The visitors whom they met in these several houses were no less unhappy, disappointed or angry. Sickness, or wounded affection, or money troubles were consuming them. Those who possessed, and feared to lose, were even more unfortunate than those who had nothing. The obscure wished to shine, and the celebrities to shine yet more. The greater number were overwhelmed with work; and those who had nothing to do suffered a boredom more merciless than toil. Many of them pitied and felt the pains of others; they suffered with the sufferings of a wife or a beloved child. Many were declining under an illness from which they were not suffering, but which they believed they had contracted, or feared they might contract. —
A cholera epidemic had just been raging in the capital, and a financier was mentioned who, fearing to be attacked by the contagion, and knowing of no sufficiently safe refuge, committed suicide.
“The worst of it is,” said Quatrefeuilles, “that all these people, not content with the real evils which are pelting them like hailstones, plunge into a bog of imaginary misfortunes.”
“There are no imaginary misfortunes,” answered Saint-Sylvain. “All evils are real as soon as one feels them, and the dream of sorrow is a genuine sorrow.”
“Well,” replied Quatrefeuilles, “when I pass a stone as big as a duck’s egg, I could wish it were only a dream.”
Once more Saint-Sylvain observed that men often plague themselves for opposite and contrary reasons.
In Madame du Colombier’s drawing-room he conversed in succession with two men of great intelligence, enlightened and cultivated, who by the twists and turns which they unconsciously gave to their thoughts, revealed to him the moral evil by which they were deeply attacked. It was from the state of public affairs that both derived the cause of their anxiety, but they derived it in diametrically opposite ways. Monsieur Brome lived in perpetual fear of a change. In the present stability, and in the midst of the peace and prosperity which the country was now enjoying, he dreaded disorders and feared a complete upheaval. He opened the papers with trembling hands: every morning he expected to find in them the news of riots and disturbances. Suffering under this impression, he magnified the most ordinary and insignificant incidents into preludes of revolution and forerunners of cataclysms. Believing himself always on the eve of a universal catastrophe he lived in perpetual terror.
Monsieur Sandrique, on the other hand, was eaten up by a stranger and more uncommon malady. Tranquillity bored him, public order annoyed him; peace was odious to him, and the sublime monotony of human and divine laws overwhelmed him. He called secretly for change, and feigning to fear them, he sighed for catastrophes. This good, kindly, pleasant creature could conceive no other amusement than the violent subversion of his country, of the world, of the universe; watching even the stars for collisions and conflagrations. Disappointed, despondent, melancholy, morose, when the tone of the papers and the aspect of the streets showed him the unchanging peaceableness of the nation, he suffered all the more thereby, because, owing to his knowledge of men and his experience of public business, he knew how firmly entrenched in the peoples are the spirit of conservation and the tradition of imitation and obedience, and how slowly and with how equal a pace the social system progressed.
At Madame du Colombier’s reception Saint-Sylvain noted another contradiction, even greater and more important.
In a corner of the little drawing-room, Monsieur de La Galissoniere, President of the Civil Court, was conversing peacefully, and in a low voice, with Monsieur Larive-du-Mont, administrator of the Zoological Gardens.
“I will confess, my friend,” said Monsieur de La Galissoniere, “that the idea of death is simply killing me. I never stop thinking of it, and am dying of it. Death terrifies me not of itself, for it is nothing, but because of what follows after, the future life. I am a believer; I have faith in the certainty of my immortality. Reason, instinct, science, and revelation all demonstrate the existence of an imperishable soul; all prove to me that the nature, the origin and the ends of man are as they are taught by the Church. I am a Christian, and believe in eternal punishment; and the terrible idea of this punishment incessantly pursues me. I fear hell, and this fear, stronger than any other feeling, destroys my hope and all the virtues necessary to salvation, throws me into despair, and exposes me to the reprobation which I dread. I am damned by the fear of damnation, I am cast into hell by the dread of it, and, still living, I suffer eternal torments in advance. There is no punishment comparable to that which I am enduring, and which becomes acuter from year to year, from day to day, from hour to hour, since every day and every minute brings me nearer to that which I dread. My life is one agony full of fears and horrors.”
As he spoke the magistrate beat the air with his hands, as if to ward off the undying flames by which he felt surrounded.
“My dear friend, I envy you,” sighed Monsieur Larive-du-Mont. “Compared with me, you are a happy man. The idea of death rends me also; but how that idea differs from yours, and how far it surpasses it in horror! I am only too firmly persuaded by my studies and observations, by the continuous practice of comparative anatomy, and by deep research into the constitution of matter, that the words soul, spirit, immortality, spirituality, represent merely physical phenomena, or their negation, and that, for us, the limit of life is also that of consciousness, seeing that death consummates our complete destruction. There is no word to express what follows life, for the term nothingness which we employ is merely a sign of denial before the whole of nature. Nothingness is an infinite nothing, and by this we are enveloped. Thence we came, and thither we shall return; we are like a shell on the sea, between two voids.
“Nothingness is at once the impossible, and the certain: it cannot be conceived, yet it exists. The misery of man, and his crime, look you, lies in having discovered these things. The other animals do not know them: we should have ignored them for ever. To be, and cease to be! The horror of this idea makes my hair stand on end; it never leaves me. For me that which will not be spoils and corrupts that which is: the void swallows me by anticipation. Wicked absurdity! I feel myself, I see myself there.”
“I am more to be pitied than you,” said Monsieur de La Galissoniere. “Every time you pronounce that false and delicious word, nothingness, its sweetness soothes my soul, and promises me, like a sick man’s pillow, sleep and rest.”
But Larive-du-Mont answered:
“My sufferings are more unbearable than yours, for the vulgar support the idea of eternal hell-fire, while an uncommon strength of mind is required to be an atheist. A religious training and a mystical bent of mind have given you the fear and hatred of human life. Not only are you a Christian and a Catholic; you are also a Jansenist, you carry at your side the abyss which Pascal skirted. For my part, I love life, this earthly life, life as it is, this dirty life. I love it, brutal, base, and coarse; I love it, sordid, filthy, and spoiled; I love it, stupid, imbecile, and cruel; I love it in its obscenity, in its ignominy, in its infamy, with all its stains, its stinks, its deformities, its corruptions and its infections. Feeling that it is escaping and eluding me, I tremble like a coward, and become mad with despair.
“On Sundays and holidays I wander through the populous parts of the town, mixing with the crowd in the streets, plunging into the groups of men, women, and children round the street singers, or before the showmen’s booths. I rub up against dirty petticoats and greasy blouses; I inspire the heavy, warm odours of breath and sweat and hair. It seems to me that in this swarming life I feel further from death. I hear a voice saying:
“‘I alone shall cure you of the fear which I inspire; I alone shall give you rest from the weariness with which my threats overwhelm you.’
“But I don’t want it, I don’t want it!”
“Alas!” said the magistrate. “If we do not cure in this world the evils by which our souls are ruined, death will bring us no peace.”
“And what infuriates me,” resumed the scientist, “is that when we are both dead, I shall no
t even have the satisfaction of saying:— ‘You see, La Galissoniere, I was not mistaken; there is nothing.’ I shall not enjoy the pleasure of having been right. And you will never be undeceived. At what a price is thought repaid! You are unhappy, my friend, because your mind is stronger and more capacious than that of the animals, and the majority of men. And I am unhappier than you because I have greater genius.”
Quatrefeuilles, who had caught scraps of this conversation, was not greatly impressed.
“These are mental troubles,” he said. “They may be acute, but they are uncommon. I am more alarmed by the more ordinary woes, sufferings, and deformities of the body, disappointments in love, and lack of money, which make our search so difficult.”
“Besides,” observed Saint-Sylvain, “those two gentlemen are too urgent in forcing their doctrine to make them miserable. If La Galissoniere were to consult a good Jesuit father he would soon be reassured, and Larive-du-Mont ought to know that one can be an atheist, with serenity like Lucretius, or with enjoyment, like Andre Chenier. He should repeat the verse of Homer: ‘Patroclus is dead, who was worth more than you,’ and consent with better grace some day to join his masters, the philosophers of antiguity, the humanists of the Renaissance, the modern scholars, and so many others of greater worth than himself. ‘Paris and Helen are dead,’ said Francois Villon. ‘We are all mortal,’ said Cicero. ‘ We all die,’ said that woman whom wisdom the Holy Scripture praised in the Second Book of Kings.”
CHAPTER IX. THE HAPPINESS OF BEING LOVED
THEY went to dine in the Royal Park, a fashionable promenade, which is in the capital of King Christophe what the Bois de Boulogne is in Paris, the Cambre in Brussels, Hyde Park in London, the Thiergarten in Berlin, the Prater in Vienna, the Prado in Madrid, the Cascine in Florence, and the Pinclo in Rome. Seated in the open air, amidst the brilliant crowd of diners, their eyes wandered over the great hats covered with flowers and feathers, roving canopies of pleasure, moving screens of love, dovecotes to which desire winged its way.
“I believe,” said Quatrefeuilles, “that what we are looking for is here. I have been loved, like every one else: that was Happiness, Saint-Sylvain: and once more I ask myself whether this is not man’s only happiness; and although I carry the weight of a bladder more loaded with stones than a waggon coming out of a quarry, there are days when I feel as full of love as when I was twenty.”
“I,” answered Saint-Sylvain, “am a misogynist. I cannot forgive women for being of the same sex as Madame de Saint-Sylvain. They are all, I know, less foolish, less malignant, and less ugly, but it is too much that they should have something in common with her.”
“Never mind that, Saint-Sylvain. I repeat that what we are looking for is here, and that we have only to stretch out our hands to grasp it.”
Pointing to a handsome man sitting alone at a little table, he said:
“You know Jacques de Navicelle. He pleases women, all women. That is happiness, or I don’t know what is.”
Saint-Sylvain was of opinion that they had better make sure.
They invited Jacques de Navicelle to join their table, and as they dined they chatted with him in a familiar fashion. Twenty times, by circuitous approaches, or sharp turns, by frontal or flank attack, by insinuation, or perfectly frankly, they endeavoured to learn whether he was happy, without being able to learn anything about their companion, whose cultivated conversation and charming features expressed neither joy nor sorrow. Jacques de Navicelle talked freely, showing himself open and natural; he even indulged in confidences, but they concealed his secret, and left him all the more impenetrable. There was no doubt but that he was loved; was he happy or unhappy? By the time the fruit was brought the King’s two inquisitors gave up hope of learning. Fatigued by their campaign, they talked idly, and about themselves; Saint-Sylvain about his wife, and Quatrefeuilles about his stone, in which he resembled Montaigne. They exchanged stories as they drank their liqueurs: the story of Madame Berille, who slipped out of a private room, disguised as a pastrycook’s boy, with a basket on her head; the story of General Debonnaire, and the Baroness de Bildermann; the story of Monsieur Vizire and Madame Ceres, who, like Antony and Cleopatra, squandered an empire in kisses, and many others, old and new. Jacques de Navicelle told a story of the East.
“There was a young merchant of Bagdad, who lying one morning on his bed, felt full of love, and, with loud exclamations, prayed that he might be beloved of all women. A djinn who overheard him appeared to him and said:
“‘Your desire is already accomplished. From this day forth you will be beloved by all women.’” Immediately the young merchant leapt joyfully from his bed, and, promising himself varied and inexhaustible pleasures, went down into the street. He had hardly gone a few steps when a horrible old woman, who was filtering wine in a cellar, blew him kisses through the grating. He averted his head in disgust, but the old woman caught him by the leg, dragged him into the cellar, and there kept him a prisoner for twenty years.”
As Jacques de Navicelle was finishing the story, a waiter came up to tell him that some one was asking for him. He rose, and with dull eye and hanging head strolled off to the gate of the garden, where, sitting back in a coupe, a somewhat forbidding figure was awaiting him.
“He has just been telling us his own story,” said Saint-Sylvain. “The young merchant of Bagdad is himself.”
Quatrefeuilles struck his forehead.
“Some one told me that he was guarded by a dragon. I had forgotten it.”
They returned late to the Palace with no other shirts but their own. They found King Christophe and Madame de la Poule weeping bitterly as they listened to a sonata by Mozart.
Owing to association with the King, Madame de la Poule suffered from melancholia, nursing gloomy ideas and foolish terrors. She believed herself to be persecuted, and the victim of abominable schemes. She lived in perpetual fear of being poisoned, and obliged her maids to taste all her food. She was terrified of death, and the attraction of suicide. The King’s condition was aggravated by that of the lady, with whom he passed melancholy days.
“Painters,” said Christophe V, “are sad artificers of imposture. They lend a touching beauty to weeping women, and show us an Andromache, an Artemis, a Magdalenes, and an Heloise adorned by their tears. I have a portrait of Adrienne Lecouvreur in the role of Cornelia, watering with her tears the ashes of Pompey; she is adorable. Directly Madame de la Poule begins to cry, her face screws up, her nose becomes red, and she is ugly enough to frighten you.”
The unhappy Prince, who was living only in expectation of the health-giving shirt, abused Quatrefeuilles and Saint-Sylvain for their neglect, incapacity, and bad luck, reckoning that, of these three charges, one at least would be just.
“You will let me die, like my doctors, Saumon and Machellier. But that’s their profession. From you I hoped better things; I relied on your devotion and intelligence. I see that I was mistaken. Are you not ashamed to return empty-handed? Was your mission so difficult to fulfil? Is it then so hard to find the shirt of a happy man? If you are not even capable of that, of what use are you? One is never well served unless by oneself. It is true of private individuals, and still truer of kings.
I shall go at once myself and look for this shirt which you cannot find.”
Throwing off his night-cap and dressing-gown, he asked for his clothes.
Quatrefeuilles and Saint-Sylvain endeavoured to restrain him.
“Sire, how rash, in your condition.”
“Sire, it has struck midnight.”
“Do you then think that happy folk go to bed like hens?” asked the King. “Are there no places of amusement in my capital, no night restaurants? My Prefect of Police has closed all the night houses; but are there any the fewer open? However, I shall not need to enter the clubs. I shall find what I want in the streets, and on the benches.”
Barely dressed, Christophe V skipped over Madame de la Poule, who was twisting in convulsions on the floor, dashed dow
n the stairs, and ran across the garden. The dismayed Quatrefeuilles and Saint-Sylvain followed him afar off in silence.
CHAPTER X. WHETHER HAPPINESS CONSISTS IN NO LONGER BEING CONSCIOUS OF ONESELF
REACHING the main road, shaded by old elms, which bordered the Royal Park, he perceived a man, young, of wonderful beauty, who, leaning against a tree, was contemplating with an expression of delight the stars, which traced in the pure sky their sparkling and mysterious signs. His curly locks were shaken by the breeze; In his eyes there shone a reflection of the heavenly brilliance.
“I have found it!” thought the King.
He approached this handsome, smiling young man, who started slightly at the sight of him.
“I must apologize, sir,” said the sovereign, “for disturbing your meditation. But the question which I am about to put to you has, for me, a vital interest. Do not refuse to reply to a man who is perhaps in a position to oblige you, and who will not be ungrateful. Sir, are you happy?”
“I am.”
“Is there nothing lacking to your happiness?”
“Nothing. To be sure, it has not always been so. Like all other men, I have felt the evils of life; perhaps I have felt them more grievously than most. They befell me owing neither to my private condition nor to fortuitous circumstances, but to the essential basis, common to all men, and everything that breathes. I did know a great uneasiness; it has entirely disappeared. I enjoy perfect calm, and sweet cheerfulness: all within me is contentment, serenity, and a deep satisfaction: I am penetrated throughout by a subtle joy. You meet me, sir, at the most beautiful moment of my life, and since fortune has caused me to meet you, I will take you as witness to my happiness.
“At last I am free, exempt from all the fears and terrors by which men are assailed, from the ambitions which eat them up, and the crazy hopes which devour them. I am above Fate: I am escaping from man’s two invincible enemies, Space and Time. I am able to defy Destiny. I possess absolute Happiness, and merge myself in the Divine. This happy condition is my own work: it is due to a resolution I have taken, so wise, good, beautiful, virtuous, and efficacious, that in grasping it one is deified.
Complete Works of Anatole France Page 384