Dieudonat

by Edmond Haraucourt

  “The dying man for whom prayers are being said is your father. You’re going to be the Duke; the whole country is demanding you.”

  At those words Dieudonat put his hands together, moved by filial tenderness, and a cry rose from his heart to his lips: “Let my father be saved, O Lord! Render health to my father!”

  The miracle occurred, and the Duke was cured.

  As was appropriate, the first actions of the convalescent were actions of grace, and the second, acts of wrath. Because people had, before his death, disposed of his throne and gone against his decisions, that criminal audacity merited a good few gallows.

  He was reflecting along those lines when the ambassadors came back from Fortunada and presented themselves very inappropriately at the gates of the castle, with banners deployed, in order to request the recall of the disgraced prince. Hardouin received them with an impetuous face and invited them violently to mind their own business.

  In those days, the happiness and unhappiness of peoples was not within their competence; everyone knew that, city-dwellers or peasants, and no one contested an axiom so veridical. This time, however, the subjects protested against the master’s decision; Dieudonat, who had been cruelly taken away from them, was their work, they claimed, since God had made him in response to their prayers. In resisting the will of the sovereign, they were conscious of obeying the celestial will that renders men so powerful against their adversaries and so firm in their ideas. They mutinied, therefore, and in order to express their discontentment clearly they strung up the tax-collectors from trees.

  To tell the truth, those modest functionaries had nothing to do with the dispute, but their mission down here consists especially of not being liked by anyone in times of peace, and hanged immediately in times of trouble. That is why monarchs justly consider executions of that sort to be an insult to their own person, even more than a prejudice to that of their agents. Hardouin the Just became increasingly angry, and made it a point of honor to avenge his prestige. That vengeance involved further hangings, and things went from bad to worse.

  They went all the more rapidly because the bastard employed himself malevolently to maintaining anger in his father’s soul. It went to his head, as the petit bourgeoisie are wont to say, although the result is much easier to obtain among the powerful, who already have the habit of holding their heads high.

  Since the recent events, Ludovic was execrated even more than before, because the role of his influence was divined, but the hostility of worthy people earned him the sympathy of those who were not. Cut-throats and mercenaries acclaimed that adventurous captain, with whom they went on campaign. Cheers raised in his honor emerged by night from taverns; his glory was written on walls in charcoal or by the points of daggers. Ambition created a party, fear of it constituted another; groups formed, and subdivisions within the groups, with controversies and quarrels over this and that. Some wanted to set Dieudonat on the throne right away, others preferred to wait until the Duke fell ill and was buried; others did not want anything at all, but made speeches anyway. People debated, and argued; discord spread everywhere; the potentate no longer calmed down, and existence ceased to be tenable in the country that had previously been so happy.

  Ludovic judged the moment opportune to suppress his brother definitively.

  “I don’t want to worry you, Your Lordship, but it would be prudent to conceive the most serious apprehensions, now that your second son is aware of the supernatural power of which he disposes, for your misfortune.”

  “The monks swore on their heads not to reveal anything!”

  “They might have forgotten their oath after eight years, and perhaps they counted too much on your death, which was announced. The truth is that the ambitious felon uses his magic on a daily basis to cure scullions and wash cooking-pots. He might also use it against your scepter and your life. You’re at his mercy. Whatever chagrin I might experience if I’m troubling your repose, I’m fulfilling a duty in warning you.”

  Furious, the Duke cried: “Have people forgotten, then, that I’m named the Just and that I make Justice? I warned those monks! So much the worse for them, if they’ve determined their fate!”

  That same evening, a troop departed with orders to occupy the convent, raze it to the ground and kill everyone.

  When the men-at-arms arrived, in the middle of the night, Dieudonat, locked in his cell, was sleeping the vigorous slumber of his twenty years; at first, he did not hear anything of the tumult; the mercenaries, in order to be quite sure that the Prince did not escape them in some disguise, murdered everybody; that task had lasted a good half-hour, when Onesime, who was still alive and continued to have the best of intentions, volunteered to indicate to the killers the retreat of the man for whom they were searching.

  He ran to the closed door and, hammering on it, shouted to his friend: “Save yourself, Dieudonat! They’re killing us!”

  The murderers arrived behind him.

  “Kill! Kill! The Prince is there!”

  They felled poor Zime with hatchet-blows to the head and broke down the door with the same implements; blood and short hair came through the cracks; the Prince was splashed in the face by it. Could he hesitate in such circumstances to use his magic power?

  “Let the massacre cease! Amen!” he ordered.

  Instantly, the massacre ceased. But the door collapsed; the men rushed into the cell, by the light of torches, and recognized their prey.

  “It’s him! Kill! Kill!”

  Then something strange happened. Those brigands could shout, as before, but they could no longer kill. While howling furiously, they arranged themselves tranquilly in a semicircle behind the Prince without a single hand being raised against him. They stabbed him with grim gazes, but their weapons dangled at the end of their arms, motionless.

  Without paying any heed to them, Dieudonat had thrown himself on Onesime’s body, and he embraced him, weeping. He heard the warriors sniggering behind him, but the anger that another might have felt was, in his soul, an immense pity for the victim and the executioners. He turned toward the cut-throats, mildly, and asked: “Why have you killed this child, who has never done any harm?”

  “Order of the Duke and Ludovic: we’re killing everyone.”

  “Why has the Duke, my father, given that order?”

  “To suppress you and those who were conspiring with you.”

  “Then why not strike me?”

  The soldiers looked at one another with stupid expressions, and they all waited for someone else to explain the reason that prevented their actions from being in accord with their will. For want of anything better, they had recourse to a sort of laughter, which at least explained their embarrassment.

  “Have you, then, ceased to hate me since you’ve found me?”

  “We hate you. We’re friends of Ludovic!”

  “And you want my death?”

  “Yes, yes! Death to the Presumptive! Death!”

  They agitated as they yelled, with ferocious visages, but their bloody hatchets continued quivering uselessly in their fists.

  The monk raised his eyes to the heavens.

  “Oh Lord, my Lord, with what and power have you equipped the worker of miracles, whom one only obeys against one’s will, who can do anything with gestures but nothing with thoughts? I command matter, but souls escape me! But your lesson is all too intelligible, Lord, and I shall not forget it, for I have just learned that men, however brutal or inept they are, cling to their ideas more than anything else, and they will consent to anything except renouncing the form of stupidity or wickedness that they have in their conscience, and want to be inviolable, because it is their very soul—which is to say, their reason for being.”

  The mercenaries understood vaguely that that harangue tended to treat them as stupid and wicked, not to mention brutes; they were confused; they desired fervently to decapitate the orator, at the risk of making in this world and sending into the next one martyr more, but their muscles persis
ted in refusing them the satisfaction of that fantasy.

  To console themselves, they yelled: “Long live Ludovic! Ludovic on the throne! To the gibbet with Dieudonat and all those who conspire with him!”

  The Prince went past them. In order to get out of his cell he had to step over the body of the man who had been the companion of his labor and his quietude for months. He saw on the flagstones the innocent brain that had never thought about anything, and which had been opened nevertheless. He felt his heart lurch, made the sign of the cross, and, turning toward the men-at-arms, he pronounced sentence: “You will never kill again; I wish it. So let it be.”

  Then, in the shadow of the corridor, he went away, without considering that he had just deprived those brave men of their only means of earning a living. One cannot think of everything, even when one is superiorly endowed.

  In spite of their limited intelligence, the brigands took better account of the wrong that had been done to them; they set about pillaging the convent, since they had only been forbidden murder; they discovered the prior, from whom they extracted the secret of the hidden treasures by torture, while taking great care not to allow him to perish on the rack. That game of patience, in any case, appeared to amuse them considerably. The worthy abbot had begged in vain: “Kill me, for charity’s sake! Finish me!”

  “It’s forbidden.”

  When they saw that he was duly crippled for the rest of his days and nights, thy transported him, with precaution but without tenderness, into the garden of the cloister, after which they set fire to the convent, which had not been forbidden to them by anyone, and they withdrew, laden with booty, gold and gold braid, silver plate, sacred vessels and precious fabrics—everything that people had the custom of taking away, in those ages of profound piety, after every military descent on a religious house.

  In the meantime, the heir drew away across country.

  “Before anything else, it’s necessary to deliver the convent from my dangerous presence.”

  Not knowing the area at all, he marched at random, following a stony path that led upwards through a large wood.

  After he had been walking under the vault of trees for more than two hours, he reached a plateau that overlooked the mountain. At that height the branches were less dense and the traveler could perceive overhead the pink-tinted sky. He thought that the sun was about to rise, and that was why, before going down the other side of the mountain, he wanted to look again at the place where he had lived, in order to salute it with an adieu. He scaled the rock and turned back toward the plain.

  Horror! Instead of the dawn that he thought he would see on the horizon, an immense fire was blazing, red and yellow, beyond the blue dome of the forest.

  “The convent’s burning! They’ve set fire to the convent! Flames, extinguish! I wish it, I order it!”

  The flames died down at his order, and he collapsed on to the rock; he sobbed into his hands, raising his head at intervals to watch the fire diminishing.

  “Alas! What remains of the unfinished church of which I admired the brave ascent? And the library, where all the thought of centuries was accumulated? And the cell where the poverty of our intellect was revealed to me, and the kitchens where I learned to benefit from manual labor, what remains of them?”

  Wisps of flames and sparks were still spurting from the furnace and swirling in clouds; against the sky, which was beginning to pale in the east, spirals of opaque smoke were unwinding in the breeze and fleeing with it.

  “The books are flying away in light! The books are drifting in darkness! The blackened pages are birds! The great ideas are clouds! It is accumulated effort that the win is carrying over my head, which will fall back as dust, disseminated to the four corners of the world. It is thought in ashes, only good now to soil a blade of grass! Oh, nullity, nullity of effort!”

  In the ending night, the monk was cold, and he shivered. Finally, the sun appeared; the flames, which had finished dying away, bright a little while ago, became obscure beneath the resplendent radiance that gilded the countryside.

  “Yes, yes, that’s it. Human thought is only a glimmer for the night, but when daylight falls upon it, it’s no more than a dull mist.”

  He stood up.

  “That lesson too, I understand, Lord, and I know where to go.”

  An exalted soul inspired him. Standing on the summit in his coarse robe, he extended his arms, and his silhouette, with large sleeves, was cut out in the middle of the matinal sky like that of an eagle about to take flight. With a final glance he embraced the land that he was about to quit forever. The convent was no more than a heap of ashes from which a few pink puffs of smoke were escaping.

  “Adieu, house...you were a peaceful dwelling…this is what men make of the peace of others...”

  He beat the air with his open hands and inhaled the odor of ash.

  “The peace of others, this is what I make of it myself! I bring disaster into the homes of those who welcome me, and for that, Lord, it is sufficient that I’m different from your other children by virtue of my birth and your gifts. Misfortune is attached to the man who does not resemble everyone else; he is harmful without meaning to be. Ruins were made within me while I was studying in books, and ruins around me when I peeled carrots. The exceptional being can only live in solitude. Lead me into the desert, then Lord, and permit me no longer to analyze anything, since analysis leads me astray. In order for me to live in peace, enable me to become simple again, and in order that I cease to do harm, enable me to live alone.”

  His arms fell back, his head inclined toward his breast, and the man who had seemed to be about to take flight like a eagle a few minutes before fell to his knees, like a man.

  X. Dieudonat refuses to believe that he is indispensable

  Everything encouraged the belief that he was about to weep, for he was sentimental; finally, he stood up and went down the opposite slope of the rock.

  “Where am I going? It doesn’t matter, as long as I quit my father’s realm.”

  Again he marched through woods for hours. When he emerged from the forest he found himself on a slope in the final foothills of the mountains. At the bottom of the hill, a cluster of roofs was cozily huddled in a nest of orchards, and the church in the middle rose up as if on watch, like the mother of the houses. He was admiring the restfulness of that pretty place when he saw an animated troop of men emerge from it, who ran toward him.

  Those peasants were armed with scythes and plowshares, and with the same fury that the exile had already seen in his brother’s soldiers they were shouting the same things, except that the name had changed:

  “Death to Ludovic! Death!”

  A city-dweller, better dressed than the rest, was marching at their head; they reached the monk and surrounded him, all talking at the same time.

  “Have you arrived from Fortunada?”

  “Is the convent on fire?”

  “Have you come through the forest?”

  “Have you encountered Dieudonat?”

  “His enemies are looking for him, to kill him!”

  “I know.”

  “He isn’t dead?”

  “No,”

  “Long live Dieudonat! We’ll make him Duke! We’ll make him King! Ludovic will be hanged, and those who conspired with him! We’ll find our Dieudonat and seat him on the throne.”

  “Worthy people,” said the Prince, “I know the man you’re looking for, and he doesn’t want anyone to be murdered in his name. You ought to return home in peace. That Dieudonat doesn’t want to be King, or Duke.”

  Then the city-dweller, a man of short stature and great verbosity, who had come from the city to whip up the country dwellers, advanced toward the monk and spoke under his nostrils. He had raised his right arm and his speech was violent. It began with the words: “Where do you come from, monk, and why are you interfering?” The first part of the discourse, entirely consecrated to irony and insult, delighted the audience. The second part, consecrated to eloque
nce, began with the words: “And all of you who are oppressed...” Both parts, taken together, tended to demonstrate that Dieudonat was indispensable to the wellbeing of the country.

  The peroration concluded: “This monk is nothing but a secret agent paid by the enemies of the people. They want to deceive the people! Long live Dieudonat the Indispensable!”

  A frenetic hurrah filled the landscape. The Prince waited patiently for that amorous wrath to die down slightly, and when he thought he could make himself heard he ventured: “Even if I were endowed with the vast genius and virtues that someone has been kind enough to describe to you, that wouldn’t imply...”

  “It isn’t a matter of you, monk, but of the Indispensable Dieudonat! Do you hear? The In-dis-pen-sable!”

  “It’s a matter of all men, and none is indispensable. I have much to tell you: the most powerful men of genius, and even those who push power as far as becoming what you would call benefactors of humanity, by endowing it with some revelation that changes the face of the world, are scarcely more indispensable than the others. If they hadn’t been born, be sure that others would have been born in their place, to do or say the same things, for what is necessary to the progress of the world isn’t the individual but the action, and when the action has become possible, by the same token, it becomes necessary. Necessary! And by that, understand that it must be produced, whatever the organ might be that is employed for its production. All progress is a total that is realized in its hour; nothing will prevent that realization when the time has come. Men of genius are those in which is manifest, not their own strength, but that of their race and their epoch; they summarize and they express, condensers of human possibility, and that possibility, or capacity, engenders them spontaneously by the very logic of its normal evolution.”