Afterwards, he sat down. Dieudonat in the middle, Calame to the right and Noiraud to the left, they stayed there for hours without moving and without speaking. Sometimes, the sovereign without a throne uttered a sigh; in the intervals, the voice of the blind man intoned his anthem...
That languor lasted for a month, at the end of which there was a great noise in the square; troops were arranged in front of the parvis; the crowd hastened from all the streets.
“What is it?” asked the Prince.
“They’re coming for the honorable amends of Queen Gaude.”
“No, no! I don’t want any more! I don’t want to see that!”
At that moment, the sculptor repeated: “Have pity on a poor blind man!” But almost immediately, he cried: “I can see!” And a moment later he added “I can see with one eye.”
Frightened, Calame leaned over King Dieudonat, placed a hand on his forehead and tipped his head back: two empty orbits gazed at the starry vault of the porch.
“Wretch! What have you done now?”
“Nothing good, doubtless. I’ve unburdened myself.”
Dieudonat did not see Queen Gaude on her knees on the parvis; but he heard her sobs, the liturgical chants, the prayers, the responses, the large and small bells; the Calamitous explained the episodes of the scene to him.
“Please, Calame, I’d rather not hear that.”
The poet fell silent; but the blind man, ecstatic at the spectacle, continued to describe it. Finally, the ceremony ended; the audience withdrew; Calame’s voice called out to one of them, saying: “Good day, Gontran!”
Another voice, heard before, responded: “Oh, there you are, comrade. Beautiful ceremony, you must admit. I was its organizer. But the one who laid the foundations wasn’t able to enjoy is triumph; little Epagomene stupidly allowed himself to be poisoned. Between us, he was a fool. I’m replacing him next to the King, but I’m adopting another title, more in rapport with the importance of my role: Comte d’Avatar, Minister of the Court. I have everything in hand; I’ll finally be able to show what I am.”
And the poet’s voice replied softly: “As long as it doesn’t constitute a crime against modesty.”
Those words were the last that Dieudonat heard the indomitable Calamitous pronounce; a few minutes later he could still hear him, but he was no longer talking, he was screaming; the men of the watch were taking him to prison, by order of Lord Comte d’Avatar, Minister of the Court.
From that morning on, the Prince knew no other speech than that of the carver of images recriminating against his bad luck. The old man had reason to complain, in fact; since he could see clearly, he applied himself to finishing his works carefully, which had lost all the charm of their naivety; furthermore, the public found them devoid of interest, since they were no longer sculpted by a blind man; he sold fewer and fewer, and the beadle wanted to have him removed.
“Now that you’ve recovered your sight, it’s necessary to go away; you no longer have any reason to beg.”
At that injunction, the expelled did not fail to observe an expression of triumph on the face of the amputee; he shouted at him: “It’s your fault! You’ve had me chased away, for sure, in order to be alone!”
Every day, all day long, chronometrically, while whittling his pieces of wood, he grumbled: “It’s your fault! I can no longer earn my bread!”
Pretending to be still blind, he drew nearer to the stump of a man, and walked over his fingers, by mistake.
“It’s your fault!”
The indignant Noiraud bit him.
“That’s your fault!”
And Dieudonat thought: “Alas, yes, it’s my fault, and even more than he thinks; all the same, I’d like no longer to hear that....”
“It’s your fault!”
“Everything is my fault, always, except the fate of poor Calame, who made his own misfortune; and it’s a little curious that the only creature for whom I never attempted anything has as much to lament as the others...”
The invisible Noiraud pushed his oblong skull with its unique bump under his hand; smiling, he caressed that warm box, which he sensed to be full of love, and an idea of the dog’s entered into him via the fingers: “No, it’s not your fault; it’s necessary not to believe them, it’s necessary not to believe yourself. Misfortune comes on its own, and you have nothing to do with it.”
“You think so, Noiraud? Thank you, Noiraud...”
“Modest dogs know that. All life is misery. Bells also know it. Listen to them, what they’re saying...”
From one hour to the next, the bronze of the bells coiffed him with a heavy cope of sounds, which fell upon his cranium and his shoulders; they enveloped him with a tremor that penetrated him through all his pores; his breast swelled with those renewed rumblings, and it was as if he had sensed, hour by hour, in his meager body, the gross heart of the city beating.
“All the same, I’d like no longer to be able to hear that...”
One autumn evening, the master of the chapel stopped before him; he spoke in a sad voice: “Oh, life isn’t droll! Now I’m completely deaf; the churchwardens are going to replace me; I no longer have anything to do but die of hunger.”
The King did not reply; he gave him his hearing.
At first, he had the sentiment of a new deliverance. Then an immense desert extended in the silence, and a boundless solitude.
Calame had not reappeared. Even the organist hardly ever stopped any longer and ceased to address words to the poor devil who could no longer perceive sounds. Since he had been deaf, Dieudonat had lost speech. He still said: “Noiraud… Noiraud...” Or again, when someone threw him a hunk of bread: “Thank you.... Thank you...” But nothing else.
No one looked at him any longer. At the foot of his pillar, he slumped like half a statue.
More than before, Noiraud came to huddle against him; under the windy porch, they pressed together for warmth, and without bending down, the legless man could find, at the end of his arm, a fraternal head, full of mute thoughts, like his own.
But the hours were very slow, and too numerous, even in winter; in order still to count them, he tried to divine them, for want of hearing them rumble above his head. More and more, he withdrew into himself, and diminished.
One night, when it was snowing, the dog started to tremble with fever and his teeth chattered; he licked his friend’s hand slowly, and in his manner he said: “Adieu, I’m going to die, I regret it...”
The King gave his life to the dog.
But the sacrifice served little purpose, for Noiraud accompanied the body, and let himself die on his brother’s grave.
Epilogue.
In which the deceased learns that he possessed
thirteen senses and practiced two virtues
The late Prince Dieudonat, in the thirty-ninth year of his age, arrived, very perplexed, at the gate of Paradise. Doubtless he would not spontaneously have had the presumption of heading that way if some occult force had not guided him there; he even made the journey so slowly that Noiraud had the time to catch up with him on the way.
On seeing them together, so hesitant and so crestfallen, Saint Peter took pity on them and emerged from his lodge. Standing on the threshold, he smiled, a little ironically, but benevolently, shaking his head with an expression of tender reprobation, as an old grandfather might do facing a child who has not been good.
Dieudonat recognized him immediately by his mariner’s beard, his baldness crowned with wisps of hair, and above all by his keys; before that colossal apparition, and although he had recovered the integrity of his person by virtue of death, he felt infinitely smaller than on earth, and more heavily laden with sin.
“Excuse me, great saint, I see that I’ve mistaken my way. I was looking for Purgatory.”
“Behind you, my friend.”
The deceased turned round, but only perceived the earth.
“That was it; you’ve just emerged from it. Haven’t you been there long enough?”
<
br /> “Long enough for others, whom I never ceased to harm! Father, I confess to you: all those I approached have suffered by my actions.”
“I like to hear you talk that way, my son, by let’s not exaggerate, I beg you; there’s a pride in exaggerating anything, even the sentiment of your responsibilities, since it is, by the same token, exaggerating your importance. Don’t persevere any longer.”
“All along the road, I’ve seen my works rising up against me. Everywhere, I’ve spread dolor and death.”
“Like every creature, solely by virtue of the fact that it exists and that it moves.”
“I’ve done more harm than any other!”
“Because you could do more, my child. The least harmfulness coincides with the least action. To be able to do more than other men is to be able to do more harm. The Devil certainly thought that when he ceded you the possibility of acting beyond human limits.”
“Dolor lay in wait for my every action. From the good I tried to do, nothing emerged but evil.”
The effects are not your work, but the sum of the innumerable forces that your movement was sufficient to trigger; they are the cooperation of the universe. What would become of us, great God, if it were necessary to demand that good intentions only produced good results? Paradise would be deserted. Not one saint, that I know, could resist the examination of the consequences that his dream and his role provoked behind him. Would I be here, myself? Could Our Lord himself have entered here, given how often evil has been done in his name?”
“Oh.”
“By the mere fact of being placed in the hands of crowds and centuries, every idea is depraved and ceases to be understood, and ceases to be admirable, or even desirable. It is necessary to be able to confess it, young man: to want to do well is a beautiful dream, but to serve it is a chimera.”
“I have lived badly!”
“To live better, it would merely have been sufficient to marry a worthy young woman, to have children and to dig your field in order to nourish them. The entire secret is there, and also the moral of your story.”
“However, Heaven heaped me with magnificent presents...”
“Magnificent? Magnificent? Evidently, we heaped you with them, but to excess. In seeing you emerge from Limbo, when everyone charged you with his gifts, and when you set forth toward the planet, so small, so crushed under the burden of our future capacities, God is my witness that I felt sorry for you in advance. ‘Oh, poor lad, what are you giving him there? What will he become, poor little thing?’ A victim! And you were, much more than culpable.”
“Sometimes...”
“The exceptional individual is always a victim! You were endowed? Well, there you are! Superficial endowments are causes of joy, I concede to you, but profound endowments are sources of pain.”
“It’s true that I’ve suffered in my heart from the evil that I’ve done, and that I’ve suffered in my mind from the good that I’ve conceived; because of the power that had been put in me, all my heart has bled, and over my impotence, all my mind has lamented.”
“A battlefield on which the forces of Heaven and Hell clash, that’s what you were. The presents with which we heaped a pitiful Prince, Satan topped off by saying: ‘Your wishes will be realized.’ God had given you a conscience—which is to say, the notion of your human incapacity—and the Evil One, with that, granted you extra-human power, with the result that you became a hybrid creature, omnipotent and warned of your impotence, a derisory knight of love who, among the desolations of the earth, paraded the deceptive motto: Able to do everything and knowing that one cannot do anything.”
“Is suffering, then, the ineluctable law of the world? O my father, when I summarized my life under the porch of the church, in the apparent humility in which I was then crouching, more wretched than Job, I consummated the supreme act of pride: at the same time as judging myself, I judged God, and I condemned him! Why has God put dolor on the earth?”
“Out of pity, my son, in order to save you.”
“Useless and cruel dolor?”
“Attentive and very benevolent dolor! You believe that you only have five senses, and that excessively naïve error comes from not having understood the purpose they serve. Like children, you believed that they were given to you as playthings, for your pleasure. Their role is much vaster; they were given to you, in appearance for your joy, but in reality for the needs of the universe.”
“My senses?”
“Oh yes. Life is conceded to you as a transmissible deposit; it is therefore important both that you preserve it and that you transmit it. In that double design, Nature equips her children with alarm systems that remind them of their double duty: those guardians are your senses. But in order to animate your attention further, it was determined that they would be elements of sensual pleasure as well a counselors of prudence, and that is certainly very ingenious, since in promising you pleasure they excite your individual egotism to the accomplishment of the common mission.”
“I can glimpse...”
“Exposed as you are to ambient perils and exterior perils, you have your special informers for every eventuality: against whatever menaces you from a distance, sight and hearing; against what might wound you, touch; against what might poison you, smell and taste; in order to awaken your vigilance against the known or the unknown, you have fear, and against the inconveniences of gravitation you have vertigo. Thus warned about your surroundings, there is only the further matter of defending you against yourselves: hunger, thirst and suffocation advise you of internal expenditures, with the injunction to provide for them, and those are the ten senses that watch over the creature. But if it is appropriate for the universe to safeguard the individual although in sum, it is negligible in itself, it is above all because it needs to perpetuate the species; in consequence, Nature has provided you with a propagatory sense, amour, to which she attaches for you the maximum of sensual pleasure, since it comports for her the maximum of utility—to such an extent that, with a view to satisfying that imperious sense, you go beyond any consideration of personal sagacity...”
“Armida’s Palace, O my sin...”
“But it was not enough to incite you to joys; in order to forearm you against the dangers of your carelessness, excesses or failures, a truly tutelary solicitude has taken care to enrich you further with a supreme sense that combines all the others, in admonishing you with a pressing voice: dolor. That sense is the early warning system par excellence, a manometer with an alarm bell, the one that sounds the alarm in urgent circumstances and which reveals your enemies, overt or covert, those within as well as those without, and which indicates to you the limit of your resistance: brutally, violently, it rings, loudly, and with increasing loudness. The ringing is painful? It has to be, in order to make you listen, and obey; against your apathy, the rigor of that inexorable summons is necessary, which constrains you to combat the evil in order for the alarm bell to fall silent.”
“And since we discover, in each or our organs, the possibility of an abuse—which is to say, a vice—it gives rise to dolor like the other senses; thus we can conceive the monstrous sin of cultivating it for its own sake or of setting it in motion with the unique desire of hearing its beautiful cry of appeal, the cry that is suffering?”
“The liking for martyrizing the weak is innate in all creatures.”
“To such an extent that we invent tortures, instruments, and even professions in order to obtain Dolor in itself!”
“Is that all, my child? Are you going to forget that the appetites of torture are so morbidly inveterate in humans that they even dare to attribute them to God, in imaging a Hell where defenseless victims are torn apart endlessly by joyful torturers?”
The deceased had turned back toward to earth, and he perceived it, deplorably alone and round in space.
Then Peter said to him: “If it is true that human beings stray further than the beast in the ways of depravity, at least they have had the honor of imposing limits on thems
elves, and it is those limits that Satan solicited you to surpass, my prince, when, by a perfidious favor, he gave you omnipotence.”
“I have known that only too well.”
“Never enough; humans do not know what an interest they have in dreading power. One can never repeat to them enough that more power is the surest means of multiplying not only opportunities or self-deception but also those of falling.”
“Alas...”
“The human conscience is not solid enough to risk with impunity the danger of triggering an uncontrolled force; inevitably, in humans, power diminishes its enemy, conscience—and what makes you great is your conscience.”
“My father...”
“You were very small, Dieudonat, because of your immense power; but you have grown by virtue of diminishing yourself.”
“My father...”
“To grow, my son, is not to gain grandeur, but to increase one’s conscience, and you have understood that.”
The apostle was speaking in sure terms. Dieudonat, who was listening to him, lowering his brow under the praise, raised his head again and perceived, with amazement, that the saint and he were now face to face, of similar stature.
Peter smiled at him and said: “You have understood, and you are delivered. Like me, you were in bonds, and like me, you have emerged from Herod’s claws. Come, my brother, that I might embrace you.”
The grand old man opened his arms; the dead man threw himself into them, weeping; the former fisherman of Galilee caressed the shoulder of the former amputee gently.
“The same Angel has extracted us, you and me, from the same jail, and he had two wings: Effort and Pity. In spite of Satan, like me, you have resisted, in order to celebrate Effort-even-so and Pity-even-so. Like me, too, you have failed, and that was the day when, like me, you renounced Effort and Pity.”
“I remember; that was the evening on the bank of a river; in a cowardly fashion, I abdicated my soul and denied my duty...”
“The cock spoke to me three times. You took pity on yourself, like me, and that was the sin.”
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