“Oh, what a magnificent country, imposing and pious! Don’t you find, Captain, that these mountains, with their summits and gorges, invite the soul to prayer?”
“Silence!”
“They went into the monastery. Along with his guest, the prior received an order to make sure that he did not communicate with anyone at all, and the order added: Above all, and in the interest of our Estates, it is important not to reveal to the Prince that he has the faculty of realizing his wishes; the prior and his monks will answer for that with their lives.
In order to reinforce that advice with an argument that had all the vigor of a threat, the Duke sent the good Fathers the mortal remains of his defunct almoner and friend; he asked them to give him a worthy funeral, as he had given him a sound justice, and thanked them in advance.
The venerable prior appreciated the scope of that double advice in its full extent, and took his measures. The dead man had a crypt and the living one a cell.
Nevertheless, in order to forearm the neophyte against the temptations of ennui, he was authorized to borrow whatever he desired from the library of the convent, reputed to be the richest in the entire world, which contained thousands of works.
VI. Dieudonat makes a tour of human science
and returns from that long voyage
The well-endowed child installed himself in his next existence with delight; his habitation pleased him, and the idea of being at home, having his own lodgings, an inaccessible retreat devoid of slaps and a tutor filled him with virile pride as well as gratitude toward the benefactors who had made him that present.
“How comfortable it is here! What a delightful little castle!”
The castle consisted of two superimposed rooms communicating by means of a miller’s ladder. On the upper floor there was a bed, a prie-Dieu, a table and a chair; on the ground floor, a small table for meals, a shelf, a stool, tools for carpentry and gardening. Aliments came through a hole pierced in the wall, and the only door opened into a square garden—minuscule, to tell the truth, but between the walls of which an enormous expanse of sky was perceptible, in which the clouds filed past in complete liberty.
“Not to mention that I’m in a splendid location! I can’t see it, but I saw it when I arrived, and I know its beauty!”
He could not weary of admiring his domain, his wealth and the independent future that all those possessions promised him.
“I’m my own master! So young! I’m being spoiled! What sublime things I’m going to read in those big books! My father was cruel to my tutor, but he’s been generous to me; paternal tenderness inspired his heart when he imagined sending me to this place of delights. Isn’t prescribing me solitude while permitting me books simply dispensing me from conversation with people who have nothing to say and limiting me to those who speak in order to say something? With Dom Ambrosius I was alone, while I shall now have the society of the noblest minds that existed in all times. A book is a soul that confesses; add that one can interrupt it without having to apologize, one can reply to it without having one’s ears boxed, one can raise a objection to a stupidity without being obliged to blush, and one can even shut it, as one can’t shut people. It’s admirable!”
He set about reading all the books.
In between times, he cultivated his garden during the mild seasons, or worked with wood in the days of winter. Then he resumed reading. At his command, at his choice, philosophers and the Fathers of the Church, scientists and historians, and also poets, filed through his cell and sat on his lectern. He knew all the great men of humankind, the great events and the great ideas; his brain became parallel to the world, and as vast as time.
That task had been fecund at first in intellectual sensualities; every time that beauty surged forth before his mind’s eye, every time that the truth lifted a corner of the veil, his entire being was impregnated with glad light, and his eyes brightened with an interior fire.
But so many successive illuminations, provoking one after another an emotion that was always the same, ended up only having the value of a phantasmagoria, and the universal reader became anxious.
“I admire the forms, and the skill that produced those forms or formulae; I admire the subtlety of human genius, an acrobat and conjurer; but it seems to me that in total, I’m not being given very much. Of what am I sure? Very little; and the more I’m instructed, the less sure I am, since, to every one of these beautiful sentences, another replies to demonstrate the contrary to me; when I know them all, they’ll all have been belied, and I’ll be left without anything.
He was at that point in his thoughts when, one morning, he heard the sound behind his garden wall of stones, hammers, sawn beams, shifted earth, wheeled trucks and voices conversing vigorously, with cries and oaths. Being naturally inclined to pity, he felt sorry for the people who were going to so much trouble while he was so tranquil. The racket lasted until nightfall, and from then on, that rumor of an invisible labor was renewed every day. Undoubtedly, the foundations were being laid there of some building, perhaps a church. The young monk was not astonished by that, having observed elsewhere that priests, much more than the common run of men, are haunted by the passion of erecting edifices, as if their celibacy found in that chaste creation a pasture for the desire to engender and to leave on earth a prolongation of themselves.
The noises continued and they were embellished by songs. Reading and study became difficult, but Dieudonat never became impatient and he was always able to look at the good side of things. In any case, his neighbors interested him, as did their mysterious work; he waited, sometimes looking at the crest of his wall. After some lapse of time, the wood of a scaffolding extended in the sky; later, the heads of masons appeared, and then their shoulders, their torsos, their entire bodies; then a section of wall appeared in perspective above the enclosure, and the building rose up without discontinuity.
Dieudonat became increasingly interested; he saw the workmen adding rows of stones to rows of stones. Indubitably, a church was being born; already, the lateral wall was braced by perforated buttresses from which pinnacles protruded; it was illuminated by rose-windows and ogives traversed by slender mullions; it was displayed in its width, and departed into the air again, still rising. The thing nonexistent yesterday existed today, and the monks piled up the cubes on the masses, and the thing rose ever higher.
On seeing it augmented thus, the adolescent shivered with internal effort and collaborated with all his muscles. Seized by a spirit of emulation and avid to act, without knowing it, he got up from his seat and only came back to get up from it again. He arched his back and stretched his spine in order to pick up folio volumes, with a need to find them very heavy and an air of wanting to pass them to the masons.
He could not hold still anymore; he solicited an audience with the prior and asked him: “Father, how long have I been in this cell?”
“Seven years, my child.”
“Can it be? Seven years already? I’ve lost seven years of my life!”
“The time a man spends endowing his mind is not time lost, my son, and if Milord the Duke, relaxing the rigors of your reclusion, authorized us to utilize your knowledge in consecrating it to the instruction of our brothers...”
“Teach! I couldn’t do that, Father; I’ve read too much. Between so many contradictory affirmations of genius, how would I have the presumption to accord preference to one to the detriment of another, and attest which one is sound? That would have been possible when I knew almost nothing, but at present, I know too much, and I’m not capable of teaching.”
The prior shook his head. “What you’re telling me there is bad, my child; it is necessary to be sure of the truth and to believe it. I believe the truth.”
“Because you only know one, Father, and I have much of which to complain in knowing several, since they are incompatible.”
“I’ll grant you that Metaphysics provides matter for debate, at least insofar as it does not attain the Faith, but History has p
rocured you certainty, for it relates to facts, and facts are undeniable.”
“The number of facts that are uncontested is relatively considerable, yes, Father, and I have not encountered anyone to deny the death of Charlemagne or the ruination of Nineveh, but on the matter of what engendered those events and what their soul was, the profound causes that alone are capable of revealing to us the meaning of life, there is never agreement, and History is nothing without that.”
“The testimony of men who have seen...”
“Is error or lies; the explanation of facts is only pure hypothesis; History and Legend are two sisters worth as much as one another, but one speaks and the other sings. I can no longer teach history.”
“Fall back on the sciences.”
“Oh, science, Father, what an admirable trampoline of enthusiasm and vertigo, and how it launches us to the edge of infinity! But only to the edge, alas, and the very clarity of the conceptions that it permit us renders our impotence to go any further crueler. To everything, a limit exists that human understanding will never surpass, and our heads always bump into the pitiless wall of an enigma that humans cannot penetrate.”
“The mysteries...”
“At the terminus of everything I have found mystery! Science only leads us to the inaccessible, and if some genius reached us from a world where minds are superior to ours, in order to reveal to us what we do not know, we would listen to him open-mouthed, and we would not be able to understand.”
“Pride is laboring you, I see...”
“Because I have acquired the notion of sitting on the last step of the ladder of thinking beings?”
“You think too far, my young friend, and that is why you have lost your footing. Your ambition is leading you astray beyond your strength, in purely speculative theories, and it’s a grave imprudence to want to go so high, for humans can only draw away from the earth without peril with the aid of the Faith, and under its constant tutelage. Let me finish: to criticism I will add consolation, by assuring you that your labors will not remain entirely sterile; they have prepared you for wisdom, for prudence, for the day when Milord the Duke, in quitting his world, will leave you his crown to wear and his people to lead.”
“Reign over my fellows? Can you think so, Father? How can I pretend to lead them, when I recognize myself incapable of instructing them? I wonder how Heads of State dare to walk, eat, sleep, go up or down stairs, sit down or get up, when they know that a gesture of their finger, or their abstention from making that gesture, can overturn lives, annihilate forces and stimulate others, engender life or death, and prepare the future!”
“One does one’s best; Heaven will enlighten you.”
“By enlightening the fors and againsts? For it ought to enlighten both at the same time, since the two coexist and no contingency is completely good or totally bad. And that is what is terrible, Father, enlightening at the moment of action! I imagine that at that moment it is necessary no longer to see anything, and that if you have the misfortune, at that supreme moment, still to be examining the decision to make, with everything that is contrary to it, you would not make it Father. Me neither.”
“You would make it, my son, with the aid of God and the firm intention of becoming a benefactor of human beings.”
“Yes, indeed! I would form projects immediately deformed by those in view of which I meditated the good, and from which evil would emerge. I know very little of the world, Father, only having studied it in books, but I know enough to glimpse that every idea is perverted as soon as it becomes action. I shall not act. Or, at least, I shall not act in the fashion of kings.”
“I understand you, my young prince; you consider, fundamentally, that the authority of sovereigns is a lure of vanity far more than an effective power; you disdain their role, because you suspect their strength of not being real; if I have understood correctly, you estimate that each of their names is planted in history like a golden nail that supports the weight of common actions and the responsibility of all?”
“Perhaps. They direct, but they do not lead; no power is absolute.”
“Except for that of God, my son. God alone can do what he wishes.”
By way of reply, Dieudonat picked up a sculpted bronze hand-warmer from the table and presented it gravely to the old monk. “Father, could God make this ball cease being round?”
“Assuredly, if he deigned to want it”
“But could God determine that the ball had never been round?”
The venerable priest started with indignation, but made no reply.
Dieudonat added, tranquilly: “I said, Father, and without exception, that no power is absolute.”
“And I say that books have done you no good. They have maddened your miserable reason with pride!”
“Very miserable, yes. I know all its misery and sterility.”
“Return to your cell. You will not read any more!”
“In fact, I no longer want to read; I believe I even declared that to you, having come expressly for that. For I’ve perceived your masons, Father, and they’re working. Now, after so many lost years, I also want now to devote myself to real work, no matter how humble it might be. You’re irritated against me, Father, and I wouldn’t be any less so than you if the appreciations of my mind derived from my will instead of imposing upon it, as they do and ought to do. Deign to believe me; the sole role to which I aspire to the render myself useful, in a small way. Send me to join the masons, whom I envy and admire.”
“Milord has forbidden you any contact with the outside; his orders are formal.”
“In that case, Father, find me a task inside, a true task that serves my fellows, I beg you.”
“I’ll think about it, and when I’ve obtained Milord’s assent, we’ll se. Go.”
The Prince went back to his cell, with the satisfaction of a man who has just decided to take the better path.
He closed all his books, saluted them politely, thanked them and bid them adieu.
A monk came to take them away in silence.
VII. The heir presumptive of a throne
discovers a better career
The prior meditated, consulted his chapter, and informed the sovereign that, seven years of solitary study having exasperated the pride of the young prince, necessity imposed recourse to new remedies to bring his mind back to sentiments of a more Christian humility.
That news fell into the Court like rain into a frog-pond; a great racket resulted from it. The Duke’s anger had calmed down a little over time, but in the murky souls of fools the rancor of vanity only ever sleeps lightly, always ready to croak at the slightest sound that awakens it; Hardouin’s started.
“Oh, the criminal, the miscreant! Oh, the incorrigible heretic! A leper without a rattle! A donkey without a stick, a hood without a head! A runt who isn’t even capable of mounting a horse dares to have ideas! I’ll give you ideas! I’ll show you what kind of wood I warm myself with! I’m Hardouin the Just!”
The bastard encouraged him. “Assuredly, my young brother is burned by pride; all that we can hope for him is that he makes his salvation in a cloister, and even that will be difficult for him, with the doctrines he professes. Outside of that refuge he’ll only be able to do harm and spread dangerous errors among your people.”
“Horns of Beelzebub, that’s certain!” cried the Duke.
“Really?” said the Duchess. “How is that possible for a child endowed by all the saints?”
“Endowed by the Devil, Madame! Know that children too well endowed make the despair of families.”
“And the misery of the world,” added Ludovic, “as soon as they become men.”
He added many other things, talking by turns about royal security, public tranquility, moral outrage, the present and the future, and he spoke so well that the necessity appeared evident of averting so many perils. At all costs, it was necessary to reduce to impotence a pretender who was known to be too inclined to insubordination, and the mildest, most indulg
ent and most paternal way was to cut his hair definitively, in default of the head.
The Duchess fainted at the idea of the tonsure, and her only son imprisoned forever behind the grilles of a monastery. But nothing could be done about it; the perfidies of the bastard prevailed; the Prior of the Fortunada received the order to shear Dieudonat and attach him to the vilest employments, in order to master his arrogance.
Thus it was done. The eighteen-year-old novice was extracted from his philosophical cell and received a new habit of coarse and solid cloth. The Prior having decided only to confer Holy Orders after a year’s novitiate in the kitchens, the Prince was sent there with a broom in his hand.
“Learn humility,” the Prior said to him, “and enter into yourself.”
Dieudonat was scarcely thinking of entering into himself, since he only aspired to get out of himself; as for feeling humiliated, he did not think about that either. He was not unaware that certain tasks were reputed to be degrading, but that appreciation seemed to him to be erroneous, and his logic refused to admit it; not only could he not conceive that labor could be dishonoring while it is honest and necessary to the common good, but, on the contrary, he judged it honorable, and more honorable still when the task involves few inherent pleasures for the mind or satisfactions for pride.
That is why, when he went downstairs after mass he went with a lively step and a light heart, full of joy at finally feeling useful for something for the first time in his life.
“To nourish one’s fellows, what a mission! Eating is a primordial urgency. People can do without books and kings, but not bread. God gives subsistence to his creatures; as a kitchen aide I shall be an aide of God.”
He learned his métier quickly. He peeled vegetables, rinsed the spoons and scrubbed the floor-tiles. The monastic rule forbade meat, so he did not have to fear the soiling that horrified him, that of blood; the pleasure that he was able to obtain from scouring the cooking pots came from his liking for cleanliness and purity; the coppers shone.
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