The Surprises Of Life Part 7

In less time than it takes to tell it, the three men had quieted down.

They separated hastily, without good-night, and each with nimble foot went home to bed.

The fourth Israelite, Jesus, son of Joseph, was left alone beneath the stars. He is still there. Without disrespect, I blame Him for not having on this occasion put in a word.

VIII

EVIL BENEFICENCE

Beneficence is a virtue: no one will deny it. But let no one deny, either, that there are benefactors maleficent in the extreme, through the stupidity of their benefactions.

In the distant days of my youth there flourished in the Woodland of the Vendee a highly respected couple, who during a period of fifty years wearied three cantons with their "kindness."

These excellent people were, of course, possessed of great wealth, for in order to pester one's fellowman with generosity one must have received the means for it from heaven. They were, on top of that, pious, again as a matter of course, for the preacher's promise of eternal reward has killed in man the beautiful disinterestedness that is the fine flower of charity.

The Baron de Grilleres was a small n.o.ble of large fortune. Formerly a member of the body guard of Charles X, he had little care for "Divine Right" or a return to the splendours of the old regime, as he proved by accepting a captaincy in the militia called out by Louis Philippe to crush the royalist attempt at an uprising in the Vendee, in which the d.u.c.h.esse de Berry so miserably failed. I have seen in the Baron's study a shining panoply in which his epaulettes of a royal guardsman eloquently fraternized with his collar piece of a captain of the National Guard in arms against the King. In the centre were two crossed swords, one of them formerly worn in the service of the legitimate sovereign anointed at Rheims, the other drawn from its scabbard against that same legitimacy, to uphold the rights of the usurper.

It is certain that the excellent soldier had never perceived anything contradictory in these two manifestations of a martial spirit. He had consistently upheld established order, that is to say, the regime which a.s.sured him the peaceful enjoyment of his property, and the logic of his conduct seemed to him unquestionable, for what in the world could be more sacred than that which promoted the quietness of his life? Totally uneducated, barely able to write his name, he was never troubled by any longings after learning. The Church answered for everything; he referred everything to the Church. This principle has the great advantage of dispensing one from any effort to think for himself.

The Baroness, of middle-cla.s.s origin, and doubtless for that reason very proud of the three gates on her escutcheon, lived solely, as she was pleased to say, "for the glory of G.o.d." Divinity, according to this simple soul, needed the Baroness de Grilleres in order to attain the fullness of glory. It is a common idea among believers that the Creator of the Universe is open to receiving from His creatures pleasant or unpleasant impressions, just as we are from our fellow-beings. These estimable people are convinced that the Good Lord of All is pleased or angered accordingly as they act thus or so. They hold Providence in such small esteem as to believe that It needs defending by those same human beings whom It could with a gesture reduce to the original dust. Do we not often hear it said that such and such a minister or party is bent on "driving out G.o.d" from somewhere or other, and that they would in all likelihood succeed but for some paladin, ecclesiastical or military, stepping in to defend the Supreme Being, unequal, apparently, to defending Himself? This Baroness of the Vendee, dwelling in perpetual colloquy with the Eternal, either directly or through the mediation of the divine functionaries delegated for that purpose, had taken as her special mission to "contribute to the Glory of G.o.d." In some nebulous way it seemed to her that if she gave an example of all the virtues, the Sovereign Artificer, like Vaucanson, delighted with himself on account of his famous mechanical duck, would be puffed up with pride at His success in producing so perfect a human specimen, and that the admiration of the world for the genius capable of such a masterpiece would deliciously tickle the conceit of the Almighty. One might attribute to the Master of the Infinite less human causes of satisfaction. But, might one say, what matter, if this rather earthly view of Divinity incited the devout Baroness to the practice of the virtues?

"The virtues," when one has an income of 80,000 francs, and no personal tastes, no pa.s.sion of mind or heart to satisfy, do not seem beyond human reach. For "the glory of G.o.d" the Baroness de Grilleres was in life as chaste as an iceberg, and at death bequeathed her wealth to the rich.

G.o.d, the Holy Virgin, and the Saints bid us to give. More especially, they are pleased if we give first of all to the Church. Chapels sprang up in the Baroness's footprints. After a consultation with her spiritual adviser, she had dedicated her husband to Saint Joseph. The Saint and the Baron exchanged a thousand amenities. The one received statues and prayers, the other, the highest example of resignation. Wherever two avenues crossed in the park, stood a group of the Holy Family, with an inscription showing that the Baron and Baroness de Grilleres aspired to linking their names in the public memory with those of the pair conspicuous for the greatest miracle known on earth.

Upon every religious establishment in the surrounding country successively were bestowed sums of money, in exchange for which the pious donors desired nothing but a marble tablet, placed well in view, whereon was published in golden letters that Christian charity in connection with which the Master has said that the right hand must not know what is done by the left. Of course, the presence of the poor, the sick, and the infirm, in an inst.i.tution conducted by some congregation, did not actually const.i.tute a reason in the minds of the Baron and Baroness for withholding their gifts. They considered, however, that direct service to G.o.d and the Saints must be given precedence, for the heavenly powers were the ones who dispensed rewards; it might, moreover, be feared that there was a sort of impiety in thwarting the unfathomable designs of Providence, by attempting to alleviate the trials It had seen fit to impose upon human beings.

When the mayor of La Fougeraie, a notorious Free Mason, headed a subscription for setting up a public fountain in the village square, the lord and lady of the chateau refused to contribute, but immediately devoted 2,000 francs to purchasing a holy water font of Carrara marble, on which might be seen a flight of angels carrying heavenward the escutcheon with the three gates.

As for the poor who did not shrink from personally soliciting alms, the Baron and Baroness alike held them in profound contempt. In the history of every wretched beggar there invariably turned out to be some fault in conduct making him unworthy of charity. One of them had got drunk last Sunday at the tavern, one was accused of stealing potatoes, another had been mixed up in a brawl at the village festival. How could disorderly living of this sort lead to anything but mendicancy? "You ought to go to work, my good man," they would say. "Look for employment. Do you so much as go to ma.s.s? Do you keep Lent? Go and see the _cure_. It is to him we give our alms, for the whole countryside knows we keep nothing for ourselves of what the Good G.o.d has given us. It is not to the deceitful riches of this earth that we must cling, my poor friend; for heavenly things only must we strive. Go and see the _cure_, he is so kind. He will know how to minister to the needs of your soul."

Sometimes the gift of a little bra.s.s medal with the image of Saint Joseph or the Virgin Mary would accompany this homily, and the beggar, however hardened in his evil ways, would depart with humble salutations and a melancholy thankfulness.

It is true that vice deserves hate, but can it be denied that certain aspects of virtue are utterly hateful? Vice, not unlikely to bring about humility and repentance, is sometimes capable of generous actions without hope of reward. The selfish goodness of calculating virtue sees in Christian charity the opening of a bank account with the Creator, and while making lavish gifts, forfeits the merit of giving, by the avowed exaction of a profit immeasurably greater than the amount paid. The Baron and Baroness de Grilleres basked in the delight of hearing themselves praised from the pulpit. No flattering hyperbole seemed to them excessive, for, as they sowed money on all sides, they looked for a great harvest of splendidly ostentatious veneration. All they lacked in order to be loved was that they should first love a little.

Of family life they never knew anything but the companionship of two egoisms, both fiercely straining toward an incomprehensible future felicity, to be earned by the application of a language of love, in which was wrapped their l.u.s.t of eternity. They had for incidental diversion the base adulation of poor relations, whose mean calculations did not, however, escape them. But the habit of hearing, at every step, every conceivable virtue attributed to them, was an agreeable one, and although they knew that money counted for something in the outpouring of eulogistic superlatives of which they were the objects, they lent themselves easily to the sweet belief that they did, in fact, achieve prodigies of kindness every hour of their lives. No need to say that they never made a gift of three shirts or a pair of shoes to a grand nephew without the fact being trumpeted abroad.

A delightful game, for the Baroness, was distributing legacies among her relatives. Not a piece of furniture, of jewellery, or of silver, did she possess, not a single object of commonest use, that she had not in theory and in antic.i.p.ation given to some one of her heirs. She would open a wardrobe and show the happy prospective owner a label posted on the inside of the door: "I bequeathe this piece of furniture, which came to me from my dear Mamma, to my good little cousin Mary, whom I love with all my heart." Picture the embraces, the ensuing effusions of tenderness! Further on, the corner of a bit of paper would stick out from under the pedestal of a clock. "I bequeathe this clock, which was the property of my beloved Grandmother, to my grandnephew, Charles, who will pray for his good aunt." With what ecstasy little grandnephew Charles, led with much mystery to the spot, would with his own eyes read the text naming him possessor of the treasure! No member of the family was without his allotted share.

Only, the capricious Baroness, whom it was very easy to annoy, was perpetually taking offence. For a delayed letter, for thanks which seemed insufficient tribute to her generosity, she would declare that Mary or Charles no longer loved her, and as she looked upon affection merely as a marketable commodity, the little slips of paper referring to heirship were immediately replaced by others. Mary's wardrobe would fall to Selina. Charles's clock would leap into John's inheritance, who would be apprised of the fact in deep secret, until presently, for some unconscious fault, the clock would be temporarily bestowed upon Alphonse, and the wardrobe upon Rose. Variable book-keeping, which kindled among relatives inextinguishable hatreds. But the Baroness'

masterpiece was the marriage between John and Rose.

John was an overseer of highway and bridge construction. He loved his cousin Mary, who contributed by her needlework to the slender family earnings. The young people had been betrothed six months, when one fine day, without any known reason, the Baroness declared that Rose was the one for John, and John exactly suited to Rose. Great commotion. The fear of being disinherited kept every one concerned in subjection to the "dearly beloved Aunt." Mary, desperately weeping, was preached into promising to enter a convent, the Baroness paying her dowry; this for the dear sake of John, whose name she might unite in her prayers with that of the Providential Aunt, who mercifully opened the way of salvation to her. John, alas, was more easily persuaded than she, when he learned that he and Rose together would be chief heirs; and Rose, who had ideas of grandeur, and dreamt of nothing less than going on to the stage, lent herself with her whole heart to the comedy of love fatly remunerative. John was invited to give up his work and "live like a gentleman," and Rose's natural tendencies cooperating, the young couple, loaded down with gifts of sounding specie, spread themselves gloriously, under the happy eyes of the Baroness, in every description of silly extravagance.

The Baron died of an attack of gout, a disease unknown to clodhoppers.

His wealth pa.s.sed to his wife. Rose and John had received on their marriage an income of only 10,000 francs, but they had the formal promise of the entire inheritance. Unfortunately, a week before her death, the Baroness was shocked by "a lack of regard" on Rose's part, which consisted in not having evinced a sufficiently vociferous despair at the recital of her Aunt's sufferings! By a will made in her last moments everything was bequeathed to the Church, in payment for numberless ceremonies whereby the utmost of celestial bliss was to be secured for the dying woman.

Rose and John, after a torrent of invectives, left that part of the country. An income of 10,000 francs signified poverty for them. They fled to Paris, where in less than a year John lost down to his last penny in speculations. After that they went their respective ways, Rose to sing in a cafe-concert of the Faubourg St. Martin, John to take employment with a booking agency for the races. He has as yet only been sentenced to one month's imprisonment for a swindling card-game.

Admirable results of an Evil Beneficence!

IX

A MAD THINKER

Among the wise, some will perhaps agree with me, the maddest madmen are not those who are commonly called so. In great walled and barred and guarded buildings--prisons where people who are condemned by "science,"

just as elsewhere people are condemned by "law," expiate the crime of a psychological disorder greater than that of the majority--unfortunate beings are kept behind bolts and triple locks, for the incoherence of their syllogisms, while fellow mortals no more mentally stable are allowed to do their raving out on the world's stage.

For one whole year in my youth I dwelt among the lunatics of Bicetre. I had many interviews with "impulsives," whom a sudden disturbance of the organism had made dangerously violent, and who talked pathetically about their "illness," believing it cured, whereas it was not. I held discussions with patients suffering from more or less specific delusions. From those now long-past a.s.sociations I have retained a habit of comparing the mentalities inside asylums with those outside, which proceeding leads rather to the proposal than the solution of problems.

What seems clear, however, is that we have not discovered a standard of good sense, a way of measuring reason, by which we could definitely separate sane from morbid psychology; that, furthermore, such a method, had we discovered it, would not help us much, considering the disconcerting ease with which men pa.s.s from the normal to the pathological state, and vice versa. We should need too many asylums, and there would be too continual a coming and going in and out of them. We should not have time, between sojourns there, to study what we wanted to learn, to teach what we knew, to prove to each other that we are all afloat in a sea of errors, to quarrel, to vote, to kill one another, and to reproduce ourselves for the sake of perpetuating the balance of unbalance amid which fate has placed us.

Let us then accept the human phenomenon as it stands, and beware of cla.s.sifications which might lead us to believe that the mere fact of being at liberty on the public highways is a guarantee of sound mind.

Whoever doubts this may wisely consider the judgments men are pleased to pa.s.s upon one another. Question the Christian with regard to the atheist, he will tell you that one must be totally devoid of common sense to deny evidence that to him seems conclusive. The Mahomedan will not conceal from you, if you discuss Christianity with him, that one must unmistakably be mad, to identify three in one, and believe in a physical manifestation of G.o.d to man. The Buddhist will look upon the Mussulman as feeble in reasoning power, and the practiser of fetishism on the coast of Africa or of Australasia will declare all these sects foolish, since to him the only rational thing is to worship his fetishes, which are, strangely enough, matched in our religion by the many miraculous statues. Lastly, let me mention the philosophers, who agree in regarding all those people as affected with morbid degeneration, while pitying one another because of the mutual imputation of diseased understanding.

At the time when I, like so many others, was seeking for the absolute truth which should give me the key to all knowledge, I made the acquaintance of one of those same seekers, possibly mad, or possibly gifted with more than ordinary intelligence, who applied all his mental energy to the solution of the problem of the construction of the world, and to answering the questions raised by the presence of man on earth.

He was one of those "unfrocked priests" whom people usually blame because they refuse to preach what seems to them a lie. I do not give his name, his express desire having been to pa.s.s unknown among men. He left the priesthood quietly, and after a fairly long stay in Paris, during which he studied medicine, returned to his native village, where two small farms brought an income more than sufficient for his needs.

He lived alone, despised by pious relatives, who besieged him with flattering attentions aimed at his inheritance, but were kept at a respectful distance by his witty and well-directed shafts of sarcasm. A veritable Doctor Faustus. Fifty years he spent in a.s.siduous study of the great minds that make up the history of human thought. His door was open to the poor, but he did not seek them out, absorbed as he was in problems allowing him neither diversion nor respite. He had no curiosity as to what was going on in the world. His spirit lived in the perpetual tension of reaching out toward the unknown, feverishly importuned to deliver up its mystery, and he did not wish to know anything of men, their conflicts, their often contradictory efforts to better their fate.

Had he lived in the midst of the Siberian steppes, or on some Malay Island, he would not have been more entirely cut off from the surrounding social life. The Franco-Prussian war and the Commune were as remote from him in the depths of the Vendee as Alexander's expedition to the Indies. When one of the farmers once tried to recall that period to his mind: "Yes, yes, I remember," he answered, "all the fruit was frozen that year." It was the only vestige in his memory of those terrific storms.

He was naturally considered mad, but it could not be denied that he reasoned pertinently on all subjects. Absorbed in books, he had for sole company the men of all time, and felt himself far better acquainted with Leucippus, Democritus, Epicurus, Newton, Laplace, Darwin, and Auguste Comte than with Bismarck or General Trochu. Shut up day and night in a great room to which no one had admittance, he lived over with delight the vast poem of the creation of the world. In waking to consciousness, the universe, he was wont to say, had set us a riddle, after the manner of the Sphinx, and he, a new Oedipus, was challenging the monster. He would tear out its secret, he would proclaim it from the earth to the stars, while disdaining the glory dear to ordinary mortals.

For he had taken every precaution to ensure the author's name remaining absolutely unknown when his great work should be published. In order to avert suspicion, the book was first to be printed in a foreign tongue.

If the Abbe was mad--the peasants still called him by his ecclesiastical t.i.tle, either from old habit, or respect for his mysterious investigations--his madness was certainly not a mania for self-aggrandizement. Disinterested truth, truth with no other reward than success in the effort to reach it, was the single impulse moving this monkishly cloistered existence. One might say that there was proof of an unbalanced mind. I will not argue the point. Absolute truth is undoubtedly beyond our reach. It is none the less true that the sustained effort to attain truth remains the n.o.blest distinction of man. If it is reasonable to desire to know, who shall say at what point it becomes folly, through aspiration outstripping the possibility of satisfaction? Since, furthermore, this possibility increases with the progressive evolution of the mind, might not it follow that one who had been thought mad, in olden days, would be called wise to-day and that the madman of to-day will in future ages be a prodigy of luminous intellect? Find the boundary line between reason and unreason in this inextricable tangle!

But to return to our excellent "Abbe," with whom, by a curious chance, I became intimately acquainted, a few months before his death, I must say that he never troubled himself with these considerations, to him inane.

He did not deny that there were maladies of the mind, but he professed complete scorn for the "collection of low prejudices" to which the name of "reason" was given by the general public. "I have come too soon," he said to me. "In a few thousand years they will erect statues to the man who will be a repet.i.tion of me. So far, men have parted at the cross-roads where the paths of science and faith diverge. Some day there will be one broad highroad to knowledge. The time has not come to lay that road. As barbarism covered over the premature flowering of Greek thought, so our present savagery would soon crowd out truths too newly arrived at, which only very gradually will take root in men's minds."

"Tell me," I said to him one day, "since you stand on such a height that you are free from the pride of the precursor, that you are insensible to human glory, that you do not even intend to leave to posterity your name as a seeker, have you never, alone with your conscience, and stripped of all personal interest, asked yourself whether you were sure, after all, entirely sure, of possessing this total and absolute truth?"

The Abbe's little gray eyes twinkled. He answered with a melancholy smile: "The final and irreparable failure of my religious faith was a fearful blow to me. I no longer believed. What had appeared to me good evidence on the day before looked to me from that day onward like the irrational wanderings of delirium. But I realize to-day, after so many years of meditation, that although my old conceptions of existence could not stand the test of experience, yet the framework of my mind has remained the same. I had abandoned the Theological Absolute; I was in search of a Scientific Absolute, no more to be found than the other. I do not regret my error, for I owe to it the greatest joys of my life.

For thirty years the marvel of seeing the veil of Isis slowly raised, and the world, bit by bit, taken to pieces and put together again, according to infallible laws, brought me the supreme delight of grasping the world by thought. When I had exhausted a.n.a.lysis and synthesis, I undertook to tell my discoveries, and such was my mastery of my subject that in ten years I wrote a volume of five hundred pages, in which, I can say it now, for I have burned it, was contained what, in incalculable centuries to come, will be considered the treasure of human knowledge."

"You burned this work of yours?"

"Yes, to replace it by another."

"And is this other one final?"

"You want my complete confession? I am so near death that I will afford you this pleasure. Having finished my book, I decided to devote the rest of my life to going over it, pen in hand, and annotating it. Alas! When I became my own critic I found the fine frenzy of creation replaced by a power of keenly reasoning destructiveness which I had up to that time not suspected in myself. The creators of systems in the past were only gifted with the power of induction and prophecy. I had the power to dissect, to undermine my own inductions and prophecies. What we term truth is but an elimination of errors. I thought, I still think, that I had attained truth, pure and simple, but the edifice so laboriously built could not escape the pitiless criticism of the builder. The same mental gymnastics which had led to my replacing former doubts by demonstrated affirmations now raised fresh doubts in the face of my new demonstrations. What would have been their effect upon the unprepared intelligences for which the result of my labour was intended? I spent five years of painful spiritual tension in rewriting and condensing my work."