“Soon?”
“Not for a few months; a semester, I think, will be necessary to smooth out a few difficulties that I glimpse: the resistance of the father, the temporary insufficiency of my situation. It will all work out.”
“The young lady is waiting for you?”
“You said it! She’s waiting for me, even though she doesn’t know me, just as I’m searching for her without knowing her; for I’m categorically resolved to marry her without delay, but it’s important that I find her first, and for that I have a very precise description: she’s rich, very rich, young, unless she’s mature, brunette or blonde, and perhaps a red-head, tall or short, pretty or ugly. There’s her portrait, sire monk, a striking resemblance; if you know where she lives, take me here, and I’ll take charge of the rest: the child will adore me, for I’m well able to convince her of it. A task all the easier because I don’t pretend to eternal amour. Nothing lasts, but everything last long enough, if one knows how to lead one’s amours to the altar.”
“And afterwards?”
“Afterwards? Come what may, cavalier! In the saddle for life! When a woman has put her foot in the stirrup, I’ll have the rest of her.”
The captain of the brigands, slumped over the table, his eyelids half-dead, was gazing at his friend with a troubled eye, shaking his head. Through the hair and wine of his moustache, he muttered an insult whose meaning the monk did not understand, heaving only read the substantive in a summary of ichthyology.6 Instead of taking offense, Gontran d’Avatar clapped his hands.
“I accept the augury, old chap, and in a couple of years, I’ll teach you by my example what the métier is worth, when it’s professed before God and the notaries. I’ll be bourgeois and sworn, administrator of financial societies, alderman and capitalist, Commander de Saint-Jacques. I’ll have my valets, my flatterers, my hunts and my carriages; I’ll offer fêtes to princes and prizes to inventors; I’ll encourage the arts, the sciences and virtue; I’ll be considered, my friend, and considerable.”
Ruprecht the Pug-nosed was asleep on his folded arm. Gontran the Rogue, whom drunkenness was urging to confidences, fell back on the monk and developed his projects for a further hour. Suddenly, however, he had the sensation of talking to a useless audience and working without profit; immediately, he got to his feet, very politely, extended his right hand, bowed with an abrupt twitch of the back of the neck, smiled, showed his white teeth one last time, and went to lie down on a mat. Dieudonat was left alone in the middle of the room.
“This evening, I’ve heard the two conquerors of the earth; Lord, you have enabled me to put my finger on the two forces that reign over this world: Violence and Intrigue. I wasn’t born for this world.”
His heart was beating in his breast: “Outside society! Outside society!”
He drew away from the table and, in the vague torchlight, he began to walk toward the exit.
A seminal stopped him. “Who goes there? Where are you going?”
“Outside society.”
“Pass.”
He emerged from the subterrain, and was dazzled by the light. The day was ending, however; the sun, having disappeared behind the mountains, was still tinting the sky bronze, but in the depths of the gorge the night was already amassing blue mists, and from one minute to the next it was climbing along the steep rocks. Up above, little trees were designed like lace; down below, others were melting into the haze; a divine peace blessed the landscape. The crescent of the moon was rising above the treetops.
Then the Prince cried: “O Nature, Nature! Before you, I render thanks to God, who has given it to me to see you; seeing is the consolation for hearing.”
XII. The anchorite obtains large and small animals,
and some information about himself.
After he had walked for many days through mountains and plains he arrived in a country that was no less savage than magnificent. For a week he had not encountered a man or a woman.
“Here I can live without being harmful to anyone; here I can meditate without the fruit of my deductions contaminating the minds of others; here I can gain a quotidian subsistence without it being necessary for me to have recourse, like the Gontrans and Ruprechts of the world, to violence or intrigue; here I can make in peace my happiness for this world and my salvation for the other.”
He installed himself in a nice grotto, which he furnished with sand and foliage. He lacked implements of labor, and also a few utensils of primordial necessity; in spite of the repugnance he had for using his magic power, he did not think it sinful to ask Heaven to grant him the indispensable tools. He had them immediately and set to work with a great joy.
“I’ve reconstituted the Earthly Paradise, the true one, the one in which a man, in an admirable location, gains his nourishment by the sweat of his entire body.”
He worked, prayed, thought, breathed the air and gazed. He did not suffer at all from the solitude, having discovered that it did not exist; deserted mountains are richly inhabited places, much more populous and much more alive than cultivated terrains, and even capital cities. Generally, we pay no heed to them, and doubtless that is out of scorn, but Dieudonat, less proud than a man because he was more than an ordinary man, paid attention to every creature.
Very quickly he had the sensation, among the animals, of living among people. His fellows, whom he had only known until then by reading, he found again here in reality, and he recognized them. All the modes of life in use among us were renewed at ground level and under the branches; there were republics of ants, kingdoms of bees, cities of woodlice, errant insects armored like knights, butterflies dressed as princes, spiders lying in ambush in their lacy fortresses like barons in their towers and more or less poetic birds who sang from dawn till dusk in order to take turns with those who sang from dusk till dawn.
They were friends. In the morning he received the visits of rabbits and hinds, not to mention stags and wild boar; at midday lizards basked in the sun around him, and in the evening wolves came politely to wish him good night; even bears willingly frequented the vicinity of his abode. Large and small animals had promptly recognized him for one of their own, and were no longer frightened of him, for animals enjoy a particular instinct that designates the less harmful people to them; the most timid creatures allowed themselves to be caressed by him, and he took an infinitely sweet pleasure in that confidence of the weak, whom we could crush by closing our hand, who know that, and who go to sleep nevertheless in our hand.
One thing troubled him, however; in that universal fraternity he observed an evident and undeniable lacuna. He lived on the best terms with everyone, but it was impossible to enter into amicable communications with the insects. For his part, he experienced an epidermal repulsion in their regard; he was a little afraid of them, without knowing why; for their part, they gave the impression of not seeing him, and treating him as a slope or a spring; they climbed over him, tickling him as they walked, sometimes sucking a drop of his blood, and going away without apology or salute, quitting the human landscape to go elsewhere. All the polite advances he risked remained without effect.
“Funny people!”
Science had taught him very little about them, and their limited dimensions scarcely permitted study; in the hope of that he might understand them better if he saw them more clearly, he formulated the wish for a biconvex lens. Immediately, a magnifying-glass of compressed ether fell from the sky, ready mounted. It was an article of the first choice, magnifying objects abut two thousand times. The insects entered the field of the miraculous lens.
“Eh…? Ah…! Oh…! Eh! Now I understand why my skin was afraid of them, and my skin wasn’t so stupid!”
Dieudonat was amazed by that phantasmagoria of miscellaneous horrors. In taking on the proportions of mammals, those minuscule creatures agitated in nightmares, so formidable that by comparison, tigers and alligators gave the impression of being inoffensive. Eyes launched terror, mouths chewed menace; pincers and claws, saws and rasps
, daggers and drills, a whole arsenal of tortures, all the instruments of hate, were exercised under the glass disk with a metallic tranquility, brilliantly deploying the pitiless force of their unconsciousness.
“They’re beautiful, yes, truly, with an atrocious beauty, which might well be that of the evil angels fallen into Hell; one might believe oneself in Gehenna, or at least on another planet, if any exist somewhere, as scholars claim, or even in the first days of this one, when the exuberance of a globe in parturition threw out monsters in order to sate its fury to invent perpetually and no matter what. Perhaps the Creator amused himself sculpting in jewels these paradoxes of his genius, to which he refused the honor of normal dimensions. In any case, it’s appropriate to thank Him, whose wisdom and goodness deigned to forbid the development of these imperceptible monstrosities, which would terrorize all living creatures if God had made them on a larger scale. God does well what he does!”
He discovered unusual mores. Those creatures lived in a permanent state of immorality; endowed with all vices, accustomed to all crimes, they took pleasure in them with so much candor that the Ruprechts and Gontrans, the tigers and reptiles of human society, appeared in their turn as petty saints.
Every species had its own very characteristic vice, the exercise of which was indispensable to the very existence of the individual and the entire species. He was obliged to observe very clearly that on every creature that lives, a certain form of evil, or what we call thus, is imposed as an essential law of its race, and imposes itself with the ineluctable character of a fatality, against which attempts at disobedience are neither permissible nor possible: such is necessity.
Dieudonat replied: “God does well what is necessary.”
But why was it necessary?
“To them, an order to do; to us, an order not to do; and the two contradictory wills emanate from common Master; which is to say, a unique principle. Now, God cannot contradict himself, since he is God; and since I don’t understand, it’s therefore quite simply that I’m an imbecile; I knew that already.”
The certainty of not being subtle has never prevented a man from undertaking intellectual tasks; Dieudonat did what another might have done and resolved, for the honor of the good God, to discover, or at least to investigate, the basis of a natural morality. To that end, he undertook to study with precision and method the mores and characters, not only of insects but of all the animals present around him. Similarly, he surveyed the gestures of plants, and was not very surprised to observe that they possessed, to a lesser degree, sensations identical to those of the animal kingdom, and instincts, volitions and even vices.
“Creation is decidedly very complex.”
Thus engaged in his essay on universal morality, Dieudonat got bogged down and the work did not advance. Every time he thought he had edified a general law, based on patent facts, other facts just as patent came along to demolish it in haste, in order to propose a new one, absolutely contrary.
“My word, the animals are treating me exactly like the philosophers; the more they teach me, the less I understand what I’ve learned.”
He bombarded them with questions.
“Why are you? What do you want? What do you prove? Give me the key to your enigma in order that I can see clearly into mine.”
The animals were used to the speech of the biped who talked to himself, and were no more concerned about it than any other song.
One evening, when he was reasoning, according to his custom, sitting on a stone outside his grotto, his piteous reflections had inclined his head toward the ground. Then he noticed, to the left of his left foot, a blonde Spider who, taking advantage of the nuptial emotion, was slyly devouring her young husband without the amorous fellow budging from his post. Revolted by such an abuse of confidence, the moralist looked away, and, at the same moment, to the right of his right foot. He saw a Bee who, while drinking the soul of a golden bud, was allowing herself to be gripped from behind by a Wasp, and the later was unwinding her viscera like a tangled skein, in order to nibble more at her ease the golden meanders to which the Bee continued tranquilly to send sugar; and the Wasp, in her turn, was so attentive to that living repast that she did not even deign to notice the indiscretion of a Mantis occupied in gnawing her abdomen.
“That’s too much! They’re making a chain. They tolerate being eaten, and don’t even notice it, provided that they’re alimenting their own poor little bodies!”
An amorous Hind that was passing by gracefully placed her delicate hoof on the Mantis, who was cut in two, without that incident being able to interrupt her feast or the others.
“Insects exaggerate, Lord! That one might sacrifice one’s life to one’s passions I can conceive, rigorously. But that death accompanied by slow tortures appears to be no more than a detail devoid of importance before the double appetite of nourishment and amour is excessive!”
The work of the flesh went on serenely, along with the agonies.
“Let’s see, let’s see... This is natural, since it exists in nature. Let us take account of these excesses and extract the principle: to nourish the individual and perpetuate the species, by order, such are the two goals of the creature, and hence its morality. The dolors that might result from that do not count in the totality—which is to say, in the universe—which, in consequence, is ignorant of pity and cruelty, corollaries of those sufferings. Modesty or immodesty, purity or impurity, corollaries of amour, count for no more; nothing is either good or bad, everything is, and death is only life in function. Am I right this time, Lord?”
No voice protested; the breeze rocked the Clematis hanging around him, and the Meadow-sweets erect on their stems, and everything nodded: “Yes,” swinging their perfumed tresses at the friction, by which the evening air was embalmed.
“Life wants to live, and that is the entire morality of a plant. In other words, the goal of life is life. I’ve reflected hard to arrive at that sublime discovery. Dom Ambrosius would treat it as a pleonasm or a tautology, and he wouldn’t be wrong, but bah! That law has the advantage over many others of being logical, simple to grasp and easy to remember. Shall I leave it at that?
But the torture of animals in the throes of death drew his eye and thought toward it.
“I can’t, however, let them suffer indefinitely...”
He did not want to touch the Spider, because of the future she was already carrying in her entrails, but the others? He hesitated for two full minutes; then, suddenly, he stretched out his leg and, abruptly, he crushed with his bare foot, the Mantis, the Wasp, the Bee and the golden Bud; the sole of his foot clenched with horror over the final wriggle of the quadruple death.
“Were they suffering as much as I imagine? Assuredly not, and it’s even possible that the patient individuals, all together, were suffering less than the spectator; alone, I was translating ganglionic sensations into cerebral pain...”
At those words, he interrupted himself; a flash of light had just penetrated him, and under that new light, engendered by the words, he believed that he had glimpsed the admirable verity.
“Aha, my comrade! Cerebral, you say? Doesn’t the big difference between humans and animals, between their morality and ours, arise quite simply from the dissimilarity of the nervous systems? Our is remarkable among all, and I won’t go into the question of whether it was like that from the start or became so gradually, whether we’re born monsters or become monsters. Either way, our cerebellum, unique in the sublunar world, pushes hypertrophy to the point of calling itself a cerebrum, and, from progress to progress, that organ of exception has been developed to the extreme by the usage that we have been able to make of it, and which we have made of it.
“Consequently, if I’m not mistaken, we see the manifestation of two series of perfectly logical reactions, on the one hand proceeding from the nerves exasperated by the reveries of the encephalum, and on the other emanating from the encephalum overworked by the nerves. In fact, dear and defunct master—for it’s to you that
I’m addressing myself, Dom Ambrosius; listen to me without getting impatient—in that precious and marvelously sensitive organism, a phenomenon could not fail to be produced: our purely animal sensations quickly became more subtle, thanks to the intrusion of the intelligence that applied itself to extracting the best return from our senses; appetite was stimulated. The decupled organism decupled its needs, and our mind became ingenious in discovering, within us, as well us around us, subsidies of sensuality.
“We harvest them here and there, by imitation, by assimilation, in order to increase ourselves. While every species had its own instinct, and its predominant pleasure, we wanted them all at once: we would have liked to be all of nature at the same time. Certain capacities of certain animals remain prohibited to us? We salute them with a regret, but without renouncing the hope of acquiring them some day, and our desire invites inventors to supply us with the means; in the meantime, in order to substitute for the absence of the forbidden joys, we multiply to their highest power those that are permitted to us.…
“Can you grasp that, Dom Ambrosius? The first result of the cerebrum: exaggerated instincts become vices, since vices are nothing but exaggerated instincts.
“But we made too much of them! We abused the original reminiscences; we exasperated nature in pretending to obey her, we emerged from her in thinking that we were entering into her. The necessity of a brake was imposed, without which the race would not have taken long to perish of exhaustion. And the second result was that the cerebrum itself, that multiplier of the nerves, that provoker of excess, invented what was required to save us from the peril caused by its role, and produced the brake in question: Morality.”
The soul of Dom Ambrosius made no reply, and Dieudonat continued;
“You’ll tell me that Morality varies with climates, races and epochs. Well, my master, that detail is of no importance. The important thing, common to all men, but belonging to them alone, is their intention to have a morality, their firm determination to apply a brake, whatever it might be.”
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