The Countess von Rudolstadt

by George Sand

  “Now, my children,” said Albert Podiebrad to the villagers, “we have prayed; there is work to be done. Off to the fields with you. As for me, I’m off to the forest, along with my family, in search of inspiration and life.”

  “You’ll be back come evening?” shouted all the peasants.

  The Zingara made an affectionate gesture that they took as a promise. The two little girls, understanding nothing about the course of time or the vicissitudes of travel, shouted “Yes! Yes!” with infantile joy, and the peasants went their ways. Old Zdenko sat down on the cottage doorsill after having made sure in a fatherly way that the family’s lunch was tucked away in his godson’s game-bag. Then the Zingara motioned that we should follow, and we left the village on the heels of our itinerant musicians. We had to go up the far side of the ravine. The master and I each took one of the little girls into our arms, which gave us a chance to approach Trismegistus who hadn’t yet seemed to notice that we were there.

  “You see that I’m musing a bit,” he told me. “It pains me to deceive the friends that we’re leaving, also the old man whom I love. Tomorrow he’ll go searching for us over every path in the forest. But Consuelo wanted it this way,” he added, pointing to his wife. “She thinks it dangerous for us to stay here any longer. For my part, I can’t believe that we arouse anyone’s fear or envy at this point. Who would understand our happiness? But she says that we bring the same dangers down on the heads of our friends, and even though I don’t see how, I yield to that consideration. Besides, her will has always been my will, just as mine has always been hers. We won’t return to the hamlet this evening. If you are our friends as you seem to be, you’ll go back there after dark, once you’ve had a long enough walk, and you’ll explain this to them. We didn’t bid them farewell so as not to grieve them, but you’ll tell them that we’ll be back. As for Zdenko, you need only say tomorrow, he doesn’t see any further ahead than that. Every day, the whole span of life, that’s his tomorrow. He’s stripped away the error of human notions. His eyes are open to eternity, and he’s ready to let himself be absorbed into its mystery so as to partake of life’s youth there. Zdenko is a wise man, the wisest I’ve ever known.”

  Trismegistus’ ramblings had a noteworthy effect on his wife and children. Far from feeling embarrassed in front of us, far from suffering for themselves, they heeded every word with respect, and it seemed that they found in his oracles the strength to rise above this present life and themselves. I believe that this noble adolescent eagerly poring over each one of his father’s thoughts would have been astonished and incensed if he’d been told that these were the thoughts of a madman. Trismegistus rarely spoke, and we noticed as well that neither his wife nor his children ever prompted him to do so unless absolutely necessary. They had a religious respect for the mystery of his reverie, and even though the Zingara kept her eyes on him at every moment, she certainly seemed rather more worried about his being importuned than about the dreary isolation in which he found himself. She had studied his bizarrerie, and I use this word so as no longer to pronounce the word “madness” that I find even more repugnant with regard to such a man, a state of soul so respectable and moving. Seeing this Trismegistus, I understood the veneration that the peasants, great theologians, and great metaphysicians without their knowing it, and the peoples of the East feel for men deprived of what is called the torch of reason. They know that when one does not trouble this abstraction of the mind by vain exertion and cruel mockery, it can become an exceptional faculty of the most poetically divine sort, instead of turning to furor or stupidity. I don’t know what would happen to Trismegistus if his family didn’t act like a rampart of love and fidelity between him and the world. But if he were in this case to succumb to his delirium, that would be yet more proof of what respect and solicitude are due to invalids of his sort, and to all invalids, whoever they may be.

  This family walked with an easy, nimble gait that had soon exhausted our strength. If the little children hadn’t been carried to prevent them from getting tired, they would have devoured space. They feel born to walk, so it seems, as do fish to swim. The Zingara doesn’t want her son picking up the little girls, even though he would certainly like to, until he is fully grown and his voice has gone through that crisis that singers call the molt. She hoists up onto her robust shoulders these lithe, confident creatures and carries them as lightly as her guitar. Physical strength is one of the benefits of this nomadic life that becomes a passion for impoverished artists, for beggars and naturalists as well.

  We were worn out by the time we had trudged over the most rugged trails to a wild, romantic place called Schreckenstein. As we were drawing near, we noticed Consuelo looking at her husband more attentively and walking closer beside him as though she were fearing some danger or painful emotion. Yet nothing troubled the artist’s placidity. He sat down on a great rock dominating an arid slope. There is something frightening about the spot. There are heaps of boulders all over the place, and they are continually shattering trees as they come crashing down. The trees that have endured all have exposed roots, and by these knotty limbs they seem to hang on to the rock that they threaten to drag off. A deathly silence reigns over this chaos. Shepherds and woodcutters keep away out of terror, and wild boars plough up the earth. Tracks of wolves and mountain goats litter the ground as though wild animals were sure of finding shelter from men there. Albert dreamed a long while on that rock, then he looked back at his children playing at his feet and his wife standing in front of him, trying to read what was going on inside his head. All of a sudden he stood up, knelt down before her, and beckoning to his children, uttered with profound feeling, “Bow down before your mother, for she is the consolation that heaven sends to those in distress; she is the peace of the Lord promised to men of good will!”

  The children knelt down around the Zingara and wept, covering her with caresses. She too wept, clasping them to her breast, then making them turn back around, she had them render the same homage to their father. Spartacus and I bowed down along with them.

  After the Zingara had spoken, the master transferred his homage to Trismegistus and seized the moment to exhort him with eloquence, to ask him for enlightenment while telling him everything that he had studied, everything that he had meditated and suffered in preparation for it. I, on the other hand, remained as though enchanted at the Zingara’s feet. I don’t know if I dare tell you what was happening inside me. This woman could no doubt be my mother; well, there is still some undefinable charm emanating from her. Despite my respect for her husband, despite the terror that washed over me at the mere idea of forgetting that respect, I felt my entire soul spring impulsively toward her with an enthusiasm that neither the radiance of youth nor the prestige of luxury have ever inspired in me. Oh, let me meet a woman just like this Zingara and devote my life to her! But I do not cherish the hope, and now that I won’t ever see her again, there is deep in my heart a sort of despair, as though it had been revealed to me that there is no other woman for me to love on this earth.

  The Zingara did not even see me. She was listening to Spartacus, she was struck by his ardent, sincere language. Trismegistus too was moved by it. He clasped his hand and made Spartacus sit down next to him on the rock of Schreckenstein.

  “Young man,” he said to him, “you’ve just reawakened in me all the memories of my life. I thought I was hearing myself talking at the age you are now, when I was ardently asking men ripe with years and experience to teach me virtue. I had decided not to say anything to you. I was wary, not of your intelligence or honesty, but of your heart’s naïveté and fire. I didn’t feel capable, moreover, of transcribing back into the language that I once spoke the thoughts that I’ve since grown used to manifesting through the poetry of art, through feeling. Your faith has won, it has worked a miracle, and I feel I must speak to you. Yes,” he added after studying him in silence for a moment that seemed to us a century, for we were trembling at the sight of this inspiration escaping from h
im, “Yes, now I recognize you! I remember you, I’ve seen you, loved you, and toiled with you in some other phase of my earlier life. Your name was great among men, but I don’t remember it; I just remember your gaze, your words, and that soul from which mine parted only with effort. Now I read the future better than the past, and the coming centuries often appear to me as glistening with light as the days that I have yet to live in today’s form. Well, I’m telling you this, you’ll be great once again in this century, and you’ll do great things. You’ll be rebuked, accused, slandered, hated, condemned, persecuted, exiled. . . . But your idea will survive you in other forms, and you’ll stir things up here and now with a formidable plan, immense notions that the world won’t forget and which may smite the last blows to social and religious despotism. Yes, you’re right to seek to act in society. You’re obeying your destiny, that is to say your inspiration. This is enlightening me. What I felt listening to you, what you were able to communicate to me about your hopes is great proof of the reality of your mission. So go forth, act and work. Heaven has made you an organizer of destruction. Destroy and dissolve, that is your mission. It takes faith to bring down as it does to raise up. As for me, I had chosen to stand back from the paths down which you are rushing, as I had judged them to be evil. They were no doubt only accidentally so. If true servants of the cause feel called to give them another try, that means that they’ve become practicable once again. I thought that there was nothing more to be hoped for from official society and that one couldn’t reform it while remaining part of it. I made myself an outsider, and despairing of ever seeing salvation descending to the people from the heights of that corruption, I’ve been devoting the last years of my strength to direct action on the people. I’ve turned to the poor, the weak, the oppressed, and I’ve preached to them through art and poetry, which they understand because of their love for them. It may be that I was too wary of the good instincts that still vibrate in men of knowledge and power. I haven’t had any dealings with them since I got fed up with their skepticism as well as their even more unholy superstition and went off in disgust to seek out the simplehearted. They’ve probably had to change, to amend their ways and learn. What am I saying? Certainly this world has marched on, refined itself and grown in the last fifteen years; for every human thing ceaselessly gravitates to the light, and everything joins together, good and evil, to spring toward the divine ideal. You want to speak to the world of scholars, patricians, and rich men; you want to level things by persuasion; you want to seduce, even kings, princes, and prelates, with the charms of truth. You feel seething in you that confidence and strength that surmount all obstacles and rejuvenate everything old and worn. Obey, obey the breath of the spirit! carry on and expand our work; gather up our weapons scattered over the battlefield where we met defeat.”

  Then there began between Spartacus and the divine old man a conversation that I’ll never forget my whole life long, for there happened a marvelous thing. This Rudolstadt, who at first had wanted to speak to us only through music, like Orpheus in ancient times, this artist who was telling us that he had long ago abandoned logic and pure reason for pure feeling, this man whom vile judges have called insane and who has accepted passing as such, this man, making a sublime effort out of charity and divine love, all of a sudden became the most reasonable of philosophers, to the point of guiding us along the path of the true method and of certainty. Spartacus, for his part, revealed all the ardor of his soul. One was the complete man, in whom all the faculties were in unison; the other was like a neophyte full of enthusiasm. I was reminded of the Gospel, where it is said that Jesus spoke on the mountain with Moses and the Prophets.

  “Yes,” said Spartacus, “I feel that I have a mission. I’ve approached those who rule the earth, and I was struck by their stupidity, ignorance, and hardness of heart. Oh, how beautiful Life is, and Nature, and Humanity! But what do they care about Life, Nature, and Humanity? . . . And I wept a long while seeing that I as well as all mankind, who are my brothers, and the whole of God’s creation, we are all slaves to such wretched men! . . . And when I had moaned a long while like a feeble woman, I said to myself, ‘Who is stopping me from tearing off their chains and living free?’ . . . But after a phase of solitary stoicism I saw that being free alone is not being free. Man cannot live alone. Man is man’s object; he cannot live without his necessary object. And I said to myself, ‘I’m still a slave, let’s deliver my brothers. . . .” And I found noble hearts that joined together with me . . . and my friends call me Spartacus.”

  “I had indeed told you that you would do nothing but destroy!” replied the old man. “Spartacus was a rebellious slave. But once again, never mind. Organize in order to destroy. May your voice call forth a secret society to destroy the current form of the great iniquity. But if you want it strong, efficient, powerful, put all the living, eternal principles that you can into that society destined to destroy so that it may first destroy (because in order to destroy, it must live and be, all life is positive) and then, out of the work of destruction, allow the rebirth of those things that must be reborn.”

  “I hear you; you’re putting considerable limits on my mission. Never mind. Small or great, I’ll take it.”

  “All that is according to God’s counsel is great. Know one thing which must be the rule of your soul. Nothing is ever lost. Even if your name and the form of your works were to disappear, even if you were to work namelessly as I do, your work would not be lost. The divine scales are mathematics itself, and in the crucible of the divine chemist, every atom is reckoned according to its exact value.”

  “Since you approve of my designs, teach me, open the way to me. What is to be done? How is one to act upon men? Is imagination the main way to reach them? Is it necessary to take advantage of their weakness and penchant for the supernatural? You yourself have seen that one can do good with the supernatural!”

  “Yes, but I’ve also seen all the evil that can be done. If you knew the doctrine well, you’d know in which age of humanity we’re living and you’d choose your means of action accordingly.”

  “So teach me the doctrine, teach me the method of action, teach me certainty.”

  “You’re asking an artist for method and certainty, a man who’s been accused of insanity and persecuted on this pretext! It seems that you’re talking to the wrong person; go ask that of philosophers and scholars.”

  “You’re the one I’m talking to. As for them, I know what their knowledge is worth.”

  “Well then, since you insist, I’ll tell you that the method is identical to the doctrine itself, because it is identical to the supreme truth revealed in the doctrine. And, when you give it some thought, you’ll understand that it cannot be otherwise. So everything comes down to knowledge of the doctrine.”

  Spartacus reflected, and after a moment of silence he said, “I’d like to hear out of your mouth the supreme formula of the doctrine.”

  “You’ll hear it, not out of my mouth but out of that of Pythagoras, who is himself the echo of all wisdom: O DIVINE TETRAD! This is the formula. This is the formula that, through all sorts of images, symbols, and emblems, Humanity has proclaimed by the voice of the great religions when it hasn’t succeeded in grasping it in a purely spiritual way, without incarnation, without idolatry, such as it has been given to the revealers to reveal to themselves.”

  “Speak, speak. And in order to make yourself understood, remind me of a few of those emblems. Afterward you’ll take the austere language of the absolute.”

  “I can’t separate, as you would wish, these two things, religion in itself, in its essence, and manifested religion. It is part of human nature, in these times, to see the two together. We judge the past, and, without living in it, we find there the confirmation of our ideas. But I’m going to explain what I mean. Now then, let’s first speak of God. Does the formula apply to God, to the infinite essence? It would be a crime were it not to apply to the one from whom it proceeds. Have you thought about the na
ture of God? No doubt; for I feel that you carry Heaven, the true Heaven, in your heart. Well, what is God?”

  “God is the Being, the Absolute Being. Sum qui sum, says the great book, the Bible.”

  “Yes, but don’t we know anything more about his nature? Hasn’t God revealed something more to Humanity?”

  “The Christians say that God is three persons in one, the Father, the Son, the Spirit.”

  “And the traditions of the ancient secret societies that you’ve consulted, what do they say?”

  “They say the same thing.”

  “Haven’t you been struck by that correspondence? The official, triumphant religion as well as the secret, proscribed religion agree on the nature of God. I could talk to you about the cults that preceded Christianity, and you’d find, hidden in their theology, the same truth. India, Egypt, Greece knew the one God in three persons; but we’ll return to this point. What I now want to make you understand is the formula in its whole extension, in all its aspects, in order to arrive at what interests you, the method, the organization, the politics. I’ll continue. From God, let’s go on to man. What is man?”

  “After one difficult question, you ask me another that is scarcely less difficult. The oracle at Delphi declared that all knowledge consisted in the answer to this question: Man, know thyself.”

  “And the oracle was right. A good understanding of human nature is the source of all wisdom, all ethics, all organization, all true politics as well. So let me repeat my question to you. What is man?”

  “Man is an emanation of God. . . .”

  “No doubt, like all living beings, since God alone is the Being, the Absolute Being. But you aren’t, I hope, like the philosophers that I saw in England, France, and Germany as well, at the court of Frederick. You aren’t like this Locke, the subject of so much talk these days on account of Voltaire, his popularizer; you aren’t like Helvetius, with whom I often conversed, nor La Mettrie whose materialist audacity so delighted the court in Berlin. You don’t say, as they do, that there is nothing particular that distinguishes man from animals, trees, and rocks. God, no doubt, gives life to all nature, as he gives life to man, but there is order in his theodicy. There are distinctions in his thought, and consequently in his works, which are his thoughts fulfilled. Read the great book called Genesis, this book that the common man rightfully considers sacred without understanding it; you’ll see there that it is through divine light establishing distinctions among beings that there is eternal creation: fiat lux, et facta est lux. There you’ll also see that each being having a name in the mind of God is a species: creavit cuncta juxta genus suum et secundem speciem suam. So what is the particular formula of man?”