by Paul Vibert
It was the first time that anyone had made a similar discovery in an Egyptian tomb. Tears ran silently down my cheeks—tears of joy and amazement—and, in truth, the mean of my escort were as emotional as I was.
I stood there stupidly, dumbstruck, not daring to violate that youth interrupted by death thousands of years before, that infancy that I found frozen in its hieratic play. It was mad and sublime, and those two mummies of little girls made a much deeper impression on me than those of their parents, because, even seen through the profound darkness of time and space, the death of a child is always infinitely poignant.
How long did I stay like that? I have no idea. My men were no longer afraid, because, little by little, they had divined something of the sentiments, simultaneously tumultuous and superior, that had taken possession of my soul and which, in a certain measure—the measure of their restricted intellectual culture—they shared, so much does the grandeur of circumstance raise men up.
For myself, I no longer felt the choking atmosphere, nor the intense heat; I was dominated by a world of thoughts, which were all colliding with one another at the same time within my brain, and I scarcely suspected, as I stood dumbfounded before the sarcophagi of those two little queens, holding their cherished dolls in their mummified arms, that I was on the threshold of one of the most curious philological discoveries of the end of the last century….
II. How the Egyptians pronounced the letter u.
Ou as old as the world.
A stupefying demonstration.
After a long silence devoted to the quasi-religious contemplation of the children, I made an effort to pull myself together, as if I were demerging from a dream, and, slowly kneeling down beside the sarcophagus of one of the little princesses, with infinite precaution, I picked up the beautiful doll that she had been holding her arms, clutched to her heart for thousands of years, like a good mummy.
The doll was fully-dressed and well-conserved, with eyes of jade and precious stones replacing the enamel.
Suddenly, my inquisitive gaze was attracted by two little cords hanging down between the legs, and I had the sudden vision that I was confronted by an Egyptian doll that was designed to close its eyes at will, or to speak.
I examined the eyes attentively; they were fixed, but large beads of sweat were falling from my forehead on to its impassive face and, shaking off the multi-millenary dust, appeared to render it a life that it had never had, with a sort of enigmatic smile.
There was no more doubt about it; I really was holding a talking doll from the time of the Pharaohs, and I confess that I could hear the beating of my own heat, so intense was my poignant emotion becoming.
Finally, I slowly tugged on one of the cords, which seemed solid but somewhat frayed by time. It broke in my hand. I made a knot, but it broke again.
Having stood up again, I stayed there for some time with the doll in my hands, letting my tears flow—tears of blood and despair, this time.
My men, overwhelmed, dared not say a word. Finally, the very excess of despair provoked a salutary reaction; I was ashamed of my moment of weakness and, sitting down on a block of porphyry that separated the sarcophagi, I began slowly undressing the doll.
O prodigy! The fabric was not yet crumbling into lint, with the result that, after having taken off its dress and bouffant trousers, like those still worn by the Arab women of today, I discovered intact, high up between the legs, two little metal hooks—probably made of bronze or brass—which ought to have retained the two cords.
Without delay, I deposited my doll in the arms of its little mother and, seizing the hem of the burnoose sworn by one of my fellahs, I cut off a long strip with my knife, following the weave of the cloth.
I unpicked the weave feverishly, and rebraided the thread two or three times, in order to have two improvised strings, which I attached to the two little hooks.
My impatience was extreme; and, strangely enough—a mystery of the human heart—instead of pulling the string immediately, I dressed the doll with the same precaution as before. To act otherwise would have seemed both a violation and a profanation.
As I have already said, environments, circumstances and contacts sometimes abruptly elevate and develop the intelligence and hidden qualities of individuals. It must be said that the coarse and primitive men surrounding me were as keenly interested, as firmly gripped and almost as emotional as me, if that were possible.
Finally, I slowly pulled one of the strings, and—O miracle!—the doll spoke, and I heard, or thought I heard, in old Egyptian: iri haru nofir. Word for word, than means: iri, time, haru, day, nofir, good—which actually means: have a nice day, and corresponds roughly to our bonjour. But I pulled a second time, more slowly, and, forewarned, I distinctly heard: iri harou nofir.
What! The letter u already pronounced ou, in diphthong, among the Egyptians of Pharaonic times! But then, in that palpable testimony, I had a demonstration of the greatest philological discovery of modern times!
I was dazzled, I admit, and rapidly lifted my gourd of eau-de-vie to my lips to avoid falling ill in the sudden commotion.
With easily-understandable anxiety, I tugged the second string, and the doll responded clearly: Anougit harou—k, instead of Anugit haru—k. There was a hard h in the word harou, so the whole probably signifies, word for word: Anougit, rub, harou—k, your face, and seems to correspond to a primitive method of greeting, which was no longer in use, at least currently, in early Egypt. The constructor of the doll had thus tried to contrive something already archaic, in his own time, that form of greeting would have been easy to render and imitate. For myself, I only saw one thing, which was that, for the second time, the doll had revealed to me clearly that u was pronounced ou by the Egyptians, which I had never suspected, personally. This time, however, I was finally in possession of a material and indisputable proof.
In order that this story should not go on too long, I shall just say that I had the same difficulties and the same emotions with the doll of the second mummified little princess in the second sarcophagus, but that I succeeded in overcoming them with equal good fortune. This time, however, one of my companions, overcome by the passionate interest of the discovery, which he felt confusedly to be of capital importance, and who was Hadj, like all Arabs who have been to Mecca, plucked a piece of the camel-hair cord holding his turban around his head, which simplified my task considerably.
When I pulled the first cord thus reconstituted, the second doll said: Ia atfou-I rempit nofrit—which means daddy, or father, if you prefer—and not Ia atfu-i. When I pulled the second camel-hair cord, it responded Ia maouit-i—mommy, or mother—not Ia maut-i or mut. That, again, was clear and conclusive: the letter u had definitely been replaced by the diphthong ou. I was definitively enlightened, and thus, by the greatest stroke of luck, had just had the good fortune to settle once and for all a philological issue that has divided linguists into two camps for centuries.
As I was satisfied, I carefully reclosed the sarcophagi, after having replaced the two dolls, the unwitting clarifiers of a transhuman mystery of pronunciation, in the arms of their little princesses and owners, who had lain there for thousands of years in their eternal hieratic sleep. We all went out of the great pyramid, each of us lost, on his own account, in an abysm of reflections—for, without having understood the scientific aspect of my discovery, all my men had been struck and stirred by the truly tragic grandeur of that unforgettable scene.
Shortly afterwards, I hastened to draw up a report of the double exemplar, which I sent to the Khedive via my cousin, and also to the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles Lettres.
But hazard plays a large role in life, doesn’t it? And that’s why I’ve taken the trouble to relate here, simply and without embellishment, the various and sometimes poignant details of this discovery, of capital importance from the viewpoint of comparative philology.
Author’s note: Later, I was to find another talking doll in another sarcophagus, this time talking
Hebrew—which proves that it only goes back to the time of the captivity. On pulling the first string, it said Baroukh attar—bless you—instead of Barukh atta, and on pulling the second cord, it pronounced Adounai Imma khem—the Lord be with you—and not Adonai Imma khem, which victoriously corroborates my first discovery and demonstrates once more that the Hebrews, like the Egyptians, always pronounced ou, being ignorant of u. After that, it was only natural that Greek, Latin, Sanskrit and all the wrongly so-called Indo-European languages, which descend word-for-word from Hebrew, were ignorant of u, as my father and I had always argued, before the fortunate material demonstration that I had finally succeeded in making, as you have just seen.
A Tragic Story
The anguish of oblivion. The obsession with survival.
The eternal dolor of creative impotence.
Recently, all the newspapers, under the heading of legal proceedings, recounted the story of a poor old painter who had bequeathed an income to his six mistresses, and everyone gloated over it.
For myself, I know of nothing more poignant than this story, and I was absolutely bowled over by it for an entire week. I will also quote the following passage from the Aurore, which clearly exposes the drama of the tormented soul in question:
“The painter Goubot,140 who passed away one evening in 1897 in the middle of a theatrical performance in Liège, was said to have a tidy fortune, relatives—who were not visible in his paintings—and exactly half a dozen mistresses. He sometimes spaced out these distractions, but sometimes maintained two in parallel. He even had the whim, a few years ago, of having four of them in harness. He excused himself, moreover, in very civil terms, in his will—or rather wills, for he made five of them, but not in favor of his relatives; it’s well-known that he couldn’t abide them.
“Goubot did not hesitate. He disposed of his house and his movable property in favor, firstly, of the Oeuvre de l’hospitalité de nuit, the Societé philanthropique141 and the City of Paris, then in favor of his mistresses. In 1892—the era of his luxurious four-in-hand—he wrote (these are the excuses mentioned above) after having mentioned the four beneficiaries in his will: ‘Now, I beg these ladies to forgive me. This is my excuse: I always wanted a child. That’s why I switched. My heart bid you adieu and wishes you good health and happiness. Don’t be too angry with old Jean, who loved you. Give him your regrets. Farewell.’
“Death not arriving yet, Goubot took two more mistresses, and, of course, did not forget these latecomers in his subsequent dispositions. In 1894, therefore, he wrote: ‘I give to the mesdames et mesdemoiselles whose names follow, the following sums, thanking them for their favors. None of them has been good enough to become my wife, and none is pregnant at this point in time. All have tried to tame me. Of them, however, I have only good memories, and wish to render their lives easier and avoid their falling into poverty:
“‘To Madame A, Faubourg Saint-Martin, I leave an annual income of 500 francs.
“‘To Madame B, Rue des Martyrs, an annual income of 1200 francs.
“‘To Mademoiselle C, Rue de Dunkerque, an annual income of 800 francs.
“‘To Mademoiselle D, Rue Dautancourt, an annual income of 1200 francs.
“‘To Madame E, divorced, Faubourg Poissonnière, an annual income of 1000 francs.
“‘Madame F, Rue Rochechouart, is to have an annual income of 500 francs, but without access to the capital; she is too stupid to hold on to it.
“‘I beg these ladies and demoiselles to receive the expression of all my regrets at not having had children with them. That was what I always wanted. God has not granted my wishes.’
“Take note also of this clause in the artist’s final will: ‘As I desire that everyone should retain a good memory of me, I beg my executor to give all my tenants, except for the coal-merchant, six months free rent on my behalf.’”
Naturally, the Oeuvre de l’hospitalité de nuit, the Societé philanthropique and the city of Paris, on whom that man had heaped his benefits, attacked the will as immoral, but, quite rightly, the court upheld it, in view of the fact that it had been made in a spirit of benevolence.
All the petty chroniclers have embroidered the above, pouring out their joyous hearts, into pornography. Well, I tell them quite frankly that they are wrong, and have not understood the intimate drama that has ravaged the brain, the heart, the soul and the intelligence of this artist throughout his life.
Yes, he was a painter, but he wanted his name to survive him, and his work to be continued. He dreamed of a son greater and more powerful than himself, to carry forward the conquest of the ideal. And that dreamed-of child soon became the obsession of his entire life, of every minute of that life.
You can laugh and you can cry: “The man had a ball! He had six mistresses!” No, he didn’t have a ball; for him, those women were only the instrument, the living mold into which he wanted to pour his image, to create a son, an heir, a successor, a continuer of his work. And he dream was always disappointed.
Well, short-sighted people, I do not hesitate to declare here that I take my hat off, respectfully, to the simple evocation of this lamentable memorial, this martyr soul, to the memory of a man who suffered so much and wept so frequently over his impotence all his life. Personally, I think that it is impossible to witness a spectacle more poignant, a calvary more dolorous, for can you not feel, as I do, that heart bleeding throughout its life and lamenting in the arid desert of impotence, death and oblivion?
Yesterday I read these emotional and true lines by Mirbeau, on the subject of Fécondité:
“He offers nature, not as a sacrifice but as a joy, the effort of his body and soul, lives, creates, acts, finally, in beauty and simplicity…. And that is the insemination of the earth and a woman; it is the harvest. It is nature increasingly submissive, sterility banished from the soil and humankind, and richness coming, flowing from the two primal sources, the fecund woman the virgin earth, in a communion of love…”142
I said to myself, it’s fortunate that Goubot died two years ago, for if he had been given Zola’s epic in honor of maternity and the fecund and triumphant family to read, it would have been a fate worse than death for him, a new cruel martyrdom…
That is why Émile Zola’s work Fécondité is admirable and superhuman, why it is like the joyous hosanna of life, and the most eloquent appeal to the virile virtues that it is possible to address to a people on the brink of an abyss, who are going to die! That is also why, far from mocking, joking or sniggering stupidly at the dolorous life of Goubot, at the horrible and secret drama of his heart, at the long heartbreak of his soul, revealed to the world by his wills, I weep with him retrospectively and understand at a stroke all that he must have suffered.
That man a libertine? Get away—a lamentable victim of destiny, who had too much heart and honey, since he held his duty to humanity so high!
It does not astonish me that the snobs jeer and laugh; they are neither worthy nor capable of understanding that inextinguishable, insatiable and immortal thirst for paternity that make a man the equal of the gods!
A Christmas Story
Christmas in Brittany. The Valley of Jehosophat.
Supreme coquetry.
As I do every year, I had gone to pass the second fortnight of December in Brittany, not far from Huelgoat and Locmaria, at the home of my old childhood friend Baron de Poullaouen,143 who lived there in seclusion, in the old and modest château, quasi-feudal but half-ruined, of his ancestors.
He had found a means of chipping away at his still-adequate maternal inheritance by attempting to devote himself to the exploitation of the local lead and silver mines, which had become too poor and too waterlogged to be able to render a profit, with the result that he became increasingly self-absorbed was reputed in the region to be a great eccentric.
At the precise moment when I reached his house that Christmas, about seven years ago he might have been thirty-four or thirty-five years old. Tall, upright and well-built, with an adm
irable fan-shaped black beard, he had the air of majesty of an Assyrian emperor, and was genuinely very handsome—a beauty that was both gentle and masculine, which subjugated all those who were close to him. And yet, it was said in the locality that he did not wish to marry, that he considered himself too poor to ask for the hand of a noble and rich daughter of Brittany, and too proud to ask for any other. Then again, it was known, or believed, that he had religious sentiments of an exalted mysticism, and did not much like hunting and his dogs.
It is true that the Montagnes Noires and the Monts d’Arrée had no secrets for him, and that he waited impatiently for my arrival every winter in order to hunt the last few foxes and wild boars that were there, which might have be left over from the time of the Druids.
Thus, we were coming back, in very harsh weather—quite rare in Brittany—from a long hunting expedition, in pitch darkness, even though it was not yet six o’clock, on the twenty-fourth of December, firmly decided to have at the château, not a good Christmas but simply a good dinner.
We went back into the château, and after freshening up a little, we were comfortably installed at table beside an immense fireplace, in which enormous logs—Yule logs—were burning gaily, along with the village curé, who was still a good trencherman in spite of his sixty years, and two or three young sons of the neighboring chatelaines, all friends of the Baron de Poullaouen.
Needless to say, the meal was cheerful, and over coffee, while smoking a pipe or an excellent cigar, each of us undertook to tell a little Christmas story. In a land of tradition and religious superstition like Brittany, from Druid times to the present day, there has been no lack of Christmas stories, and any peasant will be able to tell you three or four, each more authentic and terrifying than the last—for there is no one like the inhabitants of that land of heightened religiosity for always seeing life in its most saddest and tragic aspects, both at the same time.