with whom to talk. Around me, men simple to the point of imbecility, rendered even more stupid by their reclusion and the labors of their new existence. One did not see the officers at all, in a manner of speaking. While I waxed the floors of corridors with potatoes, while I made the iron staircases of the building shone with fuel-oil, I was unable to understand that it was for the salvation of the fatherland.
“We were sent to pick up the droppings behind the horses and mules, with our hands, in order to train us. The stables were, however, ornamented with spades and forks, provided by the government of the Republic, but which we were forbidden to touch, which always drove my reason to despair. My corporal, who hated me, ordered me to all the worst chores. Life was untenable.
“The period of brutalization was followed by the period of revolt; in brief, I decided to escape from my company, and to get away without any fuss. And I don’t know what impotence to react, what habituation to servitude, what absorption my individuality by the immensity, what weakness of my will and my thought it was that prevented me from deserting.”
“You had courage,” said the abbé.
“I resigned myself to it,” said Vaissette. “That’s the great secret, in barracks in peacetime and in armies in wartime. I resigned myself; without trying to understand, I became ingenious, from then on, in avoiding punishments by means of a thousand ruses. In order to have my equipment complete, I stole the brushes, assembly screws, underpants and cravats from my comrades that they had stolen from me. I lived in fear of responsibilities and terror of my superiors, so the regiment, with its façade of rectitude, honesty and deep-seated courage, appeared to me as a school of deceit, theft and cowardice.”
“I don’t believe,” said the abbé, “that I’ve ever heard it tried so violently. You’re a dangerous friend for the army.”
“Afterwards,” Vaissette continued, “I realized that those conditions originated from permanent equivocation; I was in the army in a time of peace, and the army, designed for war, only manifests its virtues in wartime. I also realized the grandeur of that submission, that acceptance of servitude. An unfortunate event always comes along to oppose a pretty pleasure, advancement or permission that ne thinks one has the right to expect; it’s necessary to accept it. That’s the school of renunciation; I followed it. Soon, having become a corporal in my turn, I experienced the sentiment of being useful to the fatherland in supervising the tidiness of my barrack-room and the instruction of my platoon. The fatherland lives on the obscure effort of all the corporals and brigadiers; without them, Miltiades and Hannibal would not have won any victories—and without their victories, what would the Hellenic or Punic fatherlands have been?”
“Athens has only survived,” said Abbé Coignard, “because of the artists who wrote Antigone and constructed the Propylea, while Carthage owed its renown to its navigators and merchants who founded trading posts all over the Mediterranean, and even the coasts of the glaucous Ocean. The military leaders did nothing for their people except acquire a certain dubious glory and occasionally to bloody them by leading their sons toward triumph or disaster.”
“You know as well as I do,” replied Vaissette, “that it’s behind the shield of the breasts of soldiers that artists can make eternal works surge forth from their pens or chisels and merchants can accumulate gold behind their counters. If Miltiades had been defeated at Marathon, the Acropolis would have remained a hill covered, not with marble temples but, with thyme, rosemary and wild flowers, like Hymetta. When Hannibal was defeated by Scipio, it spelt the imminent end of the rich city of African merchants.
“That’s why I incline before the necessity of constructing barracks, as well, alas, as hospitals and prisons, and before the obligation of maintaining armies. Otherwise, within a century, our nation would know enslavement, and soon, the language of Racine and Voltaire would no longer be anything but the delight of a few scholars, as the forgotten language of Homer and Plato is presently your joy, Monsieur l’Abbé, and mine to some extent too.”
VII. Doctor Faust Confesses his Anguish
“Like all of you,” declared Doctor Faust, “I felt an immense love for humanity; that is, I believe, the feature in which we all resemble one another. I leave you to imagine the bruising left in my heart by the war, which is a crime against justice and the sweetness of the world, and my sadness is augmented by that fact that I represent to some extent, in the realm of Letters, the people who bear the responsibility for the crime.”
Faust spoke slowly, lost in his metaphysical reveries, and genuinely dolorous. He inspired the pity of the circle of philosophers that surrounded him. He was wearing a long black robe, over which his white beard hung down. He was as stiff as Don Quixote, and no one would have recognized in him the famous lover of Marguerite. Chagrin had eaten him away. Alone among his companions he looked like a centenarian, and one might have wondered whether he was truly immortal. What a difference there was between that old man, disappointed in all his dreams, deceived in all his efforts, and the handsome knight, rejuvenated by the beverage that the witch had given him, departing for the conquest of the universe!
Faust went on: “I loved human beings; that is why, escaping from my books and science, which were sterile, I wanted to plunge myself into life, in order to attain fecund realities. I sought justice; I sought the truth!”
“I haven’t always understood your actions,” said Don Quixote. “So many things, in your singular existence, remained obscure for me. But my Spanish province of La Mancha is so distant from the banks of the Rhine! That distance explains many of the differences between our minds. You too have surely not grasped the meaning of my worst follies. At any rate, you have been a true friend of humanity.”
“We have each loved it in our own fashion,” Faust replied, “and in accordance with our own temperament. In your fashion there is more nobility, panache and light; there is more realism, obstinacy and good humor in Mr. Pickwick, more inimitable grace, elegance and Christian bounty in Abbé Coignard. I confess that mine, veiled by northern mists, remain obscure and forbidding. It has often seemed to me that the truth resided in the restlessness of a mind tormented by metaphysics; I have confused the profundity of an idea with its obscurity, and I have sometimes attempted to attain that verity in darkness!” He went on: “Abbé Coignard and I scarcely have the same philosophy or the same theology...”
“Undoubtedly!” exclaimed Abbé Coignard, sharply. “But believe nonetheless in all my esteem and admiration. As regards theology, we have, I proclaim, nothing in common; only our good faith unites us. For I’m a Catholic and, in the final analysis, all the arguments of reason, which is as dear to me as it is to Monsieur Descartes, yielded abruptly before faith and dogma; I incline before the Credo quia absurdum that Saint Augustine never actually proclaimed.29 You, Monsieur, a heretic as much as Luther, an atheist at times, have no rule, no doctrine, no rampart.
“In your restlessness you have gone so far as to seek the truth in alchemy, devoting yourself to the quest for the philosopher’s stone. Take note that all
that is of a nature to interest me, for I once knew a half-mad alchemist, who didn’t find the philosopher’s stone either, nor the means of fabricating true diamonds, nor the truth. You were reading Paracelsus, Basilius Valentis and the Opus mago-cabbalisticum et theosophicum in the days when, in the Astaracian library, surrounded by the manuscripts of Synesius and Olympiodorus, I was translating that of Zozine the Panopolitan. But while my curiosity once asked magic and the cabala for mental diversion, yours demanded the truth from them. You didn’t find it, and that’s what led you to make your pact with the Devil. That’s one sin that I haven’t committed.”
“The pact that I signed with Mephistopheles,” said Dr. Faust, proves what a thirst for the ideal, the absolute and the infinite I carried within me. All the means in my power having been exhausted, Satan offered me satisfaction. Oh, how I summarized within myself, at that moment, the anguish of humankind! I had cursed everything that I had seen to be empty: our miserable science, the illusions of our dreams, wealth, the juice of the vine, the kisses of women, hope, faith and patience.”
“Patience and resignation are the first glimmers that lead toward the truth,” said Vaissette.
“And so I arrived,” said Faust, “at crying to Mephistopheles: ‘Show me a fruit that does not fall before it is ripe, and trees that become verdant again every day!’30 It was then that we concluded our bargain. Satan had to take me among human beings. My enlarged heart knew all joys and all dolors. I descended into all abysses, I went up to all summits, I confused my existence with that of the human race. On the other hand, if, in that voyage, I finally encountered the absolute for which I was searching; if I said to the fugitive moment: ‘Suspend your flight!’ the Demon has the victory and could carry me away.
“I was victorious, alas! I never demanded, alas, that the passing moment should pause. Even in the arms of Marguerite, alas, I realized that my joys were incomplete: desire rendered me unhappy, for I wanted sensuality; sensuality rendered me sad, because I regretted desire. I never sated my soul, alas. I never extinguished my thirst for infinity, alas. A sad victory, was my victory over Mephistopheles, a poor triumph, that of humanity. But where are the wellsprings that cannot dry up…?”
“They’re in my little garden,” said Candide, simply.
Dr. Faust was absorbed in his meditation. The philosophers imitated him, and each them reviewed his life. But Achilles found the time long.
Faust went on: “You can imagine my anguish in the presence of this tempest. Did humankind not find itself sufficiently unhappy, then? What is the folly of the Sabbat that I witnessed in the Hartz Mountains, what is the delirium of Walpurgis Night, the fête of all the witches and the demons, compared with the unleashing of this storm?
“I once saluted war with joy; I felt that it was necessary, then, to the march of human progress; that was when the French Revolution broke out. And with Goethe, I quivered with hope on the eve of Valmy. I hoped that that last errors of the Middle Ages, over which the Renaissance hadn’t triumphed, would go down in the torment; I anticipated the rising of the sun. And Wagner, whose great silhouette looms up beside Goethe’s, proclaimed in the Twilight of the Gods and in Parsifal the decadence of the old divinities of Germany, the collapse of their Valhalla, the defeat of Odin, the Valkyries, the giants and the Aesir, the somber cults of the North, before the evangelical light that rose from Judea, bring with it the sweetness of better days...
“Everything is to begin again! It isn’t my voice, nor that of Goethe, Wagner and Kant, that has spread through our harsh valleys of Thuringia and the sad, gray, flat plains of Pomerania and Brandenburg. It’s not our speech that resounded in the pulpits of our studious universities. In the course of the eternal struggle between darkness and the light, all the forces of darkness were concentrated in pensive Germany. The students, who lost themselves in the fog of their pipes and their metaphysical conceptions; the burgers, who came together to empty barrels of beer and sing choruses; the housewives, who made children and cakes unrelentingly, have been touched by a wind of dementia. Mephistopheles has taken his revenge on me; he has triumphed, in the guise of Hegel and Bismarck!”
“But he’s fighting in the guise of Emperor Wilhelm II,” said Don Quixote.
“Germany,” said Faust, “requires a new Jena.”
“The misfortune,” remarked Vaissette, “is that the innocent are paying for the guilty.”
“That’s life,” affirmed the abbé, gently.
“And there are no more citrus trees or roses in my garden,” added Candide.
VIII. Patriotism and the Fear of the Gendarme
“Monsieur l’Abbé,” asked Vaissette, “How do you explain that France, the France of Valmy and Verdun, manifested so little patriotism in 1870?”
“I don’t understand your question, my friend,” replied Jérôme Coignard. “Defeat doesn’t prove that the defeated were less ardent in their patriotism than the victors.”
“That’s something I won’t dispute with you,” the young philosopher replied. “It would take us too far. I believe, on the contrary, that victory is not to the side that is able to suffer for a quarter of an hour more, as a Japanese general once said, but to the one that has desired it with the most implacable will and the most stubborn patriotism. But let’s pass on. I meant that in 1870, a magnificent generation of men between eighteen and forty years of age, lamented the misfortunes of France without taking up arms.”
“Conscription only existed in Prussia,” the abbé said. “In France, we only possessed a professional army.”
“But how is it,” Vaissette persisted, “that our intellectuals and our peasants, who rushed to the defense of the fatherland in 1914, allowed it to be amputated forty-four years earlier without involving themselves to the last man? I don’t say it about me, who, who wasn’t born, or about you, who had been dead more than a century, but patriotism has strange fits and starts.”
“Undoubtedly,” said the abbé, “my descendants and your forefathers sensed the futility of all resistance. They would only have added tombs to tombs. Their struggle and death would have been vain.”
“It’s never vain to fight and die for justice!” declared Don Quixote, who had heard the last words.
“Yes, but what is justice?” asked the abbé, whose skepticism was universal and cheerful. “You know very well that it varies from one side of the Pyrenees to the other. Were the causes of France and justice identical in 1870?”
Vaissette intervened, and, as always, spoke from his heart and in all conscience. “I would have adopted your general doubt before the war,” he said, “but in the course of that long servitude, I learned to possess a few certainties. I’ll grant you that justice is uncertain and troubled, but one ought to give oneself to it, when one believes that one has discovered it for oneself. In any case—I’ll get back to the subject—our parents did not lose themselves in that confusion. The fatherland was about to succumb; they should all have enrolled; duty is simple.”
“Their sacrifice would not have served France,” replied Abbé Jérôme Coignard. “It was preferable to wait until later.” Looking at Vaissette over his spectacles he added: “They reserved that proof and that glory for your generation.”
“Of course,” murmured Vaissette. “It’s always easier, whatever people say, to sacrifice one’s son rather than oneself.” He added: “Of course, I’m not talking about mothers and lovers, who are also, in every fashion, the sacrificed. I’m talking about men. Abraham and Agamemnon didn’t make a lot of fuss about it. We’re giving our fathers a rude lesson in patriotism.”
Abbé Coignard, perhaps surpassing his own thought but glad to launch a quip, declared: “Doubtless patriotism, like honesty, is merely fear of the gendarme.”
“What do you mean?” Vaissette asked.
“Let me tell you my theory, said the abbé. He installed himself comfortably in his wickerwork armchair, drank a sugared lemonade, and declared by way of an aside: “I prefer the modest white wine of the
Lord’s vines,” and went on:
“Although the law and its apparatus are, by virtue of their iniquity, one of the shames of society, although the laws and the magistrates are equally frightful, that is because the law is man-made, and only the naïve Jean-Jacques and dreamers of his species have ever doubted he extremity of human wickedness. However, I deem those laws necessary, however lame, and those magistrates too, however rotten; without them, thefts, crimes and rapes would be far too numerous, given the malignity of human nature. Without the fear of the gendarme, there would be no one in the world but scoundrels.
“Now, it is that same fear of the constabulary that makes patriots. The law, in 1870, did not establish general conscription; the mass of the citizenry was not engaged. In 1914, the citizens obeyed the mobilization under penalty of being arrested as deserters. But those who had surpassed forty-six years of age, and who could have departed nevertheless, did not depart, and were estimated nevertheless to be good Frenchmen.
“I’ll give you an example. I know a serious man, who has taken as a profession—like you, Vaissette—the teaching of philosophy. You’ll admit to me that his presence in the interior is not indispensable to the existence of the nation. He has no son; the war does not afflict him either in his fortune, or in his person, or in his children. He’s forty-seven years old and as strong as a Turk. Few men in the trenches are as robust as he is. He is content to make patriotic dissertations to his daughters and, in Autumn, to go rabbit-hunting, which is more demanding physically than hunting Prussians. One year fewer, and he would have to go. He has not gone; Pandore31 does not oblige him to!
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