Chapter I: Lord

I rose, to fall on my knees. He calmed my emotion with a gesture.

HE

Why "Lord"? I am not your lord. Listen to me, and reassure yourself. Observe these beautiful young women, their quiet, and their smiles. They play with flowers, they watch you with amused eyes: are you afraid of them? And yet, would you not say that they were goddesses? Ah! How your women are nearer than you men to nature, nearer to the divine! If you had had a mistress, I should have asked you to go and fetch her: she would have looked at me without timidity.

The young women began to laugh. All three were now on the same side of the table, and, as they leaned over their scented harvest, murmuring like bees, stirring like lilies where the wind passes, one did not know if they were listening to the words of the master or to the words of the flowers.

This spectacle helped to reassure me, after my friend's sayings, which, however, I did not understand.

HE

The religious conception of the world that you now have, the conception that you call Christian, from the name that was given me on the occasion of one of my earthly visits, is one of the feeblest that humanity has ever imagined. Practical intelligence has, in a certain sense, made progress since the Greek philosophers before Socrates, but speculative intelligence has almost consistently gone backward. To make a system that should have some distant relation to the truth, the cinematic philosophy of Epicurus would have to be poured into the fables of pagan mythology. Take, if you like, if Latin thought is more familiar to you, the poem of Lucretius, and Ovid's "Metamorphoses"; attempt an interpretation which should derive part from universal determinism, and part from divine caprice.... It is difficult? Why? Are not men apt in appearance to initiative, though ruled, as you know, and very narrowly, by fatal physical laws? You are free, when you think yourselves free. It is the same with the gods, but the liberty of the gods is exercised on a very much more extensive material, a material which, without being infinite (infinity does not exist), is immense. Their power, superior though it is, is of the same order as human power. Greece touched the knot of the question, and, if she did not untie it, it is that it is not to be untied: the creator of the world, the regulator of the world, is Destiny. Fatality rules over the gods, as the gods rule over men, and under her hand, my friend, we are all equal, exactly as you are under death, genii, kings, and beggars alike.

To dissimulate the trouble into which these words threw me, I turned towards the young women. There were but two of them.

SHE

The little one has gone off to look for more flowers. Some of them fade so quickly. One would say that the warmth of the earth is enough to dry them up.

THE OTHER

How many times love has been killed by kisses.

I

Do not say so, my friend; that was not love, but caprice.

THE OTHER

Caprice and love hide under the same dress.

I wanted to lay my hand on hers. She took it away, and I had but a finger, but I pressed it unresisted.

THE LITTLE ONE

Here are other flowers.

THE OTHER

They will fade too.

HE

No, they will not fade.

THE LITTLE ONE

There, you see.

I

I have needed this diversion, my friend, to accustom myself to your discourse.

HE

Yes, you are a man, and such you will remain. It is necessary that you should remain a man.

I

Shall I not become superior to other men, when I have heard, when I have understood?

HE

Yes, if you understand.

I

The Christian phase, then, has been an error of humanity?

HE

Humanity has never lived but in error, and, besides, there is no truth, since the world is perpetually changing. You have acquired the notion of evolution, which, within certain limits, is correct, but you have wished at the same time to preserve the notion of truth: that is contradictory. If you were to succeed in constructing, in your intellect, a true image of the world, it would be already untrue for your grandchildren. For, if the world evolves, you likewise evolve, and man, from one generation to another, is not the same man. You ceaselessly struggle to find the likeness of the old man in the portrait of the child. It is a game. After all, it is something for you to do.