“Sometimes, sir, even too frequently.”
“No doubt, these coarse fellows, having heard the admirable good sense of your reflections and your deductions, have replied by comparing your intellect to various terrestrial or marine animals, such as the donkey, the calf, the goose, the oyster and the mussel, or even parts of the male and female body, or common to both sexes, such as the foot, the...”
“That has happened to me, in fact, sir, but such base insults cannot afflict me.”
“I’m entirely convinced of it, and, if I’m not mistaken, you console yourself without delay, in thinking that your interlocutors are mere imbeciles.”
“Idiots.”
“You should be able to tell me, then, what distinction you make, Master Leonard between intelligence and imbecility.”
“Imbecility was them.”
“Indubitably: the imbecile is always the other, but the intelligent man, of high intelligence, is, therefore, Master Leonard?”
“The contrary of the imbecile.”
“Are you very sure of that, and don’t you think that, far from being the contrary, he’s simply the exaggeration? The wind said just now that there is one difference between them, only one, and I’ve glimpsed it since then in comparing myself to you.”
“Excuse me, sir, I’m awaited...”
“You don’t have to hurry, then; and I conclude: the thinker is the man who thinks the most stupidities, since he thinks more than others. For it is necessary to recognize, sir, that men of the highest intelligence and the most vivid imagination are at risk of committing monstrous stupidities of which idiots cannot conceive. Certain heights of aberration demand faculties almost of genius, and a profligacy of ideas that initially supposes a wealth of ideas, and which, for that very reason, is prohibited to average souls. Imbeciles remain struck by stupor in the face of those prodigies, which far surpass them, and they shrug their shoulders in pity. They are not wrong.”
“You’re not wrong, sir, I bid you good evening. I’m awaited.”
“Await also, Master Leonard; I would like, as a souvenir, to give you a present.”
“A gift, sir?”
The petty bourgeois approached with an agreeable expression; lunatics sometimes have abrupt generosities, from which honest men can draw profit.
“Yes, Master Leonard, a gift. I know a man whom Heaven has endowed, it appears, in a very exceptional fashion, and who has been cursing it for a quarter of a century; his mother received the assurance of the genius that he would have; he has read innumerable books and retained what he read; his brain is a encyclopedia, and if you have the slightest desire to possess that magisterial cranium, instead of yours, you see me entirely disposed to make you a gift of it.
The worthy retiree, what had been vaguely hoping for a snuff-box or a cravat pin, and to whom intellectual treasures were offered, recoiled in fear; he looked the madman up and down, and fled.
“There’s a sage,” said Dieudonat. “That’s assuredly a sage, since he refuses; the first act of incontestable sagacity that I’ve encountered in the world, it’s a cretin who has accomplished it.”
He turned back toward the river, the waters of which continued to descend in the same splendor, with the same certitude.
“They go to their goal, without error, and your force directs them, Lord. They have the divine science, and I only have the human science. I’ve exhausted it, in the end, so much have I abused the right to deceive myself, and I’d like to be ignorant of everything, in order only to be guided by your sagacity, like them, Lord, and like the humblest of the earth.”
A small boy, noticing that he was speaking aloud, came curiously to stand to his right, and examined him from below with a cunning eye. He had a schoolboy’s satchel slung over his shoulder; his calves were bare, and a pen had leaked ink on the sleeves of his checkered shirt. As soon as he saw that he had been discovered by the lord who was talking to himself, he sent his gaze to admire the horizon, and, involuntarily, laughed at the landscape.
“You’re cheerful, my little friend?”
“Yes, sir.”
“What is your name?”
“Onuphre.”
“How old are you?”
“Eleven.”
“I was our age when I met Gutenberg and inaugurated that series of deadly cogitations.”
“Pardon?”
“You’re coming home from school? Does studying amuse you?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Much?”
“No, sir.”
“What is your favorite game?”
“Running.”
“And what day do you like best?”
“Thursday.”
“Why not Sunday?”
“Sunday there’s mass, and then I go out with Papa, and Mama, and my sister, all dressed up. Thursday’s more fun.”
“You like amusing yourself, then?”
“Yes, sir.”
“More than studying?”
“For sure.”
“Yes, yes, but it’s necessary to work, all the same, isn’t it? And to prepare for examinations, and competitions, to make a position and to earn a living, later, when you’re grown up, when Papa is old?”
Dieudonat’s voice quavered in his throat, with the anxious tremor of the honest man who is about to commit a bad action and is preparing for it. At the same time, the schoolboy had taken on an almost anxious expression.
“Does it trouble you, what I said just then?”
The schoolboy shrugged one shoulder, slowly, to express some impotence, and the philosopher sensed a secret misery there; immediately, he forgot his own.”
“Something’s worrying you? Tell me. I want to know.”
Slightly astonished by his obedience, the boy, all in a single breath, confided that he would doubtless be unable to continue his studies, that his father, a shopkeeper’s clerk, was about to lose his job because of an imminent bankruptcy, that his mother was in despair, and that they would soon have no more bread.
The momentum of recounting and the occasion of interest, in exciting his young brain, illuminated his brown eyes, and he narrated the lamentable story cheerfully. As he listened, Dieudonat remembered the sacred words: If you do not become like children, you shall not enter the kingdom of God. And he thought: I’ve finished with the kingdom of earth; I no longer have any hope except in Heaven.
Suddenly, however, newspaper criers went past at a run. They were proclaiming the suicide of a rich merchant and his wife, their domestic disgraces, with which Prince Dieudonat was mixed up, their ruination, and the miraculous disappearance of the Prince.
The child went very pale.
“Papa’s boss is dead...”
“The man who has just killed himself was your father’s employer?”
“Yes... No more bread…Mama’s weeping... Goodbye, sir!”
“Stop! Listen!”
“I no longer have the time, sir; Mama’s weeping!”
“Two minutes to gain twenty years of your life! Onuphre, you’ve heard mention of Dieudonat, who can do anything he wishes?”
“Yes. Papa detests him, and says he’s the cause of all our woes and many others.”
“Your father is right; that Dieudonat does a great deal of harm, and yet he isn’t cruel; he’d repair it if he could. Listen to me with all your might; that man, my little friend, has studied a great deal, a great deal, and he knows more than all your masters put together; he’s reflected on each of the sciences. Well, since your parents can’t send you to school any longer, and since Dieudonat is the cause of your misery, he’ll give you the fruit of his labor, if you wish, and you’ll be very knowledgeable all of a sudden, tomorrow, if you like; without having the need to learn anything, you’ll pass the most difficult examinations, you’ll be able to teach, to preach from the pulpit or speak in the theater, and you’ll be a child prodigy, famous in every city, apt for any employment, an you’ll earn as much in one evening, if you want to, than your father does in a y
ear. Would you like that?”
“It isn’t a joke?”
“You’ll have his mind and he’ll have yours. Do you want that, Onuphre?”
“I’d like that very much.”
“Since you consent I...”
At the moment of formulating his wish, the magician, seized by a scruple, raised his arms toward the heavens.
“Lord, will I not do more harm by passing to another that of which your favor gave me too much? The goods whose usage no longer tempts me might nourish a family, ameliorate the lot of this child, who will soon be a man, and lighten his existence as much as they have overburdened mine. I’m getting rid of them, it’s true, but don’t you think, Lord, that it’s high time for me to live without thinking, and that it’s time, too, that I stopped doing harm by thinking wrongly, while this child won’t be able to do anything more than a man?”
The sun had just disappeared at the horizon; Dieudonat interrogated a majestically desolate sky, for nature is a mirror in which we discover the prolongation of our souls.
Before the splendid embroidery of crimson-fringed cumulus, he thought that clouds are the breath of the planet, a vapor exhaled by the earth where people suffer, a mist of sighs that strives to rise toward the placid azure, but which cannot reach it, and which bleeds at the end of the day.
“Oh, sir, can you see?”
“What, light soul?”
“The cloud. One might think it’s a golden eagle attacking a sitting bear; it’s attacking it from behind, and the other is lifting its paws; it’s comical, do you see?”
“Not yet... But you, do you persist in wanting the gift of an infused science and a brain that understands everything?”
“It would be too lucky, sir.”
“To nourish your mother and our father, say that you want them, and you’ll have them.”
“I want them!” snapped the child, bursting into laughter.
“Let me be Onuphre, then, and you can call yourself Epagomene henceforth,13 as befits you; I give you my science and my thought in exchange for yours. So be it!”
Immediately, the schoolboy’s expression darkened; in his eyes, as profound as wells, a heavy fluid of ideas gleamed mysteriously, and his brows were barred by a grave energy.
But at the same instant, Dieudonat, delivered of himself and his philosophies, ceased to take notice of those sorts of things; he pivoted on his heels, and quickly, pointing his index finger toward the west, he started to exclaim: “No, but, I beg you, look at the bear stretching out his paws. He can no longer sit still. Look at him falling on his nose. He’s funny. Do you see?”
The child replied, with condescension; “I can no longer see it, sir.” After which with a ceremonious air, he took off his cap, took a step toward the Prince, and looked him straight in the face.
“Will Your Lordship have the kindness to excuse me,” he said, “if I don’t stay any longer in his august company; my father and mother must be tormented by this evening’s news, and I’m late rejoining them. I salute Your Lordship respectfully.”
Dieudonat retained his laughter and thought, privately: He’s ridiculous, that kid playing at being a man.
With a second pirouette, he got rid of him definitively, and forgot him; then, without any longer worrying about people, happy or unhappy, he leaned on the parapet of the bridge and settled down to watch the amusing clouds.
XXV. Dieudonat’s debuts in the career
of an inferior man
Let us not try to dissimulate; before that splendid sunset, the altruist had just committed an egotistical act of the worst species; in giving himself airs of liberality, and in prefect cognizance of the cause, he had ceded to his neighbor a bad business, which had inconvenienced him for a long time, and he had taken something excellent in exchange. Those sorts of transactions are much sought after in society, and well noted, but if it is true that they are honored, they do little honor. At the very least, it is necessary to add that Dieudonat had the excuse of discouragement, and that that circumstance is the only one in which we surprise that worthy man in flagrante delicto in cunning and perversity; what is more desolating, from the moral viewpoint, is that an act so base was also the only one, among so many fine actions, of which he never had to complain or to repent.
Entirely to the contrary, he immediately entered into the happiest period of his life.
He had said to Galeas: “I will expiate; I’ll take charge of that.” One must suppose that, at that moment, he projected sacrificing himself without reserve to the good of others in order to punish himself for having sacrificed others to his own pleasure. But he truly went to work a little rapidly, and, in sum, his first day of expiatory sacrifice had been singularly advantageous, since he began by giving away that which enables suffering.
Imagine, in fact, what a state of insouciance and good humor would spread over the earth if one abolished the amplification of woes that we call thought. He gave away his intelligence! Imagine also in what blissful calm the days of the world would go by if one withdrew therefrom the dramas and the comedies that are stimulated everywhere, among people and animals, by the involuntary desire to propagate the species to which they belong. He gave away his virility! Delivered of both of them, he was rid of the thousand cares that they entail—which is as much as to say, of all cares.
Did he regret them, at least? Not at all, and every regret of that nature was forbidden to him, for those two prerogatives enjoy a truly exceptional privilege, since it is indispensable to posses them to the highest degree in order to deplore their insufficiency. On the one hand, in fact, only excessively intelligent individuals are anxious about not being intelligent enough, and on the other, the libidinous are the only ones to complain about the limit that their forces impose on their appetites.
As for the abandonment of his beauty and his left eye, he counted them as trivial, his pretty face never having occupied him much, and since he had acquired the habit of making use of it to the exclusion of the other, his right eye appeared to him to be sufficient for seeing.
A great child of a meter seventy-six, with the vigorous body of his thirty-fifth year and the serene soul of his eleventh, he went forth to adventure.
“I want to see things!”
And his wish was realized. In the twilight he emerged from the city; he slept under a large tree and woke up in the sunlight, just in time to crunch apples that were still fresh, and set off again family, a radiant wanderer, a vagabond devoid of needs, going straight ahead, at random, having neither a goal not a purpose, careless of tomorrow and forgetful of yesterday.
If it is necessary to believe the plurality of philosophers, he ought not to have remembered anything, since the notion of our identity resides in the memory, and he had given away the treasures of his own. But who can say whether the gods have not established a distinction that escapes us between the memory of learned ideas and that of our own actions, between science and conscience, one ephemeral and the other less inalienable?
At any rate, the new Dieudonat, for one reason or another, remembered confusedly a few fragments of his past, as one recalls the incidents of a dream on awakening; he knew his name, his origin and his magical power, but he only attached a mediocre importance to those things, and above all, did not take any vanity from them. Of his anterior existence he retained just what was necessary to enjoy having changed it; his subjects of remorse no longer tormented him, they trailed behind him in the dust of the roads or the mist of the horizons, and when he made the gesture of wanting to launch himself forward he liberated himself from them in the manner of children avoiding importunity, and who, while galloping, expel their cares and strew them along the road.
The sparrows saw him gamboling in the dew, laughing at the trees and the clouds, sleeping in the woods, taking a siesta on the edge of a ditch, playing with beetles and chasing butterflies. When he was hungry or thirty he wished for fruits on the branches or a spring in a ravine, and he found them immediately.
He was in
toxicated by landscapes, savoring the distances, swallowing the light, which descended into his heart and dilated his life; the harmonious warmth of hues enlivened the blood in his veins as the warmth of a wine would have done, and voices sang within him in unison with the colors.
How beautiful the earth is, and how little we know it! How lively it is in its immobility, under that envelope of vibrant air! He discovered it and invented it for his usage. Until then, in regarding it as a thinker, he had not seen it, only seeing himself therein; now, he searched the corners where masterpieces were hidden, lay in wait for it at the bends in roads, surprised it on the other side of a hill, a hedge or a rock, always ingenious and always new; he loved it with a juvenile and recent love; he communicated with it.
By night he loved the stars; he no longer knew their names or their distances, but they were all the more easily accessible for that to his childish reverie: of the enormous poetry of terror and vertigo that makes suns rotate, he no longer knew anything, but he had reconquered the naïve admiration of that which shines; lying on his back, he enjoyed being dazzled by that celestial jewelry, and went to sleep trying to count the Holy Virgin’s diamonds in their case of nocturnal velvet.
He was free, he was alone, and he savored his solitude and liberty candidly. He loved life for the life’s sake, and it was the first time.
“I don’t want anyone to find me!”
And he went forth, using up space, expending hours, days and weeks, a rather grotesque silhouette in his Court clothing, whose satin was torn by brambles, splattered with mud and gray with dist; the tattered plumes of his toque dangled pitifully over his ear, and people would have taken him for an acrobat in distress rather than the son of a king making his tour of the world. Who would have recognized him? Of the old Dieudonat he no longer wore anything but the rags, and he scarcely resembled Galeas anymore; his beard had grown; his unkempt hair extended over his neck; his natural health and savage existence had purified the Archduke’s complexion; the lips became red again and their rictus relaxed into benevolent smiles; the menaces of the unmatched eye were velveted with tenderness; the brow of the One-Eyed, once furrowed by anger and calculations, was smoothed out like a lake after a storm and shone ingenuously; the whole of that once-disquieting face opened now like a frank book in which passers-by could read the probity of a happy soul.
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