Dieudonat

by Edmond Haraucourt

  The jailer seemed perplexed, torn between his admiration for judiciary wisdom and the scruples of candor. But the judge sent his two legs out of the bed one after the other, and repeated: “Go, I tell you. In any case, I’ll join you in the main square in order to make sure in person of these important measures. I’ll have breakfast, because it’s necessary not to respire the morning miasmas on an empty stomach, and I’ll be there.”

  Having spoken, Master Touillechair collected his chemise from the pillar of the conjugal bed and began to get dressed calmly, with the intimate glorification of a man who, from the moment of his awakening, has done his duty.16

  XXVIII. He makes the acquaintance

  of the soul of crowds

  Master Touillechair walked through the streets pompously, his bile yellow and his coat black, his toque straight, his tread heavy and his heart light; his robe ornamented with fake ermines hung in noble pleats, billowing in the wind at the intersections.

  When he emerged into the square he perceived with displeasure that the crowd noise had an excessive animation; he had always prescribed decorum around executions, which ought to be a moral lesson, and he reproved tumult; he frowned. Then, convinced that his presence would restore good order, he amplified his stride, and sensed that he was becoming august.

  No one perceived him to begin with; all eyes were turned toward the gibbet.

  A somber mass of backs and heads were swarming around the masonry mass that dominated the three gallows, and whistles, cries and jeers were emerging from that opaque mass. Behind the crowd, like sheepdogs around her flock, young boys were running back and forth yapping: “Quick, quick! Come hear the last sigh of the eunuch!”

  Eh? What! They know, then, the wretches! Those wretches have no conscience, and have divulged what they should have kept quiet.

  Anonymous voices were shouting: “Down with the judge! Down with the judge! Boo!”

  Are they talking about me, by chance?

  Other voices , in the same vein, were intoning a variant: “Cuckold, the judge! Cuckold, the judge!”

  It really is me they’re talking about. Damned guttersnipes, the cuckold will bring you into line! Bu it’s very disagreeable, when one represents a symbol, to have a flighty wife, and the law would have been prudent if, in order to remain venerable, it had prescribed celibacy for judges, as for priests.

  He stopped, raising his right hand in order to reconquer, by the nobility of his attitude, the dignity that the accident of marriage had partially depreciated. Then, bravely, but with a shrill voice, he articulated: “Make way for Justice!”

  Then he was perceived, and, heavily, spontaneously, the brown crowd opened up like the Red Sea; a human pathway was hollowed out between the judge and the gibbet. At the end of that avenue, the vagabond, in his black chemise, was struggling with the executioners at the foot of the ladder. Firmly determined not to die, he was giving evidence of it in his gestures.

  The magistrate started walking toward the group; head held high, he entered the moving alley, as a Pharaoh had done before him. At the same moment, throughout the square, an enormous silence spread, a stormy silence emerging from five hundred breasts and which crushed the air; but it only lasted momentarily before resolving into a rumble of distant thunder, which rose from the four horizons.

  Already, the human flood had closed again upon its prey; a storm of clamors swirled, sweeping heads and raising a swell, from which agitated hands emerged, like foam on the crest of waves; flotsam of arms launched forth from the surface; eddies of fleecy heads inflated in order to roll forward or withdraw. The judge saw peevish forms unfurling toward him, faces in front of his own, eyes confronting his eyes; a rhythmic movement carried him away in its cadence.

  “The innocent! Hoo! Hoo! The innocent! Hoo! Hoo!”

  In less than two minutes, Dieudonat was freed and his escort dispersed; the unfortunate administrator of justice, tossed like a package devoid of weight, rolled from grip to group and from hatred to vengeance. Hatless and shredded, bewildered and ragged, bleeding and moaning, but not feeling the blows, he reached the base of the scaffold and collapsed. Behind the mob, and too far from the quarry to seize their share, frantic voices were shouting; “To the gibbet! To the gibbet!”

  The judge, collapsed at the base of the platform. His forehead applied to the upright of the ladder, his two fists on the ground, he was panting and trying to get up.

  “To the gibbet!”

  All the riff-raff of the dens of vice, pimps, prostitutes, deserters, escaped and liberated prisoners, with rage in their eyes and drool on their lips, jostled one another over the vanquished man, and ill-clad rancor spat threats at him that reeked of wine and onion. A trickle of blood ran from his temple to his throat; spittle shone on his cheeks and hung from his eyelids.

  “You won’t play the trickster any more, with your white rabbit skin!”

  “Go on, then, vermin fur!”

  “You’ve flattened enough of them!”

  “And sent innocents to the shovel!”

  “This morning’s vagabond, you knew he was a eunuch, didn’t you?”

  “But you said to hang him anyway!”

  “You’ve woven his rope, he’ll cede it to you!”

  “It’s necessary that you hang by his hand!”

  “Yes! Yes! Where’s the eunuch!”

  “Bring back the eunuch!”

  Dieudonat was running away, glad to be out of it, but frightened by the tumult.

  Oh la la! he thought, I believe they’re going to kill that poor judge, and it’s my fault, for sure. Because I stupidly formed the wish not to die, my wish has been realized to the detriment of another. Should I go back?

  “Bring back the eunuch!”

  A vigorous fist seized him by the elbow; he recognized Gertrude, who was utilizing her new strength; she shouted to him: “Go hang him, then!”

  “I don’t want to.”

  “He wanted to hang you, hang him!”

  “Is it you, Gertrude, so charitable when you’re on your own, who says such things when you’re in the street? How is that possible?”

  “I don’t know; it takes me over. Come on!”

  Arrived at the foot of the gallows, he looked so awkward and crestfallen in his penitent’s robe that people around him were already beginning to laugh; he cut an even funnier figure when they placed the rope with a noose in his hand. His bewildered eye interrogated the crowd.

  “Put the rope around his neck!”

  “Hurry up! Don’t you understand anything?”

  “Yes, yes, I understand. But where is the judge?”

  He was pushed toward that bloody rag, whose prestige he had admired at the previous day’s tribunal. He did not meditate, as he would once have done, on the fragility of grandeurs or the inconstancy of the fabrics that serve to specify the distinctions of the social hierarchy; he simply saw a suffering, and drew nearer to it, with the naïve commiseration of the humble, who know how to feel better than how to think.

  The rope slid from his fingers without him even perceiving it; he bent down and picked up the flap of the robe in which he was due to die, and made a tampon of it. He knelt down carefully, and the people were able to see a condemned man staunching the wounds of his judge.

  He murmured: “Poor fellow!” Then he raised his head toward the people; his face was pale and his eye imploring.

  “Please don’t do him any harm because of me...”

  The crowd is mobile, because it is human being with excess; Dieudonat had scarcely formulated his plea than the contagion of his pity immediately transformed the anger, and the nervous tension that was demanding death became the human emotion that is passionate for life.

  “You’re right, all the same,” said Gertrude.

  She wept involuntarily; immediately, her neighbor wept; a third clapped her hands. “Bravo, eunuch!”

  That was enough; the entire circle of the front rank applauded with that woman, and the enthusiasm gained the sec
ond rank, from which it was propagated all the way to the spectators who could not see anything, and who applauded more frenziedly than the others in order to occupy their muscles. As for those who would doubtless have preferred to offer themselves, without peril for their skin, the spectacle of a Christian dancing a jig at the end of a rope, they dared not protest, because they were cowards.

  Dieudonat tried to lift up the patient, who cried out in pain; a carpenter came to his aid; they took him under the armpits and stood him up, but he collapsed again; a veterinarian advanced, palpated, and pronounced: “Fractured kneecap.”

  Dieudonat had a tear in his eye.

  “You see, the poor fellow has a broken knee, now, and again because of me, because I didn’t say that I’m a eunuch when it was necessary to say it. I’ve been stupid, and I beg your pardon, your honor, but it can be sorted out...

  He put his hands together, raised his unique eye to the heavens, and prayed: “My God, permit me to repair my sin and make the wounds of this poor fellow pass from his body into mine. So be it!”

  Immediately, his wish was granted. He fell on the cobblestones, uttering a little cry, his face bloody and his leg broken. Gertrude ran to him.

  “How did you do that trick, then? You’re in fine state now... Can he be a sorcerer, as he says?”

  He was picked up in order to carry him to the hospital, while Master Touillechair hastened back to his lodgings, striving to gather up the shreds of his toga and those of his ideas.

  No one any longer thought of retaining him; the tempest had blown over, the common soul had dispersed, the individual souls went back into their shells, the social ermines resumed their prestige, and Master Touillechair, scarcely having escaped the mud, was aureoled in glory, for the rumor was already circulating in the upper town that Our Lady had just accomplished a miracle in the magistrate’s favor.

  XXIX. He frequents the two dolors

  Dieudonat, under the name of Onuphre and on the stretcher of the gibbet, made his entrance to the hospice. Poor people were hardly ever collected except to torment and aggravate their condition. The lame and pregnant women, smallpox sufferers and the wounded, typhoid fever victims and consumptives, the dying who cried too much and the dead who no longer moved enough, cohabited in the same rooms, not to mention the same beds. To tell the truth, those fifty-two-inch beds were not designed to receive two people, but when the number of invalids was augmented without discretion, what could be done? They were heaped up five or six at a time, any which way, the feet of one on the shoulders of another, all naked under the same sheet, and the bedsheets were then called shrouds. Immobile for lack of room and also by their own fault, since they would not have been if they had not been so numerous, they exchanged their vermin and their diseases in that sweat-bath of common warmth, and with more or less patience they waited for their death, or that of their neighbors.

  The Prince was attributed to the seventy-seventh bed, which only contained two patients any longer, the third having died that morning. The two survivors were already rejoicing at being more at ease, but whoever rejoices too soon welcomes a newcomer poorly. Immediately, he had the sensation of being an intruder. His head at the foot of the bed, with the heels of one man under his right armpit and the toes of another under his left armpit, he remained still in order not to inconvenience them, and he saw in the distance, at the end of his own limbs, their reproving faces. One, skeletal and jaundiced, with skin like vellum and excessively bright eyes, assassinated him with his pointed pupils; the other, hirsute and massive, menaced him with his violent beard.

  He tried to smile at them, by way of apology, but without any success; they even applied themselves to make him understand in detail the reasons for the antipathy they experienced toward him, and exchanged their grievances above the tips of his feet. He listened without protesting, suffering from his wound, and even more from the embarrassment that he was causing the first two occupants. The mildness of his patience ended up calming them in their turn. They interrogated him about his case, and told him about theirs.

  The skeleton with the glittering eyes was a lyric poet who lived in his art, and whose stomach was dilapidated by virtue of not eating; he was dying angrily of an incurable gastritis. As for the colossus, a roofer by trade and the father of five daughters, he fell down with grand mal seizures, and also from roofs; his last fall had cost him three ribs, if not more.

  Dieudonat listened.

  The dyspeptic poet never let up, and his sarcasms vilified humankind; the epileptic explained that the ribs would mend, thanks to God, who had decided thus in time of the terrestrial paradise, when he broken one in the breast of the first man; but the worst thing was not being able to go back on roofs in order to nourish the kids. That pair of unfortunates had the wherewithal to touch the charitable vagabond, who felt sorry for them with all his heart, although, for the moment, he could not hear them very well; more atrocious scenes solicited him from elsewhere.

  On penetrating into that hospital ward, he had only experienced at first the repulsion of an ox entering the abattoir; a stink that he swallowed by the mouthful as soon as he crossed the threshold filled him with horror; afterwards the hostility of his neighbors had taken charge of distracting him; but now, he could see better, and could even see too much.

  Five paces away, directly facing him, a typhoid fever sufferer had just thrown off his shroud, and, stark naked, with the face of a demon, he was kneeling on the naked breast of a consumptive, stifling him frenziedly; two other, companions of the fanatic, were stunning him with blows of the fist in order to keep him quiet; a fifth had rolled off the foot of the mattress and was gasping weakly on the cold paving stones, cooing like a pigeon.

  In the middle of the room, surgeons were sawing through the humerus of a soldier, and the screams of the wounded man accompanied the squeak of the saw in the bone; the soldier who was due to be operated on next, mad with terror, was running away, and his great hairy body was running along the aisle, pursued by the warders; driven into a corner he grabbed hold of a stool with his valid hand in order to defend himself.

  Orderlies passed by, carrying by the head and ankle a choleric who was evacuating his bowels. Thousands of flies swirled over the excrements, the pus and the invalids.

  The poet watched the terror becoming precise on the newcomer’s face and burst out laughing.

  “Ha ha ha! You amuse me, comrade; you’re ready to vomit, eh? That’s the first impression. We’ve all passed through it; you get used to it. I’ll wager that you didn’t imagine these fashions of reducing suffering, eh? Me neither, for everything they’re doing there, you know, they’re doing for good, and I recommend that point for the solicitude of your admiration.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Have you read Dante, my friend, and the Inferno? No? Yes? Dante thought he was inventing fine horrors, but observe and compare; compare the discoveries of human genius and those of human stupidity, and tell me, I beg you, whether the second isn’t by far the more ingenious?”

  Dieudonat replied, piteously: “I’d like to go away…”

  “Not me! I’m recording. The world has made me die, for I’m dying, and everything that it attempts in order to preserve life, I observe; it’s my vengeance.”

  At that moment, the soldier on whom they were operating stopped screaming; he was seen opening and closing his mouth by turns, in an impotent effort to swallow his life.

  “Is he dying?” said Dieudonat.

  “I fear so, for he’s yawning like a carp; see how well he imitates a fish out of water. Look, there he goes!”

  The Prince made the sign of the cross and said: “God has his soul.”

  “His immortal soul, no doubt?”

  “Assuredly. You’re laughing?”

  “At your simplicity. Have you ever wondered, my lad, why innumerable simpletons, who were good for nothing during their life, should be indefinitely conserved after their death? Can you glimpse the purpose of that eternal museum? Do you
know what need those collections of souls might serve, and what God might do with them?”

  “Justice, sir! The notion that I have of my immortal soul...”

  “Is a nominal brake, very useful, in truth, upon your passions, your vices and your instincts, and as long as you have that notion, it has served its function as a brake, which is sufficient. To affirm the immortality of the soul, that is what is indispensable; but to realize it…what would be the point, my friend?”

  “You’re speaking like the Devil. If the poor people could hear you...”

  “They’ll hear me, one day or another, and it’ll be so much the worse for them, for they’ll lose a hope, the most consoling of all, and it will be so much the worse for the world, for it will lose a brake, the only one that’s truly solid.”

  The surgeons had just dragged the corpse of the operated patient to the floor, and their aides, who had succeeded in taking hold of the next one, were extending him on the bloody table in his turn.

  “You see, their charity is going to come to the aid of that one now, and they’re doing good.”

  The patient howled, maintained by the wrists, and fixed his crazed eyes on the multiple steel implements that were about to penetrate him without anger. On all the beds, haggard spectators raised their fearful faces.

  “I want to go away,” said Dieudonat.

  “Egotist! Don’t you see that the comrade has no more desire to be here than you? He’s staying, though; do as he does, and learn.”

  “I don’t like to see pain.”

  “Simpleton! It is, however, the best means of feeling your own pain less.”

  “It’s true that I feel that I’m almost no longer suffering, as soon as people scream around me.”

  “Unlike other men, who no longer hear screaming as soon as they’re suffering.”

  “Oh?”

  “Understand, then, that the two alternatives of life are suffering and seeing suffering; as soon as a poor devil is liberated from his woe sufficiently to look around, what does he see, except for physical and mental misery? And when does he cease to see it, if not when he’s recalled to himself by the imperious urgency of recommencing whining on his own account? Your gaieties are only respites or relaxations, minutes between parentheses, blind minutes, which your health necessitates and your unconsciousness permits.”