“I swim in joy, I am magnificently intoxicated. With full consciousness, and in the sublime plenitude of its meaning, I pronounce this phrase of all frenzies, raptures, and enthusiasms: ‘I no longer know myself!’”
He pulled out his watch and said:
“The hour is come. Good-bye.”
“One word more, sir. You can save me. I”
“One can only be saved by following my example. You must leave me here. Good-bye!”
And the unknown, with an heroic step and a youthful gait, darted into the wood bordering on the road. Christophe, regardless of his words, followed him. As he was entering the undergrowth he heard a report, stepped forward, brushed aside the branches, and saw the happy young man lying on the grass, his temple pierced by a bullet, still grasping a revolver in his right hand.
The King fainted at the sight. Quatrefeuilles and Saint-Sylvain, hastening up, helped him to recover his senses, and conveyed him to the Palace. Christophe made inquiries about the young man who had found such a desperate happiness under his eyes. He learned that he was the heir of a rich and noble family, as intelligent as he was handsome, and always a favourite of Fortune.
CHAPTER XI. SIGISMOND DUX
ON the following day, Quatrefeuilles and Saint-Sylvain, still in search of the medicinal shirt, as they were walking down the Rue de la Constitution, met the Comtesse de Cecile, coming out of a music shop. They escorted her to her carriage.
“Monsieur de Quatrefeuilles,” she said, “you were not visible yesterday at Professor Quilleboeuf’s clinic; nor you either, Monsieur de Saint-Sylvain. You were wrong not to come; it was very interesting. Professor Quilleboeuf had invited all the fashionable world to his operation at five o’clock, a delightful ovariotomy. It was both crowded and select. There were flowers, smart dresses, and music; ices were served. The Professor exhibited wonderful grace and elegance. He had films taken for the cinematograph.”
This description did not greatly surprise Quatrefeuilles. He knew that Professor Quilleboeuf operated to an accompaniment of luxury and pleasure: he would have asked him for his shirt if a few days previously he had not seen the famous surgeon inconsolable because he had not operated on the two greatest celebrities of the day, the German Emperor, who had just had a cyst removed by Professor Hilmacher, and the dwarf at the Folies-Bergeres, who, having swallowed a hundred nails, objected to having her stomach opened, and treated herself with castor oil.
Saint-Sylvain stopping in front of the music shop, contemplated the bust of Sigismond Dux, and uttered a loud cry:
“That’s the man we’re looking for. There’s the happy man!”
The bust, a very good likeness, represented a noble and regular set of features; one of those full, harmonious faces which have a look of a globe of the world. Although very bald, and already old, the great composer appeared no less charming than magnificent. His cranium was as round as the dome of a church, but a rather thick nose was planted beneath it with a loving and profane robustness; a close-clipped beard failed to conceal the fleshy lips, an erotic and a Bacchic mouth. It was the very likeness of the genius who composed the most pious oratorios and the most passionate and sensual opera-music.
“Why,” continued Saint-Sylvain, “did we never think of Sigismond Dux, who so thoroughly enjoys his stupendous glory, is clever enough to seize all its advantages, and just madcap enough to spare himself the constraint and the boredom of high position: the most spiritual and most sensual of geniuses, happy as a god, serene as a beast, combining in his countless love-affairs the most brutal cynicism with the most exquisite delicacy?”
“He has a rich and varied temperament,” said Quatrefeuilles. “His shirt can do His Majesty nothing but good. Let us go and seek him out.” They were introduced into a vast, sonorous chamber like a cafe concert hall. An organ, raised on three steps, covered one section of the wall with its case of innumerable pipes. Wearing a doge’s cap, and a dalmatic of brocade, Sigismond Dux was improvising melodies, and under his fingers were born sounds which troubled the soul, and melted the heart. On the three steps, covered with purple, a group of seated women, magnificent or charming, long, thin and surpentine, or plump, compact, and of a splendid massiveness, all equally beautified by desire and love, burning and swooning, writhed at his feet. The whole hall was filled with a quivering crowd of young American women, Jewish financiers, diplomatists, dancers, singers, Catholic, Anglican and Buddhist priests, black princes, piano-tuners, reporters, lyric poets, photographers, men dressed as women, and women dressed as men. They were pressed together, mingled and amalgamated, and formed a single adoring mass. Above them, climbing the columns, astride the candelabras, and hanging to the lustres, swayed young and agile devotees. This vast crowd was swimming in a sea of intoxication: it was what is called a private performance.
The organ ceased. A cloud of women surrounded the Master, who half emerged from time to time, like a brilliant star, to dive back into it immediately. He was gentle, coaxing, lascivious, and slippery. Amiable, no more of a coxcomb than need be, big as the world, and pretty as a cherub, as he smiled he showed through his grey beard teeth like a young child’s, and uttered, to each in turn, facile and pretty phrases with which they were delighted, and which could not be remembered, so airy were they, so that their charm remained unabated, embellished with mystery. He was equally pleasant and friendly with the men, and seeing Saint-Sylvain, he embraced him three times, and said he loved him dearly; the King’s secretary lost not a moment; he asked for a few moments’ confidential conversation on behalf of the King, and, having explained briefly the important mission with which he was entrusted, he said:
“Master, give me your sh—”
He stopped, noticing that Sigismond Dux’s features had suddenly become distorted.
In the street a barrel-organ had begun to grind out “The Jonquil Polka.” And at the very first bars the great man had turned pale.
This “Jonquil Polka,” the rage of the season, had been composed by a miserable, obscure violinist, Bouquin by name, employed in a dancing hall, and the master, crowned with forty years of love and glory, could not bear that some small portion of praise should be diverted to Bouquin: he regarded it as an insupportable insult. God himself is jealous, and afflicted by man’s ingratitude. Sigismond Dux could not hear “The Jonquil Polka” without falling ill.
He abruptly deserted Saint-Sylvain, his crowd of adorers, his magnificent flock of swooning women, and rushed to his dressing-room, where he was violently sick.
“He is to be pitied,” sighed Saint-Sylvain.
And, dragging Quatrefeuilles by his coat-tails, he crossed the unfortunate musician’s threshold.
CHAPTER XII. WHETHER VICE IS A VIRTUE
FOR fourteen months, from morn to eve, from nightfall to daylight, they scoured the city and the suburbs, observing, examining, interrogating in vain. The King, who was losing strength from day to day and who now had some idea of the difficulties of such a quest, gave orders to the Minister of the Interior to institute a special commission, charged, under the direction of Messieurs Quatrefeuilles, Chaudesaigues, Saint-Sylvain, and Froidefond, to proceed, with full powers, to a secret inquiry on the subject of the happy persons in the kingdom. The Prefect of Police, in compliance with the Minister’s wishes, placed his most capable subordinates at the disposal of the Commission, and in a very short space of time the happy were sought out, in the capital, with all the zeal and devotion which in other countries is devoted to hunting down wrongdoers and anarchists. Should a citizen be reputed fortunate he was immediately denounced, spied upon and tracked down. Two of the Prefect’s officials dragged their heavy iron-soled boots without remission before the windows of anyone suspected of being happy. Did a man of fashion take a box at the opera he was immediately placed under supervision. An eye was kept on any owner of a training-stable whose horse won a race. In all houses of appointment a clerk of the Prefecture, seated in the office, took a note of those entering. On the remark of the Pref
ect of Police that Virtue was the source of happiness benefactors, founders of charitable institutions, generous givers, deserted but faithful wives, citizens remarkable for acts of devotion, heroes and martyrs were all alike denounced, and submitted to the most minute investigation.
This supervision weighed upon the whole city, but its reason was an absolute mystery. To no one had Quatrefeuilles and Saint-Sylvain confided that they were looking for a lucky shirt, for fear, as has been already explained, that ambitious people, or avaricious individuals feigning to enjoy a perfect happiness, should impose on the King, as a happy article, some article of clothing impregnated with misery, care, and disappointments.
The extraordinary measures of the Police scattered uneasiness among the upper classes, and there was a certain ferment noted in the city. Several highly respected ladies found themselves compromised, and there were outbursts of scandal.
The Commission met every morning at the Royal Library, under the presidency of Monsieur de Quatrefeuilles, assisted by Messieurs Trou and Boncassis, on special duty. At every sitting it examined an average of fifteen hundred reports. After a session of four months it had not yet secured a happy man.
As the President, Quatrefeuilles, was bewailing the situation, Monsieur Boncassis exclaimed:
“Alas, it is vice that causes us to suffer, and all men have vices!”
“I have none,” said Monsieur Chaudesaigues, “and the result is that I am in despair. Life without vice is nothing but weariness, despondency, and sadness. Vice is the only distraction that one can taste in this world: vice is the colour of life, the salt of the soul, and the light of the mind. What do I say? vice is original, man’s only creative power; it is the attempt of a natural organization against nature itself, of the enthronement of human sovereignty over animal sovereignty, of human creation over animal creation, of a conscious world in the midst of the universal unconsciousness: vice is man’s sole personal property, his real patrimony, his true virtue in the correct sense of the word, since virtue is the tact of being man (virtus, vir).
“I have tried to acquire some; I have been unable to do so; it requires genius, a natural gift — an assumed vice is not a vice.”
“Well,” asked Quatrefeuilles, “what do you call vice?”
“I call vice an habitual predisposition to what the majority regard as evil and abnormal: that is to say, individual morality, individual strength, individual virtue, beauty, power, and genius.”
“That’s all right,” said the Counsellor Trou, “it’s only a matter of understanding one another.” But Saint-Sylvain strongly combated the librarian’s opinion.
“Don’t talk of vices,” he said, “since you have none. You don’t know what they are. I have some; I have several, and I can assure you that I derive thence less pleasure than inconvenience. There is nothing more fatiguing than a vice. One worries, heats oneself, and exhausts oneself in satisfying it, and when it is satisfied one only experiences an Immense disgust.”
“You would not speak thus, sir,” answered Chaudesaigues, “if you had fine vices, noble, proud, imperious, lofty, really virtuous vices. But you have nothing but mean, fearful, ridiculous little vices. You are not, sir, a great affronter of the gods.”
At first Saint-Sylvain felt hurt by this remark, but the librarian explained that there was nothing offensive in it. Saint-Sylvain agreed with a good grace, and with calmness and resolution made the following reflexion:
“Alas, virtue, like vice, and vice, like virtue, consists in effort, constraint, conflict, trouble, toil, and exhaustion! That is why we are all unhappy.”
But the President, Quatrefeuilles, complained that his head would burst.
“Gentlemen,” he said, “please do not let us argue. We are not here for that.”
And he closed the meeting.
The result of this Commission on Happiness was the same as that of all Commissions, Parliamentary, and extra-Parliamentary, In all times and in all countries: it ended in nothing, and, having sat for five years, it was dissolved after producing no useful result.
The King got no better. Neurasthenia, like the Old Man of the Sea, assumed various terrible shapes to bring him low. He complained of feeling that all his organs had become erratic, and were moving incessantly inside his body into unaccustomed positions, his kidneys into his gullet, his heart into his calf, his intestines into his nose, His liver into his throat, and his brain into his stomach.
“You cannot imagine,” he said, “how painful these sensations are, and how they throw one’s ideas into confusion.”
“Sire, I can appreciate it all the better,” said Quatrefeuilles, “because in my youth it often happened that my stomach rose into my brain, and you can imagine how that upset my ideas. My mathematical studies suffered much in consequence.”
The worse Christophe’s sufferings, the more eagerly did he demand the shirt which had been prescribed for him.
CHAPTER XIII. MONSIEUR LE CURE MITON
I AM coming back to the idea,” said Saint-Sylvain to Quatrefeuilles, “that the failure of our search is caused by our faulty method. I certainly believe in virtue and I believe in happiness. They are inseparable. They are rare. They conceal themselves. We shall find them under humble roofs in the depth of the country. If you agree, we will, for choice, seek them in that rugged mountain country which is our Savoy, our Tyrol.” A fortnight later they had investigated sixty mountain villages without finding a single happy man. In these hamlets they found all the miseries that distressed the towns, accentuated by the uncouthness and ignorance of the people. Love and hunger, those two scourges of nature, struck the miserable inhabitants with even harder and more urgent blows. They saw greedy masters, jealous husbands, lying wives, maid-servants who poisoned their employers, men-servants who murdered them, incestuous fathers, and children who emptied the kneading-trough over their grandfather’s head as he sat dozing by the fireside. These peasants had no pleasure save drunkenness; even their joys were brutal, and their games cruel. Their holidays would end with bloody hand-to-hand fights.
The further they observed them, Quatrefeuilles and Saint-Sylvain recognized that the morals of these men could not be either better or purer, that the niggard earth made them mean, that a hard life made them callous to others’ troubles, as also to their own, and that if they were jealous, covetous, false, liars, and incessantly busy in cheating one another, it was the natural effect of their misery and indigence.
“How could I have ever imagined that happiness dwelt under a thatched roof?” Saint-Sylvain asked himself. “It is probably due to a classical education. Virgil, in his administrative poem, the Georgics, says that the country-folk would be happy did they recognize their good fortune. He thereby admits that they do not know it. As a matter of fact, he was writing by the order of Augustus, an excellent steward of the Empire, who feared that Rome would lack bread, and was seeking to repopulate the country districts. Virgil, like every one else, knew that the life of the peasantry is a laborious one. Hesiod draws a frightful picture of it.”
“One thing is certain,” said Quatrefeuilles, “and that is, that in all parts of the world the countryboys and girls have only one desire, to get work in a town. On the sea coast the girls dream of employment in a sardine factory. In the coal districts, the country lads long for nothing so much as to go down a mine.”
One man, in these mountains, displayed, amid care-worn brows and frowning faces, an ingenuous smile. He could neither work on the land nor drive the beasts; he was ignorant of all that other men knew. His words were wanting in sense, and all day long he sang a little song which he never finished. He was delighted with everything, and lived among the angels. His coat was composed of scraps of every colour fantastically sewn together. The children used to follow him and make fun of him, but as he had the reputation of a luck-bringer nobody harmed him, and the little he needed was given him. He was Hurtepoix, the simpleton. He fed at the cottage doors, with the dogs, and slept in barns.
Se
eing that he was happy, and suspecting that it was not without some reason that the countryfolk regarded him as a luck-bringer, after much reflexion Saint-Sylvain sought him out to secure his shirt. He found him lying prostrate, weeping bitterly in the church porch, Hurtepoix had just learned of the death of Jesus Christ, crucified for the salvation of mankind.
Going down to a village where the mayor was an innkeeper, the two King’s officers asked him to drink with them, and inquired if, by chance, he knew of a happy man.
“Gentlemen,” he answered, “go to the village on the other side of the valley, whose white houses you see hanging to the mountain-side, and call on the Cure Miton; he will be glad to see you, and you will meet a happy man, who deserves his happiness. You will get there in two hours.”
The mayor offered to hire them horses, and after lunch they set off.
A young man, travelling the same road, and better mounted, caught them up at the first bend. He had an open countenance, and an air of cheerfulness and health. They entered into conversation with him.
Learning that they were about to call on the Cure Miton, he said:
“Please give him my kind regards. I am going farther up to Sizeraie, where I live, in the midst of beautiful pastures. I am in a hurry to get there.”
He told them that he had married the best and most loving of wives, and that she had presented him with two children, a boy and a girl, as beautiful as day.
“I am on my way from the country town,” he added in a cheerful tone, “and I am taking back some handsome dresses in the piece, with patterns and plates of the fashions, which show the effect of the costume. Alice — my wife — has no idea of the present I am bringing her. I shall give her the parcels all wrapped up, and I shall have the pleasure of watching her impatient fingers worrying to undo the knots. She will be very pleased: her delighted eyes, full of a cool fight, will raise themselves to mine, and she will kiss me. Alice and I are happy. We have been married four years, and love each other more every day. We have the richest meadows in the country-side. Our servants are happy too, they are fine reapers and dancers. You must come and see us some Sunday, gentlemen; you will drink our white wine, and you will watch at their dancing the most graceful girls in the country, and the strongest lads, who pick up their partners and make them fly round like a feather. Our home is half an hour from here. You turn to the right by those two rocks which you see fifty yards ahead, and which are called the Chamois-feet: then you go over a wooden bridge thrown across a torrent, and through the pine-wood which protects us from the north wind. In less than half an hour I shall be home, and we shall all four be very happy.”
Complete Works of Anatole France Page 385