“I’ll quote to you,” said Abbé Coignard, “a passage from your friend Monsieur de Voltaire, who concluded as you did. He wrote it in his first philosophical letter on the English and it’s a Quaker who is speaking, ‘We never go to war, said the Quaker. It’s not that we fear death…but it’s because we’re neither wolves, nor tigers, nor dogs, but human beings and Christians. Our God, who has ordered us to love our enemies and suffer without a murmur, undoubtedly doesn’t want us to go to sea in order to murder our brethren because murderers dressed in red with bonnets two feet high enroll citizens by making a noise which two sticks in a stretched donkey-skin; and when, after battles are won, all London is lit up by illuminations, the sky ablaze with rockets, and their air resounds with the noise of hymns, bells, organs and cannons, we mourn in silence the murders that cause that public delight…!’”
Abbé Coignard thought, in his tender and equitable heart, that he shared the opinion of that heretic Quaker, and terminated by saying: “Jesus said: Diligite inimicos vestros.”36
“It seems to me,” said one voice, “that someone has just directly incriminated by an allusion the attitude in this war of the United Kingdom and the government of His Britannic Majesty.” It was Mr. Pickwick, who had just got to his feet.
But the abbé did not take the trouble of proving to him that it was nothing of the sort, that letter being nearly two centuries anterior to the intervention of Great Britain in the conflict of 1914.
A silence having marked a pause, the abbé declared: “I shall conclude and summarize the depths of my thought. He coughed, wiped the lenses of his spectacles, and went on:
“I shall repeat to you what I once declare to my disciple Jacques Tournebroche, who has reported in two modest volumes my modest instructions—or, rather, my opinions: ‘I will not hide it from you, my son,’ I said to him, ‘that military service appears to me to be the most frightful plague of civilized nations. It is admirable that war and hunting, of which the mere thought ought to overwhelm us with shame and remorse in recalling the wretched necessities of our nature and inveterate wickedness, can, on the contrary, serve to make people proud, that Christian peoples continue to honor the métier of butchers and executioners when it runs in families, and that, finally, one measures in the most polite peoples the illustriousness of citizens by the quantity of murders and carnage that they carry, so to speak, in their veins...’”37
Candide interrupted. Memory was his principal quality, as with all serious minds.
“You’re quoting, Monsieur. I shall cite in my turn, on the same subject of service and military nobility, the philosopher Martin. I’ve remembered his speech word for word, as Tournebroche remembered yours. ‘Everywhere,’ he said to me, ‘the powerful treat the weak as flocks, whose wool and flesh one sells. A million regimented murderers, running from one end of Europe to the others, carry out murder and brigandage with discipline to earn their daily bread, because they have no métier more honest.’38
“What is more,” Candide continued, “you remind me in discussion of my dear philosopher Martin, so strongly that I could believe that I could believe that you were one and the same person if I did not know that your existences are completely different, and if I did not see every day the myrtle bush under which his body reposes. What astonishes me, however, is that our conclusions are identical and similarly opposed to the optimism of Dr. Pangloss, who almost caused me to believe, in spite of my disgraces, that everything is always for the best. It is therefore right to say that extremes connect, for Martin was a Heresiarch, something of a Socinian and considerably Manichean, while you, Monsieur l’Abbé, an excellent Catholic, a priest whose orthodoxy is stainless, and who condemn all heresies, those of Lelio Socin39 and Mani along with the Jansenists or those dangerous Huguenots.”
“Now we’re in the heart of theology!” declared the abbé, delightedly. “But it’s dangerous terrain; let’s stick to that of war and peace.”
“Let it pass,” said Don Quixote, “for I too have always been a something of a theologian, knowing Latin like a the possessor of a baccalaureate and making speeches like a graduate—so much so that Sancho Panza often said to me that I resembled a churchman as one egg resembles another, and that I was more suited to being a preacher than a knight errant. Once, in the course of my adventures, I pronounced a great speech, before a select assembly, on Letters and Arms. Cedant armae togae,40 Cicero said. I rose up against that stupid maxim; I affirmed the preeminence of arms, uniquely because they serve to maintain peace. I was thus a pacifist in the time of my madness. Imagine what I am now! And, quoting in my turn, I’ll cite you a fragment of my speech. ‘The end and goal of Letters is to encourage the observation of good laws. That end is assuredly great and generous, and worthy of praise, but not as much as that of Arms, the end and objective of which is peace—which is to say, the greatest good that humans can desire in this life. The best greeting, the greatest master of the earth and Heaven informed his beloved disciples was to say when they went into someone’s house: may peace be with you. And on many other occasions he said to them: I am giving you my peace, I am leaving you my peace, let my peace by with you, as the most precious gift that such a hand can give and leave. Now, that peace is the veritable end of war, and war in the same thing as arms.’41 You see, Monsieur l’Abbé, that I too am a pacifist theologian.”
And the abbé, by way of conclusion, murmured a verse from Ecclesiastes: Melior est sapientia quam arma bellica.”42
The night was advancing, however, and they were already anticipating the dawn. Immortals have no need of sleep. The storm was beginning to calm down.
“It will be necessary to resume our journey,” said Mr. Pickwick to Don Quixote.
Why not stay here?” said Candide, hospitably. “Travel is only good for youth. For us, it’s no more than a vanity.
“Don’t you know, then, Monsieur Candide,” asked the Abbé, “the letter in which the philosopher Seneca explains to Lucilius that voyages have never cured the trouble that one carries in one’s heart? And don’t you know this passage from the Imitation:43 ‘What can you see elsewhere that you cannot see where you are? You have before you the heavens, the earth and the elements; are not all the things of the world composed of them?’”
“We need have no hesitation,” said Vaissette, “in employing erudition and citations. Citation is very agreeable, for one often finds ready forged, to express one’s thought, formulae more adept than those one could invent at hazard in the course of conversation. Besides which, the authority one is quoting adds to the verity of the remark. That is why, joining my supplications to those of Candide and the Abbé, and in order not to be behindhand in knowledge, I will give you in my turn, Mr. Pickwick, a word from Pascal. Imagine the solitary, wandering among the arbors of Port-Royal, giving this advice to the impetuous poet Racine: ‘All the unhappiness of men,’ he wrote in his Pensées, ‘comes from just one thing, which is not being able to remain at rest in a room.’”
XI. The Philosophers Announce a New Order
Meanwhile, the storm seemed to be diminishing and the rain was diminishing in its intensity over the garden; in the very bosom of the deluge, there was a presentiment of the return of the sun.
Two young women came into the room where the philosophers were sitting. They had come from Constantinople and were carrying various newspapers. The storm had been raging for several years, but the Immortals were not conscious of time and had no suspicion of that.
Candide asked the messengers for a few explanations. They were rude and not very obliging. They were employed to deliver the post for lack of men, who had all been requisitioned to fight the storm. For that reason, all the harems in Turkey had been depopulated of brown Arab women and white Circassians.
“It’s noticeable,” declared the abbé, “in the slightest details that the grace and beauty of the world have perished in the torment.”
They started leafing through the papers.
“They’re stupid,” V
aissette assured them, “but people read them anyway. The style and intelligence of the poor fellows who practice the métier of journalism doesn’t gain anything from contact with such great events.”
The philosophers, moving from deduction to deduction, understood that the storm was easing because there was no corner of the world left to devastate.
Born in the Balkans on the banks of the blue Danube cherished by waltzers, descending under the pressure of the wind to the wild plains of Germany, the hurricane had been unleashed over the whole of Europe, moving closer and closer to France, her unfortunate orchards of Artois and Picardy, her Champenois vines, the fields of Flanders, the woods of Argonne, all her lands of classic invasion, and then to England, her gray smoky cities, lush countryside and errant steamships...
“The lovely British coasts that Dickens and David Copperfield loved,” said the melancholy Mr. Pickwick, “have been bombarded.”
The storm had devastated fertile Belgium, felled the cypresses of the Italian lakes, ravaged the Balkans, growled over all the fiefs of the Commander of the Faithful, and had lost itself in the infinite Russian steppes. It had blown over Africa, bloodied from north to south, the coral islands of the Oceanian archipelagoes and the flowery cherry-orchards of Japan. It had shaken the walls of old China and its palaces with violet porcelain roofs, astonishing the sage mandarins indignant at its fury. Finally, beyond the oceans, it had fallen upon America the shelter of peace, the refuge of liberty, the land of justice, and its waves had splashed the republics of the New World, breaking against the Rocky Mountains and the Andes.
“There are mothers weeping for their sons in the fabulous modern villas of Australia,” said Abbé Coignard. “They are raising their eyes to the heavens, in which the stars that shine in those latitudes are not those their children are contemplating while dying in our climes. There are lovers weeping for their spouses or fiancés all the way to the Sicilian mountains and valleys of which Theocritus sang...”
“In Baghdad,” Candide read, “the capital of the Caliphs, Baghdad of the palaces ornamented with marble stables, whose minarets protrude from vaults of palm trees, an English military post has been established at the foot off the mausoleum of the sultana Zobeide, the favorite of Haroun-al-Raschid...”
“Are you criticizing those courageous Tommies?” demanded Mr. Pickwick.
“Certainly not,” replied Candide. “I’m even glad to see them camped there. But Baghdad, and I suffer in consequence, will henceforth evoke for us the memory of battles and heroic deeds, when it ought to be the capital of that indolent and perfumed Arabia traversed by caravans of camels, bathed by the Tigris, encumbered by boatmen singing in their rounded gourd-like boats. The Caliphs of the Arabian Nights received ambassadors there in a palace of prodigious splendor; twenty-two thousand carpets hid its floor-tiles, twenty-eight thousand tapestries hide its walls; artificial birds with ingenious mechanisms agitated and sang in aviaries, and lions were heard roaring as they pounced on their guardians...”
“I regret, in fact, that those beautiful things are no longer to be seen,” declared Mr. Pickwick. With one hand graciously placed beneath the tails of his blue coat, rubicund and full of amenity, smiling behind his large spectacles, his midriff inflated by dignity and covered in beautiful gold chains, with his twill trousers sticking to bright gaiters, he spoke, as he had in the golden days of the Pickwick Club.
“Followed by four disciples—or, rather, four good friends—I set forth one fine day in the year 1831, like Don Quixote in 1605, to conquer the world. A conquest as peaceful as could be: a simply a matter of seeing and annotating everything. I scarcely left the environs of London, but that permitted me to form an idea of the world.
“Later, installed in a comfortable cottage surrounded by lawns, served by devoted domestics who looked after my table, beat my carpets and polished my sideboards, I recalled my adventures to mind. What had they not given me to contemplate!
“In the course of those few weeks, I had learned more than during my entire life, spent behind the counter of some ironmongery where I had enriched myself. Unjust courts convicted me when I was innocent; faithful friends crushed me, when, as an unfortunate, I appeared before the judge; Companions surfeited with renown but nevertheless resistant to all avatars; electoral mores to disgust the drafters of all charters and constitutions; debauched puritans, drunken Christians and Pharisean hypocrites; scholarly society as dogmatic as solemn in their science, uncritical and stupid; female poets and German spies—nothing was lacking! So I hesitated to go with Don Quixote when he came to look for me in my house in the country.
“I have seen everything, even maneuvers and small wars, in the course of which cannons thundered, the charges of the red uniforms succeeded one another, a mine blew up, trenches were taken by storm, while the commanding General Budler,44 in his rutilant uniform, galloped, howled, spurred his horse, red-faced and congested, his voice hoarse, agitating like a madman, without any sergeant understanding his orders and without anyone knowing the reason for his delirium. Meanwhile, the spectators vanished, ate sandwiches or acclaimed His Majesty’s army. It’s necessary to admit that that is something else entirely and that there is not much in common between the idea one has of battle and the one we are seeing.”
“Let us hope,” Candide said, “that the experience will be useful to us.”
“Let us hope so,” affirmed Mr. Pickwick. “I shall return to Dulwich, where everything in my garden and my house was beautiful, neat and solid, where order reigned. There is some risk that the storm might have done some damage there, but I shall console myself, being practical by nature; one can’t make a ham omelet without killing a pig and breaking eggs. No one is more pacifist than I am, but that avalanche was required to create a new order of things.”
“That’s the key phrase,” affirmed Vaissette, “and that’s the philosophy of our times.”
“It’s possible,” agreed the abbé. “The clamor of humanity has affirmed, in its dolor, the rights of liberty and justice.”
“Liberty, justice, honor, peace!” proclaimed Don Quixote. “Great words empty of meaning, at which the world has learned to smile, of which it has just discovered, in blood, the virtues. It’s for those words that Vaissette and millions of young men have died: so, will they acquire their complete significance and force of action? I was treated as a madman, and it’s true that my chivalry was a derisory and grotesque folly, but it had a meaning nevertheless; and it was for those great words that I fought against the windmills, that I was showered with blows in the hostelries that seemed to me to be enchanted castles, that I set forced laborers free, that I did penance in the desert of the Sierra Morena, weeping with love for a Dulcinea that I had never seen, that I fought frightful battles with skins of red wine, that I withstood imprisonment in a cage, like an animal—and I don’t regret any of it. I don’t even regret this storm, since it has given reason to law and liberty.”
“I wouldn’t regret anything either,” said Abbé Coignard, “if this new order that you’ve announced were to be established. I’d like to believe so, in spite of my skepticism. Otherwise, it will be too sad. Centuries of strife, Don Quixote, and of suffering, in order to arrive at the greatest dolor of humankind and the greatest crime in history! I’m suffering too much. Too much blood has been shed; its torrent has drowned everything. Religious and civil wars, social wars and all social revolutions are useful; their fecund sadness renders the world a little better, a little freer. But what profit will people obtain from this slaughter? Let me weep.”
“Don’t weep, Monsieur l’Abbé,” said Vaissette. “Intelligence has triumphed in this storm. To die for our cause, for France, was to die in order to leave the generations of the future what you desire: consciousness of great necessary virtues, the progress of humankind, the sweetness of life.”
Vaissette and Abbé Coignard shook hands solemnly.
“Perhaps it’s the end of the insensate paradox, si vis pacem, para bellum,” sa
id Monsieur Coignard. “Shall we have discovered the truth, which is simple, of knowing that if one wants peace, it’s necessary to prepare for peace?”
“I might,” said Don Quixote, “be able to witness the end of militarism, as I witnessed the end of chivalry.”
“Will war have exploded by virtue of becoming too large?” the abbé wondered. “like the frog in the fable that wanted to inflate itself so as to resemble an ox, has it become so overinflated that it has perished of it?”
He added: “Let’s not despair of the future.”
“As Mr. Pickwick said,” Vaissette affirmed, “we’ve witnessed the collapse of a world.”
“Yes, yes, here comes a new order!” repeated the amiable Englishman.
“May the next world,” declared Candide, “in spite of what Pangloss said, be better than this one!”
Everyone fell silent. After a pause, Abbé Coignard murmured: “By the grace of God!”
XII. Future Harvests
Jérôme Coignard left the room and opened the door which gave access, via a perron, to the garden. It was no longer raining. A new day had decided to dawn. It manifested itself confusedly, hesitantly and timidly, and the young azure was stained by bloody streaks. The storm had raged for several years,45 but to our philosophers, those long atrocious months had only lasted for the space of one night, in the enchantment of an ingenious conversation.
“The tempest has eased,” said the abbé.
The philosophers came to surround him.
“What devastation!” murmured Candide.
His park, his vegetable garden, his vines and his orchard were no longer anything but a desert. Not one shrub, not one pathway, not one thicket, not one tree; no more borders, no more grapes. The ripped earth and the leveled plots were arid fallow land, with not so much as a clump of couch-grass, where tall plane trees, and orange and lemon groves had once grown, along with quincunxes of peach-trees and the green stocks of vines, the slim and twisted trunks of almonds and olives, aubergines and melons, myrtles and box-trees, laurels and privet, arbutus and palms heavy with dates, carpets of violets and anemones, trees from which pistachios and vanilla were suspended, the cedars beloved by the turtle-doves, the clumps of bamboo and cypress...
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