Content enough to have string out a chaplet of paradoxes, the philosopher stood up.
“O little animals and big animals, my sisters, I am worth less than each of you, since I have taken from each of you, every time that I could, instincts that I have made into my vices. But I am also worth more than you since, by virtue of doing too much, I have been ingenious to the point of conceiving by myself the limit of doable things. A limit that I impose myself, that that is my entire profit, but it is magnificent! While each of you only knows her own right, I have invented the right of others, and I call it my duty!”
He drew breath, as befits orators after a significant pause, while the audience applauds. Nothing applauded, but the solitary had accustomed himself a long time ago only talking to himself. He went on:
“The Nerves of humans determined it thus, when their hyperesthesis had developed to the point of making us sense, as if they were our own, the dolors of that which surrounds us. And it is thus that nature saw spreading over the indifferent world the flower that emerged from us: Pity!”
At the name of a new flower, the calices agitated in the finishing day.
“More beautiful than all of you is that flower of my soul! The gardens of the Lord have nothing similar. Oh, I would be glad, Lord, to have had the glory of inventing it, but my folly has been seeking it outside myself. A purely human relativity, I know full well that it is in me alone, as if born of me alone, a creation of the creature that I am, a lie that I have made into a verity, since I sense it, a chimera of which I make a reality, since I apply it!”
In the enthusiasm of articulating words that seemed to him to be definitive, he took a long step forward. The young Spider happened to be exactly where his foot came down; she died of it, and her posterity with her.
That murder upset the orator; in order to refresh his emotion, he drank a ladleful of clear water; at a single stroke he annihilated a hundred million existences that were swimming in that water.
“I kill when I drink, I kill when I move; the world that is turning around me mocks my axioms, and puts me to the proof; the law of the universe reigns over me as over all. To do good and abstain from evil is the desire of my unreasonable reason, when the least of my movements multiplies good and evil, without distinction, around my gestures. But so what? I am the master of the intention, the king of my interior idea, and the morality that I am seeking, applies to me in accordance with my rule: if the two conquests of the human intellect really are Thought and Pity, I shall strive to honor both of them.”
Dusk fell. The nocturnal animals emerged for the third phase of the quotidian massacre, and fear crawled under the blue-tinted branches, a landscape of prey.
“Enough, harsh mother! You have cried to me loudly enough that my pity will sterilize the world and that God does not want it. But into maintaining it in spite of your order, I shall put my human nobility, and in the universal consciencelesssness, I shall affirm conscience. If Nature has God for her, it is not necessary that one knows it, and even urgent to assert the opposite; that is why we have made our Pity an attribute of pitiless gods. What am I saying? We have made God against the gods.”
He made the sign of the cross, raising his eyes toward the clouds, which were still rosy.
“Lord Jesus, I am your disciple and I shall persist in your path, for I know now the double formula of my role: Effort and Pity!”
He went back into his grotto, said his prayer and went to bed, satisfied in the belief that he had found the means to bring into accord the immorality of the world with the morality of Christ.
“The law of Effort and the law of Pity; I now possess the double verity. But, alas, and twice alas, am I not the only one among humans to whom the application of one, as well as the other, is forbidden by a deadly gift? Effort is forbidden to me because my wishes are realized; my pity is dangerous since I harm those to whom I come close. I am the being of exception, the recluse of my privilege, condemned to live alone. Because a power has been put into me that surpasses the human, I am a lesser man than any other, incapable of the human task. Charity orders me to remain here. I shall stay here, Lord, sterilely, I shall remain here, and since nothing more is permitted to me, I shall confess the law of Sacrifice in the heart of the realm of Instincts.”
He went to sleep searching for the labor in which he might affirm his faith without harming anyone; he was still searching when he woke up.
“A labor that would be difficult and assiduous, in order to celebrate Effort, but simultaneously platonic, in order to cause no new harm, a material toil to the glory of the Idea... What?”
A block of marble overhung the entrance of the grotto, nine feet high and fifteen wide, assailed by wild plants; as he contemplated it, Dieudonat remembered the masons that he had seen sculpting a church behind his cell.
“A manual laborer of art? That is what would respond to my program... That’s it! I’ll rid you of instinctive nature, O stone, by removing the parasites that are biting you in order to live, and I shall wash you and polish you in order to make you a symbolic fronton attesting the divination of Man by Charity!”
For several nights he searched for the motto to engrave on the slab when the slab had been cleared; finally, he opted for a quote from Saint Matthew:
BEATI MISERICORDES
QUONIAM IPSI MISERICORDIAM
CONSEQUENTUR
“Blessed be the merciful, for they shall obtain mercy!”
He set to work without delay. But while he bloodied his hands in tearing away the brambles and the ivy, he was already wondering whether the promises of the Evangelist might not be a trifle temeritous, and whether it was really certain that Effort and Pity would be recompensed in this world or the other...
“It might be better to say that they carry their own recompense within them.”
XIII. Dieudonat contrives two masterpieces,
one with talent, the other with genius, which disgust him with the fine arts
Right away, he got a taste for what he was going to do, such that the initial project acquired an unforeseen amplitude from one day to next, even from one hour to the next, and sometimes from one minute to the next.
By the time he had cleared the marble, everything had already changed. The motto that was going to be merely inscribed on the unpolished stone first acquired the modest frame of a border; shortly thereafter, a banderole with beautiful curves seemed preferable. To attach the banderole, two nails were recognized to be necessary, and then two angels offered their collaboration to replace the nails, by lifting the ends of the phylactery; almost immediately, their unimportant wings gained more notably proportions, demanding to be deployed above them, in order to make it understood that they were arriving from afar and on high, which is to say, from Heaven. But a bare interval was displayed between the two divine emissaries; logic dictated the addition of other angels, in the course of travel, smaller because of the distance, closer to God; and the image of God then became indispensable. What if, at the summit of the composition, Christ presented the cross on which he had died out of pity or humankind? That would be good! It would be better still if the procession of human miseries were unfurling in the foreground, in order to serve as a foundation for the ensemble; one could see therein all those who are suffering, and everyone knows that they are innumerable, so that there is no shortage of models...
The author was enthused by his idea; it woke him up at night; as soon as first light he went to plant himself, upright, before his block, and he searched the thickness with the penetrating eyes of his intellect in order to caress in advance the silhouettes of his dream emerging from their matrix and modeling themselves for him alone.
“It will be beautiful!”
He said that with passion, but without vanity; in any case, as a true artist, he only admired his work in the future without ever making much of the present or the results obtained, in which he only saw a preliminary path, a promise.
“What an amusing métier I’ve found here! I
t can’t be denied: the plastic arts are the integral occupation of humans, the human task par excellence, since it requires the collaboration of our double nature, mind and body, mental labor and manual labor. What a magnificent combination! I was wrong not to think of it sooner, and I really believe that, this time, I’ve finally discovered the best employment of my time.”
Under the blows of the mallet, his steel chisel entered into the marble, made fire spring forth, and gave birth to forms.
“Yes, yes, it will be beautiful! It isn’t yet, but it will become so. In the meantime, I’m procuring incontestable satisfactions from it: I’m creating! Perhaps one day, later, in passing by here, a soul similar to mine will take pleasure in stopping before my work, as I intend to perfect it.
But the pleasure diminished as the work approached its definitive state.
“It won’t be as beautiful as I imagined.”
Nevertheless, the wings of the angels were well imitated; their robes fluttered very nicely in the wind of their flight through the air; from the height of his cloud, Lord Jesus looked down with a true expression of pity; in the frieze of the miserable, naked men and children, bitten by beasts and pricked by devils, mingled with crowned kings, draped women and mitered bishops, and they all seemed to be fleeing, some raising their eyes toward the heavens, and others collapsing on the ground...
“It’s a little beautiful, but not much.”
He worked for an entire year.
“That’s singular. I’ve done everything exactly, or I thought I’d done everything exactly, as I wanted to do it; it promised to be superb, in the time when the mass had neither holes nor protrusions; to prevent it from resembling my idea, therefore, there was only a little excess stone; but now that I’ve removed that superfluous stone, I can no longer see my dream at all.”
He finished off the faces and their expressions, the hands and the feet, the feathers and the fabrics. He took particular care with the Lord’s face. It was finished.
“Well, there it is! It’s not beautiful at all. Frankly, it bears as much resemblance to what I foresaw as the braying of a donkey to the music of paradise.”
That disappointment saddened him, a little because of the trouble he had taken in vain, and a great deal by reason of the wrong that he had done to the landscape.
“I’ve spoiled the work of God by adding my collaboration to it; that wall was more majestic, incontestably, when the primitive stone was inhabited by moss between the ivy and the brambles.”
By dint of having it incessantly before his eyes, he became horrified by his folly, which he found grotesque over the grotto, and which imposed itself there like a stone criticism, a perpetual reproach to his presumption. When he returned to the shelter after a walk in the woods, it was necessary for him to see that ugliness again, even more aggressive than usual, waiting for him and contaminating everything. He wished upon it the invasion of vegetation and nests, and promised himself that he would never again attempt the virginity of a pebble.
Now, he was about to realize his masterpiece on the very same day that he vowed not to attempt it again; furthermore, he executed it very rapidly and in the most unexpected fashion.
Since he had disappeared from the world, the principal concern of the people of his father’s Duchy had been to discover some trace of him, some in order to give him the crown and others in order to kill him. Hatred being, in general, more active than amity, his enemies were bound to discover him long before his friends. Ludovic’s police brought back items of news to their master that concorded strangely. A certain fugitive monk had once been seen near a certain village and had claimed to be the fugitive prince; in a neighboring region a monk had been received by a man named Ruprecht, and since then, a certain woodcutter claimed to have seen a certain anchorite wandering over a mountain...
The usurper did not want to leave to anyone else the care of verifying an identity that was so important to him. He set forth, determined to encounter his brother, and to stab him with his own hand, in order to be quite sure that, this time, the task would be carried out properly.
He therefore came, alone and well armed, had the mountain pointed out to him, found the clearing and saw the man—and he recognized his rival in a savage sitting on a tree trunk and talking to a turtle dove perched on his index finger.
He ran forward, howling, as was his custom: “Kill! Kill!”
Naively, the anchorite thought that it was the attack of a hunter.
“Don’t kill this bird! Stop!”
His order immobilized the assailant, his arm high, his leg stiff, his face contracted with anger, and Dieudonat recognized the Bastard in his turn.
Then, at the memory of Onesime and the other cadavers, indignation stirred his gentle soul, and he could not help crying out: “Wicked child, you kill incessantly! Your hatred claims too many victims! Fratricide! Here you are, fixed in your murderous gesture! I wish, for your punishment, that you might remain in that attitude and that you be changed into a statue, like Lot’s wife, in order to serve as a lesson to the wicked!”
Scarcely had he uttered those words than Sire Ludovic was transmuted into limestone and became his own effigy.
The sculptor has only spoken in that fashion because of the habitude of sculpture, and simply because each of us brings things back to the one that occupies him; not for a second had he thought about making use of his magical power, and the abrupt metamorphosis stupefied him painfully. He launched himself toward his calcareous relative with a cry of terror and tenderness, taking Heaven as a witness that he had not wanted the sinner’s death, that he had spoken in anger, that he repented...
It was no use. The words that one speaks in anger, even if one does not think them, do as much harm as the others, if not more. He learned that at the expense of his neighbor, as all experience is acquired.
He also tried, in order to restore life to the deceased, to formulate a wish contrary to the first, in all sincerity this time. It was wasted effort; his wishes were realized irrevocably, as the Devil had promised. He tore his hair, circled around the new marble, touched it and caressed it, called Ludovic by name, embraced his sculpted boots, implored his pardon and begged him to come back to life, but even though the statue, with its menacing arm, its braced hamstrings and its contracted features, was “full of movement,” as art critics say, it did not move.
While lamenting from the bottom of his heart, Dieudonat could not help casting over the magisterial sculpture a professional and admiring glance; the chagrins of an artists always have one eye open.
“Oh, how beautiful it is! What suppleness in the fabrics! And the hands! It’s perfect! The hard bones, the elastic flesh, a skin whose tan one can divine! And that face of bestial fury, with that mouth yelling in silence! What a diabolical appearance! Poor devil, all the same. Yes, poor devil, for he’s in Hell, having died in mortal sin, and by my fault.”
He recommenced mourning the bad lot, but as soon as he changed place and perceived the marble from a new angle he recommenced admiring it.
“Prodigious!”
It was indeed a prodigy, and the desolate magician knew that only too well; he beat his breast as a sign of remorse. He turned away and drew away, hiding his eyes with his hands in order no longer to see his crime, but he came back immediately, recalled by some detail.
“What workmanship! Discouraging. When I compare this block of life to the worthless product of my patience, it’s like red blood beside vegetable juice. However, I applied myself the first time and only succeeded in spoiling the stone; the second time, it’s true, I’ve spoiled life.”
He struck his forehead.
“I’ve understood! I understand! Everything is explicable, and it’s obvious: life only exists in works in proportion to the life with which one inoculates them, and talent is merely the implement of transfusion. It’s the soul that it’s necessary to put into matter, in order that it has a soul, and I’ve imprisoned one inside this. To make life surge forth can only be do
ne at the expense of life, and someone has to die or extract it from himself in order for something to be born or to palpitate. Every work of great art is made of an existence, or at least a torture, and this is vigor fixed. Art is vampiric: from oneself or one’s surroundings it’s necessary to draw, to pump, to infuse. Well, that, of course, yes, I understand, and this block is howling at me through its beautiful mouth that the only marble of genius is condensed dolor, just as the only ink is dolor in a bottle.”
He swore never to risk himself in the arts again, where the cost was really too dear. He ended up taking refuge in his grotto, in order no longer to see his atrocious masterpiece, and he threw himself to his knees with his nose against the rough wall.
“I have killed!”
He spent the rest of the day in lamentations and prayer. He spent all night there.
At one moment, he went outside. The new statue was very white in the moonlight. He recoiled fearfully, and went back into his burrow.
“I’ve killed my brother, like Cain. Punish me, Lord!”
He had no need to go to the other world in search of an abode of expiation. He possessed it in his domicile, in the very heart of his little domain; amid the cabbages and the carrots, the excessively beautiful statue replaced the imps, and it made him suffer superabundantly, having all the forks of remorse with which to jab its man. It made itself very evident; at daybreak as by moonlight he found it faithful to its post, and as soon as he reappeared, it welcomed him by crying out, with its ever-open and round mouth: “You’ve killed me!”
It cried soundlessly, but he heard it marvelously.
Naturally, he thought immediately of seeking another shelter.
“Stay with me, and that will be your penance. Henceforth, the victim and the murderer will live face to face.”
“God’s will be done...”
Dieudonat Page 10