Chapter III: Part 3

“I am personally inclined to love popular government, my son,” answered my good master. “My humbleness of condition draws me towards it, and Holy Writ, of which I have made some study, confirms me in this preference, for the Lord said in Ramah: ‘The people of Israel desired a king that I should not reign over them.’ And He said, ‘Now this will be the manner of king that shall reign over you: he will take your sons and appoint them for himself and for his chariots, and to be his horsemen, and some shall run before his chariot. And he will take your daughters to be confectioners and to be cooks and to be bakers.’ _Filias quoque vestras faciet sibi unguentarias et focarias et panificas._ That is said expressly in the Book of Kings, and one still sees that the monarch brings his subjects two grievous gifts: war and tithes. And if it be true that monarchies are of Divine institution it is equally true that they present all the characteristics of human imbecility and wickedness. It is credible that Heaven has given them to the people for their chastisement: _Et tribuit eis petitionem eorum._

‘Often in His anger He accepts our sacrifice,
His gifts are often the penalty of our crimes.’

“I could quote, my son, many fine passages from old authors where the hatred of tyranny is described with admirable vigour. Finally, I think I have always shown some strength of soul in disdaining the pride of the flesh, and have, quite as much as the Jansenist Blaise Pascal, the disgust for swashbucklers. All these reasons speak to my heart and to my intelligence in favour of popular government. I have made it the subject of meditations, which one day I shall put down in writing, in a work of that kind of which they say that one must break the bone to find the marrow. I want you to understand from that, that I shall compose a new _Praise of Folly_ which will appear frivolity to the frivolous, but the wise will recognise wisdom under the cap and bells. In short, I shall be a second Erasmus; following his example I shall teach the people by a learned and judicious playfulness. And you will find, my son, in one chapter of this treatise, every enlightenment on the subject that interests you; you will acquire a knowledge of the condition of statesmen placed in dependence on popular states or assemblies.”

“Oh, Monsieur l’Abbé!” I cried, “how impatient I am to read this book! When do you think it will be written?”

“I do not know,” replied my good master, “and truth to tell I think I shall never write it. Plans made by man are often thwarted. We have no power over the smallest particle of the future, and this uncertainty common to Adam’s race, is carried to extremes in my case by a long series of misfortunes. That is why, my son, I despair of ever being able to compose this respectable jest. Without giving you a political treatise, seated on this bench, I will tell you at least how I came to have the idea of introducing into my imaginary book a chapter wherein would appear the weakness and spite of servants taken on by good man Demos when master, if he ever become so, of which I am not quite decided, for I do not meddle in prophecy, leaving this preoccupation to maidens who vaticinate after the manner of the sibyls such as the Cumean, the Persian, or the Tiburtine, ‘_quarum insigne virginitas est et virginitatis præmium divinatio_.’ Let us then turn to our subject. It is nearly twenty years since I lived in the pleasant town of Séez, where I was librarian to the Bishop. Some travelling actors, who chanced to pass, gave a fairly good tragedy in a barn; I went to it and saw a Roman emperor appear whose wig was decorated with more laurels than a ham at the fair of Saint Laurence. He seated himself in a curule chair; his two ministers, in court dress with their impressive insignia, took their place on either side on stools, and the three formed a Council of State before the footlights, which stank exceedingly. Eventually, during the course of their deliberations, one of the councillors drew a satirical portrait of the consuls during the latter period of the Republic. He showed them as impatient to use and abuse their temporary power—enemies of the public good, and jealous of their successors, in whom they were only assured of seeing accomplices to their robbery and peculation. This is how he spoke:

‘These little monarchs, reigning for a year,
Seeing the limit of their rule so near,
Spoil the green fruit, of fairest seed and growth,
Rather than leave what they to leave are loath.
Since they have little part in what they wield,
Take a full harvest from the public field,
Assured of pardon, for their easy heirs
Hope for like treatment when the turn is theirs.’[6]

“Well, my son, these lines which, by their sententious precision recall the quatrains of Pibrac, are more excellent as regards meaning than the rest of the tragedy, which smells a little too much of the pompous frivolities of the princes’ Fronde, and is altogether spoilt by the heroic love-affairs of a kind of Duchesse de Longueville, who appears under the name of Émilie. I took care to remember them so as to meditate upon them. For one finds beautiful maxims even in works written for the theatre. What the poet says in these eight lines, on consuls of the Roman Republic, applies equally well to ministers of democracies whose power is precarious.

“They are weak, my son, because they depend on a popular assembly, incapable equally of the large and profound views of a politician, and of the innocent stupidity of an idle king. Ministers are only great if they second, as did Sully, an intelligent prince, or if, like Richelieu, they take the place of the monarch. And who does not feel that Demos will have neither the obstinate prudence of a Henry IV, nor the favourable inertia of a Louis XIII? Even supposing he knows what he wants he will not know how to carry out his wishes, nor even if they be feasible. Ordering ill, he will be badly obeyed, and will always believe himself betrayed. The deputies he will send to his States-General will keep up his illusions by ingenious lies up to the moment of falling under his unjust or legitimate suspicions. These states will perpetuate the same confused mediocrity as the mob from which they spring. They will revolve multiple and obscure thoughts. They will give the heads of government the task of carrying out vague wishes of which they themselves are not conscious, and their ministers, more unhappy than Œdipus in the fable, will be devoured, each in turn, by the Sphinx with a hundred heads for not having guessed the riddle of which the Sphinx herself was ignorant. The source of their greatest unhappiness will be their enforced resignation to impotence, and to talk instead of action. They will become rhetoricians and very bad rhetoricians, for talent, bringing some clarity with it, will be their undoing. They will have to train themselves to speak without saying anything, and the least foolish amongst them will be condemned to lie more than all the others. So, the most intelligent will become the most despicable. And if any are to be found clever enough to conclude treaties, regulate finance, and see to business, their knowledge will serve them nothing, for time will fail them, and time is the stuff of great undertakings.

“These humiliating conditions will discourage the good and lend ambition to the bad. From all sides, ambitious incompetence will rise from the depth of struggling villages to the first posts in the State, and as probity is not natural to mankind, but must be cultivated with great care and long-continued artifice, we shall see clouds of peculators fall on the public treasury. The evil will be much increased by the outburst of scandal, for, as it is difficult to hide anything under popular government, by the fault of some all will become suspect.

“I do not conclude from this, my son, that people will be more unhappy then than they are now, I have told you often enough in our former conversations that I do not think the fate of a nation depends on its prince and its ministers, and it is ascribing too much virtue to laws to make them the source of general prosperity or unhappiness. Nevertheless, the multitude of laws is grievous, and I also fear that the States-General will abuse their legislative powers.

“It is the harmless foible of Colin and Jeannot to frame laws while they keep their sheep, and to say: ‘If I were king!’ When Jeannot is king he will promulgate more edicts in a year than the Emperor Justinian codified during all his reign. It is in that direction, it seems to me, that Jeannot’s reign will prove formidable. But that of kings and emperors was usually so bad one could not fear a worse, and Jeannot, no doubt, will not commit many more follies, nor wickednesses, than all those princes girt with the double or triple crown, who, since the deluge, have covered the world with blood and destruction. His very incapacity and turbulence will have this much good in them that they will render impossible those learned correspondences between country and country we call diplomacy, which end in nothing but in the artistic lighting-up of useless and disastrous wars. The ministers of good man Demos unceasingly kicked, hustled, humiliated, thrown down and assailed with more rotten apples and eggs than the worst harlequin in a booth at a fair, will have no leisure to prepare carnage politely, in the secrecy and peace of the cabinet, on the board of green cloth, by conferences in regard to what is called the balance of Europe, which is but the happy hunting-ground of the diplomat. There will be no more foreign policy, and that will be a great thing for unhappy humanity.”

At these words my good master rose up, and continued as follows: “It is time to go in, my son, for I feel the dew penetrate by reason that my clothes are in holes in various places. Also, by remaining any longer under this porch, we risk frightening away the lovers of Catherine and Jeannette, who here await the hour of tryst.”

FOOTNOTES:

[6]

Ces petits souverains qu’on fait pour une année,
Voyant d’un temps si court leur puissance bornée,
Des plus heureux desseins font avorter le fruit,
De peur de le laisser à celui que les suit.
Comme ils ont peu de part aux biens dont ils ordonnent,
Dans le champ du public largement ils moissonnent,
Assurés que chacun leur pardonne aisément,
Espérant à son tour un pareil traitement.

VIII

THE CITY MAGISTRATES

That evening we betook ourselves, my master and I, to the arbour of the _Petit Bacchus_, where we found Catherine the lace-maker, the lame cutler, and the father who begot me. They were all seated at the same table before a jug of wine, of which they had taken enough to be pleasant and sociable.

Two magistrates had just been elected according to form, out of four, and my father was talking of it, according to the measure of his lights and his talents.

“The pity is,” said he, “that these city magistrates are gentlemen of the long robe, and not cooks, and that they hold their magistracy from the king, and not from the tradesmen, notably not from the corporation of Parisian cooks of which I am the banner-bearer. If they were of my choosing they would abolish tithes and the salt tax, and we should all be happy.... At any rate, if the world does not walk backwards like a crab, a day will come when magistrates will be elected by the tradesmen.”

“No doubt,” said Monsieur l’Abbé, “magistrates will one day be elected by the masters and their apprentices.”

“Mind what you are saying, Monsieur l’Abbé,” said my father anxiously, and drawing his brows together. “When apprentices mix themselves up with the election of magistrates all will be lost. In the days when I was apprenticed I thought of nothing but of misappropriating my master’s wife and goods. But since I own a shop and a wife I attend to the public interest, in which my own is bound up.”

Lesturgeon, our landlord, brought a jug of wine. He was a small, red-haired man, quick, and rough.

“You speak of the new magistrates,” he said, his hands on his hips, “I only wish them as much wisdom as the old ones, who were nevertheless not very knowing about the public welfare. But they were beginning to learn their business. You know, Monsieur Léonard (he spoke to my father), the school where the children of the Rue St. Jacques go to learn their alphabet, is built of wood, and a slow match and a few shavings would suffice to make it blaze like a veritable midsummer night’s bonfire. I warned the gentlemen of the Hôtel de Ville about it. My letter did not err in style for I had it written for sixpence by a scrivener who has a stall under the Val-de-Grace. I represented to the magistrate that all the small boys of the neighbourhood were in daily danger of being grilled, like chitterlings, which was a matter for thought, having regard to the sensibility of mothers. The magistrate who has to do with the schools answered politely, after a year had elapsed, that the danger run by the small boys of the Rue St. Jacques roused all his solicitude, and that he was eager to remove it, and, in consequence he was sending a fire-engine to the afore-mentioned pupils. ‘The king,’ he added, ‘having in his goodness built a fountain in commemoration of his victories, at two hundred paces from the school, water would not be lacking, and the children will learn in a few days to manage the engine which the town consents to grant them free.’

“On reading this letter I jumped to the ceiling. And returning to Val-de-Grace I dictated a reply to the scrivener as follows:

“‘Honoured City-magistrate—Sir, in the schoolhouse of the Rue St. Jacques are two hundred youngsters, of whom the oldest is but seven years of age. These are fine firemen, sir, to work your fire-engine. Take it back again, and have a schoolhouse built of stone and rubble.’

“This letter, like the former one, cost me sixpence, including the seal. But I did not lose my money, for, after twenty months had passed, I received a reply in which the magistrate assured me that the youngsters of the Rue St. Jacques were worthy of the care of the Parisian magistrates, who would prudently watch over their safety. We remain there. If my magistrate leaves his post I shall have to begin all over again, and pay a shilling once more to the scrivener in the Val-de-Grace. That is why, Monsieur Léonard, although I am firmly convinced there are faces at the town-hall which would be better fitted to play the buffoon at a fair, I have not the slightest desire to see new faces there, and I particularly wish to keep him of the fire-engine.”

“For my part,” said Catherine, “it is the _Lieutenant-Criminel_ I have a grudge against. He allows Jeannette, the viol player, to prowl about every day, at twilight, under the porch of St. Benoît-le-Bétourné. It is a disgrace. She walks through the streets with a kerchief tied round her head, and trails her dirty skirts through every gutter in the place. The public places should be reserved for girls well turned-out enough to show themselves with credit.”

“Oh! I reckon the pavement belongs to all the world,” said the lame cutler. “And one of these days I shall follow the example of our landlord, Lesturgeon, and go to the scrivener in the Val-de-Grace to get him to draw up, in my name, a fine petition in favour of poor hawkers. I cannot push my cart into a good position but I am at once bothered by the police, and as soon as a lackey or a couple of servant-girls stop at my stall, a big, black rascal turns up and orders me, in the name of the law, to go and undo my bundle elsewhere. Sometimes I am on ground rented by the market people, at others, I find myself a near neighbour of Monsieur Leborgne, sworn cutler. Another time I must yield the pavement to the carriage of a bishop or a prince. And there I am, getting into my harness and pulling at the straps, happy if the lackeys and the chambermaids have not carried off without payment, profiting by my awkwardness, a needle-case, some scissors, or a fine blade from Chatellerault. I am sick of suffering tyranny. I am sick of experiencing the injustice of the justiciaries. I feel a great desire to revolt.”

“I know from that sign,” said my good master, “that you are a magnanimous cutler.”

“I am not at all magnanimous, Monsieur l’Abbé,” modestly replied the cripple, “I am vindictive, and resentment has pushed me to sell, in secret, songs written against the king, his mistresses, and his ministers. I keep a fairly good assortment in the tilt of my cart. Do not betray me. That of the twelve reed-pipes is admirable.”

“I will not betray you,” answered my father, “a good song is worth a glass of wine to me, and even more, I do not say anything either about the knives, and I am glad, my good fellow, that you sell yours, for all the world must live. But acknowledge that one cannot allow wandering hawkers to enter into competition with tradesmen who rent a shop and pay taxes. Nothing is more contrary to law and order. The impudence of these draggle-tails is unspeakable. How far would it not go were it not checked. Last year did not a peasant from Montrouge come to a stop in front of the _Reine Pédauque_ with his little cart full of pigeons that he was selling, ready cooked, for two liards and a sou cheaper than I sell mine! And the bumpkin cried, in a voice fit to crack the windows of my shop, ‘Beautiful pigeons for five sous.’ I threatened him twenty times with my larding-pin. But he answered me, stupidly, that the street belonged to all the world. I made a complaint to the _Lieutenant-Criminel_ who saw justice done, and rid me of the villain. I do not know what has become of him, but I owe him a grudge for the harm he did me, for the sight of my usual customers, buying his pigeons, by couples, nay even by half-dozens, gave me an attack of jaundice, from the effect of which I became melancholy for a long time. I wish they’d stick as many feathers on his body, with glue, as he had plucked from the winged creatures he sold ready-cooked in my very face, and that thus be-feathered from head to foot he was led through the streets at the tail of his cart.”

“Monsieur Léonard,” said the lame cutler, “you are hard on poor people. It is thus the unfortunate are driven to desperation.”

“Master Cutler, I counsel you,” said my good master, laughing, “to order at the Innocents by some paid writer, a satire on Maître Léonard and to sell it along with your songs on the twelve pipes of King Louis. Our friend here should be celebrated a little, who, in a semi-servile state, aspires, not to freedom but to tyranny. I conclude from all your talking, gentlemen, that the policing of towns is a difficult art, that one must try and reconcile diverse and often contrary interests, that the public welfare is made up of a large number of private and individual woes, and that in fact, it is already rather wonderful that people shut up within walls do not devour one another. It is a blessing one must attribute to their poltroonery. Public peace is founded simply on the feeble courage of citizens who hold each other in respect by reason of their reciprocal fear. And the prince, in inspiring all with awe, assures to them the inestimable benefit of peace. As to your magistrates, whose power is weak, and who are incapable of serving or of injuring you much, and whose merits consist chiefly in their tall canes and wigs, do not complain overmuch that they are chosen by the king and ranked, or little short of it, since the last reign, with officers of the Crown. Friends of the prince, they are vaguely inimical to all citizens, and this enmity is rendered bearable to each by the perfect equality with which it bears upon all. It is like rain, of which one with another we receive but a few drops. One day, when they are elected by the people (as they tell us they were in the early days of the monarchy) magistrates will have friends and foes in the town. Elected by the shop-people, paying rent and tithes, they will ill-use the hawkers. Elected by the hawkers, they will ill-use the tradesmen. Elected by the artisans, they will be in opposition to the masters, who make the artisans work. It will be an incessant cause of dispute and quarrels. They will form a turbulent council where each will agitate for the interests and passions of his electors. Nevertheless, I fancy they will not make the present magistrates regretted who only depend on the prince. Their clamorous vanity will amuse the citizens who will see themselves as in an enlarging mirror. They will employ mediocre powers after a mediocre fashion. Risen from the mass of the people they will be as incapable of fostering it as of restraining it. The rich will be frightened at their audacity, and the poor will blame their fearfulness, whereas they will really display only noise and impotence. For the rest, they may be equal to common tasks, and to administering the public wealth with that insufficient sufficiency which they always attain to and never get beyond.”

“Ouf!” said my father, “you have spoken well, Monsieur l’Abbé—now drink!”

IX

SCIENCE

That day we tramped as far as the Pont Neuf, my good master and I, where the recesses were covered with those trestles on which the second-hand booksellers expose a conglomeration of romances and books of devotion. There one may find at twopence apiece the complete _Astrée_ and the _Grand Cyrus_, worn and thumbed by provincial readers, with the “Ointment for Burns,” and divers works of the Jesuits. My good master was accustomed, in passing, to read some pages of these works, of which he made no purchase, being out of funds, and wisely keeping for the _Petit Bacchus_ the sixpence he happened by a rare chance to have in his breeches’ pocket. For the rest, he did not thirst to possess the good things of this world, and the best works did not make him envious so long as he could get acquainted with the noble passages in them, on which he expatiated afterwards with admirable wisdom. The trestles of the Pont Neuf pleased him in that the books were impregnated with the smell of frying from the near neighbourhood of the hot-potato sellers, and this great man inhaled at the same time the welcome fragrance of cooking and of science.

Adjusting his spectacles, he examined the display of a second-hand dealer with the contentment of a happy soul, to which all things are gracious, for all things gain a grace from their reflection in it.

“Tournebroche, my son,” he said to me, “there are books to be found on the stall of this good man, fashioned in the days when printing was, so to speak, in its swaddling-clothes, and these books still suffer from the effects of the roughness of our forbears. I find a barbarous chronicle of Monstrelet, an author said to have been more frothy than a pot of mustard, and two or three lives of Ste. Marguerite, which the gossips of old put as a compress on their stomachs during the pains of childbirth. It would be inconceivable that men could be so idiotic as to write and to read similar absurdities, if our holy religion did not teach us that they are born with a germ of imbecility. And as the light of faith has never failed me, not even, happily, in the sins of the couch or of the table, I can more easily understand their past stupidity than their present intelligence, which, to speak frankly, appears to me illusory and deceptive, as it will seem to future generations, for man is in his essence a stupid animal, and the progress of his mind is but the empty consequence of his restlessness. That is the reason, my son, that I mistrust what they call science and philosophy, which are, to my mind, but an abuse of visions, and fallacious figures, and, in a certain sense, the advantage gained by the evil spirit over the soul. You will understand that I am far from believing all the devilries with which popular credulity frightens itself. I think with the Fathers that temptation is within us, and that we are to ourselves our own demons and bedevilments. But I bear a grudge against Monsieur Descartes and against all the philosophers who, following his example, have searched for a rule of life and the principles of conduct in the knowledge of nature. For, after all, Tournebroche, my son, what is knowledge of nature if it be not a fantasy of the senses? And what does science add to it, I ask you, with its savants, from the time of Gassendi, who was no donkey, and Descartes and his disciples, down to that precious fool, Monsieur de Fontenelle? Large spectacles, my son, spectacles like those which sit on my nose. All the microscopes and telescopes which we make a show of, what are they but glasses a little clearer than these of mine, that I bought last year at the fair of St. Laurence, of which the glass for the left eye, the one I see the best with, was unhappily cracked this winter by a footstool flung at my head by the lame cutler, who fancied I was kissing Catherine the lace-maker, for he is a coarse man, and utterly obfuscated by his visions of carnal desires. Yes, Tournebroche, my son, what are these instruments with which the savants and the curious fill their galleries and their cabinets? What are spectacles, astrolabes, compasses, if not the means of helping the senses to keep their illusions, and to multiply our fatal ignorance of nature while we multiply our relations with her? The most learned among us differ merely from the ignorant by the faculty they acquire of amusing themselves with manifold and complicated errors. They see the world in a faceted topaz, instead of seeing it as does Madame, your mother, for instance, with the naked eye the good God has given her. But they do not alter their eyes in donning spectacles; they do not alter dimensions in using apparatus proper to the measurement of space; they do not alter the weight of things in using very sensitive scales. They discover new appearances merely, and are but the plaything of new illusions. That is all! If I were not convinced, my son, of the holy truths of our religion, there would be left to me in this conviction, which I hold, that all human knowledge is but a progress in phantasmagoria, nothing but to throw myself from this parapet into the Seine, which has seen many others drown since she began to flow, or to go and ask of Catherine that form of oblivion from the ills of this world which one finds in her arms, and for which it would be indecent for me to look, in my position, and above all, at my age. I should not know what to believe in the midst of all this apparatus, whose powerful deceptions would increase immeasurably the falsehood of my outlook and I should be an entirely miserable academician.”

My good master was talking in this fashion before the first recess to the left, counting from the Rue Dauphine, and he was beginning to frighten the dealer who took him for an exorcist, when he suddenly picked up an old geometry, illustrated with sufficiently bad cuts by Sebastien Leclerc.[7]

“Perhaps,” he said, “instead of drowning myself in love or in water, if I were not a Christian and a Catholic, I should decide to throw myself into the study of mathematics where the mind finds the aliment of which it is most in need, to wit: sequence and continuity. And I vow that this little book, quite ordinary as it is, gives me a certain good opinion of man’s genius.”

At these words he opened the treatise by Sebastien Leclerc so widely, at the section concerning triangles, that he nearly broke it clean in two. But soon he flung it down in disgust.

“Alas,” he murmured, “numbers depend on time, lines on space, and these again are but human illusions. Without man there is neither mathematics nor geometry, and it is, after all, but a form of knowledge which does not draw us out of ourselves, although it affects an air of quite magnificent independence.”

Having spoken, he turned his back on the relieved bookstall-keeper, and drew a long breath.

“Ah! Tournebroche, my son,” he continued, “you see me suffering from an ill that I have brought on myself, and burnt with the fiery tunic with which I have been at such pains to clothe and deck myself.”

He spoke thus in a fanciful fashion, being in reality clad in a shocking old overcoat generally held together by two or three buttons which, moreover, were not even fastened in their own button-holes, and, as he was accustomed to say laughingly, when one spoke to him of it, it was an adulterous connection, a presentation of city manners!

He spoke with warmth:

“I hate science,” said he, “for having loved it too much, after the manner of voluptuaries who reproach women with not having come up to the dream they formed of them. I wanted to know everything, and I suffer to-day for my culpable folly. Happy,” added he, “oh! very happy are those good people assembled round that vendor of quack medicines.”

And he pointed with his hand to the lackeys, the chambermaids, and the porters of St. Nicolas, forming a circle round a practitioner who was giving a demonstration with his attendant.

“Look, Tournebroche,” said he, “they laugh heartily when that funny fellow kicks the other man’s behind. And in truth it is a pleasant sight, quite spoilt for me by thinking about it, for when one looks for the essence of this foot and the rest of it, one laughs no more. I ought, being a Christian, to have recognised earlier the malignity of that heathen saying, ‘Happy is he who knows the cause of things.’ I ought to have shut myself in holy ignorance as in an enclosed garden, and remained as the little children. I should not truly have been amused with the coarse play of this Mondor (this Molière of the Pont Neuf would have had little attraction for me when his prototype already appears to me too scurrilous[8]), but I should have found pleasure in the plants of my garden, I should have praised God in the flowers and fruit of my apple-trees.

“An immoderate curiosity has led me astray my son; I have lost, in the intercourse with books and learned men, the peace of heart, holy simplicity, and that purity of the simple-minded, all the more admirable in that it falters neither in the tavern nor in the hovel; as may be seen in the example of the lame cutler, and, if I dare say so, in that of your father, the cook, who retains much innocence though drunken and debauched. But it is not thus with him who has studied books. They leave, eternally, a bitter superiority, and a proud sadness.”

Talking thus, his speech was cut off by the roll of drums.

FOOTNOTES:

[7] The geometry of which Jacques Tournebroche speaks is decorated with designs by Sebastien Leclerc which I, on the contrary, admire for their precise elegance and delicate exactitude, but one must endure contradiction (ANATOLE FRANCE).

[8] It is a priest speaking thus (ANATOLE FRANCE).

X

THE ARMY

So, being on the Pont Neuf, we heard the roll of drums. It was the call to attention of a recruiting-sergeant, who, hand on hip, was strutting in an open space in front of a dozen soldiers, who were carrying bread and sausages spiked on the bayonets of their guns. A circle of beggars and youngsters looked on open-mouthed.

He twirled his moustache and made his proclamation.

“Do not let us listen to him,” said my good master to me. “It would be waste of time. This sergeant speaks in the king’s name. He has no talent for speaking. If it would please you to hear a clever discourse on the same subject you should go into one of those bakehouses on the Quai de la Ferraille, where the crimps cajole the lackeys and bumpkins. These crimps, being rascals, are bound to be eloquent. I remember, in my youth, in the time of the late king, having heard the most wonderful harangue from the mouth of one of these dealers in men, who kept shop in the Unhappy Valley, which you can see from here, my son. Recruiting men for the Colonies: ‘Young men who surround me,’ said he, ‘you have no doubt heard tell of the Land of Cockayne; it is to India you must go to find this land of fortune, where one is in clover. Do you wish for gold, pearls, diamonds? The roads are paved with them, one has but to stoop to pick them up. And you need not even stoop. The savages will pick them up for you. I do not even mention the coffee, the lemons, pomegranates, oranges, pineapples, and the thousand delicious fruits which grow without cultivation as in an earthly paradise. Did I speak to women and children I might extol all these dainties, but I am talking to men.’ I omit, my son, all that he said about glory, but you may believe he equalled Demosthenes in vigour and Cicero in fluency. The result of his discourse was the sending of five or six unhappy beings to die of yellow fever in the swamps, so true is it that eloquence is a dangerous weapon, and that talent for the arts exercises its irresistible force for evil as well as for good. Thank God, Tournebroche, in that, not having given you talents of any kind, He does not expose you to become one day the scourge of nations. One recognises the favourites of God by their lack of wit, and I have experienced that the fairly quick intelligence heaven has given me has been but an unceasing cause of danger to my peace in this world and in the next. What would it be if the heart and thought of a Cæsar dwelt in my head and my breast? My desires would recognise no sex and I should be untouched by pity. I should light the fire of inextinguishable war at home and abroad. And yet the great Cæsar had a delicate soul and a certain gentleness. He died decently under the dagger of his virtuous assassins. Day of the Ides of March! Ever fatal day, when sententious brutes destroyed this charming monster! I am fain to weep over the divine Julius along with Venus, his mother, and if I call him a monster it is from affection, for in his equable soul nothing was excessive save power. He had a natural feeling for rhythm and proportion. He found equal pleasure in his youth in the beauties of debauchery or those of grammar. He was an orator, and his beauty doubtless ornamented the purposed dryness of his speeches. He loved Cleopatra with that geometric exactitude that he brought to all his doings. He put in his writings and in his actions his talent for clarity. He was the friend of order and peace, even in war, sensitive to harmony, and so able a maker of laws that we still live, barbarians as we are, under the majesty of his rule, which has made the world what it is to-day. You see, my son, I am not sparing in praise or love for him. Commander, dictator, sovereign-pontiff he moulded the world with his beautiful hands. And I—I, have been professor of eloquence at the college of Beauvais, secretary to an opera-singer, librarian to my Lord Bishop of Séez, public-writer at the cemetery of the Holy Innocents, and tutor to the son of your father at the sign of the _Reine Pédauque_. I have made a beautiful catalogue of precious manuscripts, I have written some pamphlets, of which it is best not to speak, and set down on wastepaper certain maxims scornfully declined by the booksellers. Nevertheless, I would not change my existence for that of the great Cæsar. It would cost my innocence too much. And I would rather be an obscure man, poor and despised, as indeed I am, than rise to the height whence new destinies are opened to the world through paths of blood.

“This recruiting-sergeant, whom you can hear from here promising these vagabonds a halfpenny a day, with bread and meat, fills me, my son, with profound reflections on war and armies. I have worked at all trades save that of a soldier, which has always filled me with disgust and terror, by the characteristics of servitude, false glory, and cruelty, attached to it, which are in direct opposition to my peaceful temper, to my wild love of freedom, and to my turn of mind, which, judging sanely of glory, estimates at its rightful worth that attainable by a musketeer. I am not speaking at all of my incorrigible leaning to meditation which would have been exceedingly thwarted by sword and gun exercise. Not desirous of being Cæsar you will easily understand that neither do I wish to be a La Tulipe or Brin-d’Amour. And I own to you, my son, that military service seems to me to be the most terrible pest of civilised nations.

“This is the opinion of a philosopher. There is nothing to show that it will ever be shared by a large number of people. And in actual fact, kings and republics will always find as many soldiers as they want for their parades and their wars. I have read Machiavelli’s treatises at Monsieur Blaizot’s, at the sign of the _Image de Sainte Catherine_, where they are all very nicely bound in parchment. They deserve it my son, and, for my part, I hold an infinitely high opinion of the Florentine secretary, who was the first to remove from political action the legendary foundation of justice, on which they set up nothing but highly respectable villainies. This Florentine, seeing his country at the mercy of its hireling defenders, conceived the idea of a national and patriotic army. He says somewhere in his books that it is right that all citizens should unite for the safety of their country and all be soldiers. I have likewise heard this theory sustained at Monsieur Blaizot’s by Monsieur Roman, who is very zealous, as you know, for state rights. He has no care save for the general, and the universal, and will never be content until the day when every private interest is sacrificed to the public interest. Thus Machiavelli and Monsieur Roman wish us all to be soldiers, since we are all citizens. I do not say, as do they, that it is just, nor do I say that it is unjust, because justice and injustice are matter for debate, and it is a subject which only sophists can decide.”

“What! my good master,” I cried in sorrow and surprise, “you hold that justice depends on the reasoning of a sophist, and that our actions are just or unjust according to the arguments of a clever man! Such a maxim shocks me more than I can say.”

“Tournebroche, my son,” replied Monsieur l’Abbé Coignard, “you must consider that I speak of human justice, which is different from God’s justice, and generally opposed to it. Men have never upheld the idea of justice and injustice save by eloquence which is prone to embrace the for and against. Perhaps, my son, you would seat justice on sentiment, but beware lest on this petty site you merely raise some humble domestic hovel, some cabin of old Evander, or hut for a Philemon and Baucis. But the palace of law, the tower of State institutions, needs other foundations. Ingenuous nature alone could not support such weight of inequity, and these redoubtable walls rise from a foundation of most ancient falsehood, by the subtle and fierce art of law-givers, magistrates, and princes. It is folly, Tournebroche my son, to enquire if a law be just or unjust, and it is the same of military service as of other institutions of which one cannot say if they be good or bad on principle, since there is no principle saving God, from Whom all things come. You must protect yourself, my son, against this kind of slavery to words, to which men submit themselves with such docility. Know then, that the word justice has no meaning, if it be not in theology, where it is terribly expressive. Recognise that Monsieur Roman is but a sophist when he demonstrates to you that one owes service to a prince. Nevertheless, I think if the prince ever orders all citizens to become soldiers, he will be obeyed, I don’t say with docility, but light-heartedly. I have noticed that the profession most natural to man is that of a soldier; it is the one to which he is drawn the most easily by his instincts, and by his tastes, which are not always good. And beyond some rare exceptions, of which I am one, man may be defined as an animal with a musket. Give him a fine uniform with the hope of fighting, and he will be happy. Also, we make the military calling the noblest, which is true, in a sense, for it is the oldest calling, and the earliest of mankind made war. The military calling, moreover, has this appropriateness to human nature, that it never thinks, and clearly we are not made for thought.

“Thought is a malady peculiar to certain individuals which cannot propagate itself without promptly ending the race. Soldiers live in company, and man is a sociable animal. They wear blue-and-white, blue-and-red, or grey-and-blue coats, ribbons, plumes, and cockades, which give them the same advantage over women as the cock over the hen. They march to war and pillage and man is naturally thievish, libidinous, destructive, and easily touched by glory. The love of glory decides us Frenchmen, above all, to take up arms. And it is certain, that in public opinion, military glory eclipses all. To be assured of this, read history. La Tulipe may be held excused if he was no more a philosopher than Titus Livius.”

XI

THE ARMY (_continued_)

My good master continued in these terms:

“One must consider, my son, that men joined one to another in the succession of the ages by a chain of which they see but a few links, attach the notion of nobility to customs whose origin was lowly and barbarous. Their ignorance feeds their vanity. They found their glories on old, unhappy, far-off things, and the nobility of the profession of arms is due entirely to that savagery of early times of which the Bible and the poets have preserved the remembrance. And what, in fact, is this military nobility flaunted with so much pride over us, if not the debased legacy of those unfortunate hunters of the woods whom the poet Lucretius has depicted in such a way that one does not know if they be men or beasts? It is wonderful, Tournebroche, my son, that war and the chase, of which the thought alone should overwhelm us with shame and remorse when we recall the wretched needs of our nature and our inveterate wickedness, serve on the contrary, as matter for vain-glory to men, that Christian peoples should continue to honour the profession of butcher and executioner, when it is of old standing in families, and that finally one estimates among refined people the celebrity of citizens by the quantity of murders and carnage that they bear so to speak, in their veins.”

“Monsieur l’Abbé,” I said to my good master, “do you not think that the profession of arms is looked upon as noble because of the danger one runs therein and the courage that it is necessary to display?”

“Truly, my son,” answered my good master, “if the state of man is noble in proportion to the danger that he runs I do not fear to state that peasants and labourers are the noblest men in the kingdom for they risk death every day by fatigue or hunger. The perils to which soldiers and commanders expose themselves are less in number and in duration, they last but a few hours in a lifetime, and consist in facing cannon-balls and bullets which kill less surely than poverty. Men must needs be light and frivolous, my son, to give more honour to a soldier’s doings than to the work of a labourer and to place the destruction of war at a higher price than the arts of peace.”

“Monsieur l’Abbé,” I asked again, “do you not consider that soldiers are necessary to the safety of the state and that we should honour them in recognition of their usefulness?”

“It is true, my son, that war is a necessity of human nature and one cannot imagine nations who will not fight, that is to say, who are neither homicides, pillagers, nor incendiaries. Neither can you conceive a prince who is not in some measure a usurper. They would reproach him too much on that score, and they would despise him for it as one who was no lover of glory. For war is necessary to men; and is more natural to them than peace which is but war’s interval. Thus one sees princes hurling their armies on one another on the worst of pretexts, and for the most futile of reasons. They invoke their honour, which is excessively touchy. A mere breath suffices to make a stain on it which cannot be washed save in the blood of ten, twenty, thirty, or a hundred thousand men, in proportion to the population of the contending principalities. If only one thinks of it, it is inconceivable that the honour of a prince can be cleansed by the blood of these unhappy beings, or rather one realises that it is a mere form of speech, void of meaning; but for words men go willingly to their death. What is yet more wonderful, is that a prince gains much honour from the theft of a province and the outrage that would be punished by death in the case of some daring private individual becomes praiseworthy if it is carried out with the most outrageous cruelty by a sovereign with the help of his hirelings.”

My good master, having thus spoken, drew his box from his pocket and sniffed up a few remaining grains of rappee.

“Monsieur l’Abbé,” I said, “are there no wars that are just, and fought for a good cause?”

“Tournebroche, my son,” he answered me, “civilized nations have much overstrained the injustice of war and they have rendered it very iniquitous as well as very cruel. The first wars were undertaken for the establishment of tribes on fertile lands. Thus the Israelites conquered the land of Canaan. Hunger forced them to it. The advancement of civilization extended war to the conquest of colonies and foreign markets, as is seen in the example of Spain, Holland, England and France. Lastly, one has seen kings and emperors steal provinces of which they had no need, which they ruined, which they made waste, without profit to themselves and without other advantage than to raise pyramids and triumphal arches. And this abuse of war is the more odious as one must believe that nations are becoming more and more wicked by the advancement of the arts, or rather that war, being a necessity to human nature, is waged for its own sake when there is absolutely no reason for waging it.

“This reflection grieves me deeply, for I am disposed by my condition and inclination to the love of my fellow creatures. And what puts the finishing touch to my sadness, Tournebroche, my son, is that I find my snuff-box is empty, and want of snuff is where I feel my poverty the most.”

As much to distract his thoughts from this personal trouble as to instruct myself in his teaching, I asked him if civil war did not seem to him the most detestable kind of war there was?

“It is odious enough,” he replied, “but not so very inept, for members of a state when they come to blows between themselves have more chance of knowing why they fight than in the case where they go to war against a foreign people. Seditious and intestinal quarrels are usually born of the extreme wretchedness of the people. They are the result of despair, and the only issue left to the unhappy beings who may obtain thereby better conditions and sometimes even a hand in the game of ruling. But it is to be remarked, my son, that the more unhappy, and therefore excusable, are the insurgents, the less chance they have of winning the game. Starved and stupefied, armed but with their rage, they are incapable of great plans or of prudent considerations so that they are easily reduced by the prince. He has more difficulty in putting down rebellion among the great, which is to be detested, for it has not the excuse of necessity. In fine, my son, whether civil or foreign, war is execrable, and has a malignity that I detest.”

XII

THE ARMY (_concluded_)