De la grippe
ENCORE DE LA GRIPPE
Charles Péguy
The following afternoon — and this was already more than a month ago — the citizen doctor, socialist revolutionary moralist internationalist, came back to see me. He had in his hand — and not under his arm, for one has never carried a book under one’s arm while walking — he had a library book. I was feeling a little better still. But I still had fits of breathlessness that worried me. These fits of breathlessness might presage the slight relapse I had later.
“Citizen patient, yesterday we forgot the main thing.”
“That is not surprising, citizen doctor: one almost always forgets the main thing.”
“I forgot to ask you why you were thinking of getting well.”
“I was not merely thinking of it, doctor; I desired it and I willed it. I desired it profoundly, dully, obscurely, clearly, in all ways, in every sense, with all my body, with all my soul, with all of me. I willed it firmly. I also wanted to hope for it. My family and my friends desired it, willed it, and several of them hoped for it. I was in agreement with them on that. The doctor also willed it. And I am certain that all my adversaries sincerely desired it, and I believe that most of my enemies desired it no less.”
“That is a great deal of agreement. Shall I begin with you?”
“I will tell you that I shall no doubt be embarrassed to answer your questions. I was not very strong on analysis when I was ill. There were in me feelings and reasons for which I wanted to get well. But the desire and will I had for it seemed to me so natural that I did not seek to discern the causes.”
“Duty and knowledge are not identically in conformity with nature. I shall help you. We shall begin with the reasons, because it is more convenient, and we shall finish with the feelings. But first we shall note that the sick want to get well in order to escape death, or to escape illness, or, naturally, to escape both. We love the remedy, the convalescence, and the recovery out of love of life, or out of love of health, or, of course, out of love of healthy life.”
“These are great questions, doctor, and these simple consultations and conversations will not suffice to untangle them: the passion for life and death, for illness and health, for joy and pain. At the very least, dialogues would be needed.”
“Or a poem. Or poems. Or a drama. They have been written. Many of them. We shall dialogue if life and action leave us the space and the strength, later, when we are better informed. Then we shall speak dialogues. Today we shall converse at leisure, as befits a convalescent. For what reasons did you want to escape death?”
“As far as I recall and can disentangle, I knew that my death would cause a frightful suffering to a few, a great suffering to several, a suffering to many.”
“Good. Thus we are led back from the consideration of death to the consideration of pain and evil.”
“I would have been grieved in return if I had imagined that death consisted no doubt in leaving the survivors. But I could not manage to give myself this representation.”
“That is a defect of the imagination.”
“I thought very vividly, on the contrary, that I would leave unfinished several enterprises I have begun, a book I have begun, several books I hoped to begin, continue, and finish, these very notebooks, attempted at least for a year, on which you know I lavish all my care.”
“That proves, citizen convalescent, that you are interested in what you do.”
“It proves above all that I work at it. I would not tell you so brutally if I had not been severely reproached for it.”
“You would be wrong: one must always speak brutally.”
“A rather occasional subscriber…”
“What do you mean by that?”
“I meant a subscriber who will no doubt become steadier. This subscriber made a severe criticism of the notebooks, which I have put to use. He reproached me that my style was deliberate. That is to say, worked at.”
“What did you answer him?”
“I did not answer him, since I have not the time. I answered him within myself. I do not know what a style is that is not worked at, that is not deliberate. Or rather, I believe I know that it is not a style. People would laugh a great deal at a sculptor who carved a Balzac without noticing it. Why should the writer be expected to carve and cut without having willed it? Let us leave these jokes. I do not claim that work can draw anything from nothingness — at least human work, which is the only kind I know. But I have never seen anything serious that the author had not worked at. The Romantics have stupefied us on this point as well.”
“Which Romantics? That was a violent word.”
“Do not think, doctor, that I seek non-crude words to qualify a crude influence.”
“Which Romantics?”
“The French Romantic prose writers and poets, the only ones I have read. I have made them my personal enemies. One day I shall tell you why. For today I note only that they powerfully contributed, with all their literature, to bringing work into disrepute. You know: ‘Thus when Mazeppa, who roars and weeps.’ You too declaimed these verses, weeping with happiness and admiration.”
“I declaimed them when I was a schoolboy. They were fine verses: ‘Thus when a mortal on whom his god pours forth…’”
“When they wanted to write verses, I persist in believing that they did not have themselves tied to a fiery horse fed on sea-grasses: they had inkwell, pen and penholder, and paper, like everyone else. And they sat down at their table on a chair, like everyone else, except the one who worked standing up. And they worked, like everyone else. And genius requires the patience to work, doctor, and the further I go, citizen, the less I believe in the efficacy of sudden illuminations that would not be accompanied or sustained by serious work, the less I believe in the efficacy of extraordinary sudden marvelous conversions, in the efficacy of sudden passions — and the more I believe in the efficacy of modest, slow, molecular, definitive work.”
“The further I go,” replied the doctor gravely, “the less I believe in the efficacy of an extraordinary sudden marvelously improvised social revolution, with or without rifles and impersonal dictatorship — and the more I believe in the efficacy of modest, slow, molecular, definitive social work. But I do not know why you broach such large questions, which you yourself have reserved, when I am only asking you for information about the reasons and feelings you had last week.”
“Forgive me, citizen who carve out interrogations: forgive me for sometimes escaping your provisional limits; forgive me on the grounds that reality is not made only to conform to our carvings. Rather, it is our carvings that are sometimes in conformity with the separations of reality, and often are arbitrary.”
“Particularly arbitrary when we are dealing with men and the societies they have formed. — Did you, at the moment of danger, think of this: of the immortality of the soul, or of its mortality?”
“No, doctor, since I told you that I did not imagine that I would be leaving, that I would be departing, that afterwards I would no doubt be absent. When I was in the provinces at the lycée in my first year of philosophy, an elderly professor — white-haired, honorable, very kind, very gentle, very clear, very grave, of old-fashioned speech, with profoundly sad and gentle eyes — taught us. We owe him more for having given us the example of a long and serious university life than for having patiently prepared us for the baccalaureate. He treated simply and nobly before us the questions of the syllabus. The immortality of the soul was no doubt on the syllabus. He treated before us the immortality of the soul. What was at stake was nothing less than knowing whether his soul — his, the soul of him who regularly walked his body up and down the classroom, and who regularly placed his body’s foot on the brick tiles of the classroom — what was at stake, then, was knowing whether his soul was immortal or mortal; and it was no less a question of knowing whether our souls — ours, we who diligently used the hands of our bodies to faithfully copy down the lecture — it was no less a question of knowing whether our souls were immortal or mortal. It was a great debate. The fair-minded professor presented to us the reasons by which we may think that human souls are immortal; then he presented to us the reasons by which we may, if need be, think that our human souls are mortal: and in this course of austere and gentle philosophy, the second reasons did not appear to prevail over the first. The fair-minded professor evidently inclined toward the solution of hope. All the affectionate respect we have kept for him did not prevent us then from reacting. Continuing to protest against the Catholic belief in which we had been raised, beginning to protest against the teaching of the lycée, where our secondary studies were ending, preoccupied above all with not being afraid, and with not appearing to be afraid, we reacted against complacency. We were hard. We said boldly that the immortality of the soul was metaphysics. Since then I have perceived that the mortality of the soul is also metaphysics. So I no longer say anything. The concern I had for individual immortality, and which has varied greatly according to the events of my life, remains with me. But the attention I gave to this concern has greatly diminished since the concern for mortality, survival, and social immortality has grown in me. For immortality too I have become a collectivist.”
“One cannot seriously convert to socialism without philosophy and life and the deepest feelings being refreshed, renewed, and, to keep the word, converted.”
“It is a frightful anguish to foresee and to see collective death, whether a whole people engulfs itself in the blood of massacre, whether a whole people staggers and lies down in the entrenchments of battle, whether a whole people hastily poisons itself with alcohol, whether a whole class dies with accelerated speed from the work that is supposed to give it nourishment. And as humanity does not have indefinite reserves, it is a strange anguish to think of the death of humanity.”
“The question remains, my friend, whether it is better that humanity live or that it die.”
“To know, doctor, whether it is better that humanity live or that it die, it is still necessary that it live. One does not know when one does not live. One does not choose when one does not live.”
“The proposition you enunciate here, my friend, is roughly what is called a truism.”
“Better to proclaim a truism than to insinuate an error.”
“Or rather, it is not bad to proclaim a truism, and it is bad to insinuate an error. — You no doubt have Renan’s Philosophical Dialogues here?”
“Of course I have them, doctor.”
“Will you give them to me?”
As I did not yet have permission to go out, someone went upstairs to fetch the Dialogues. The moralist doctor set on my round table the book he had brought, opened the Dialogues and Philosophical Fragments, stopped at the Dialogues, leafed through them, reread them, reread passages, carried continuously from certainties to probabilities and from probabilities to dreams. This lasted a long time.
“One would have to quote everything. These dialogues have a strange charm and a marvelous inconsistency, an admirable continuation from the acceptable idea to the unacceptable idea. One could not, without distorting the text, isolate a passage, an idea, a word. The propositions are not deduced, do not appear to be conducted, interpenetrate, internourish one another. Strange mutuality of the incontestable and the indefensible. Never shall we seize in this fabric the entirely false formula, and several times we submit to the entirely true certainty. But even certainty leaves room there for distrust. Listen. I read almost at random:”
The doctor was the first to recall that his business was not to remain under the impression of the finest testimonies, but to analyze them as best he could, and to criticize them.
“We shall not have the presumption, my friend, to interpret this history. You have heard it perfectly. It gives you incompletely reason. It gives me complementarily reason.”
“Before we share between us, doctor, the incomplete or complementary pieces of this history, if you still dare to do so, permit me.”
“I permit you.”
“As you advanced in the narration that we owe to the fraternal and severe piety of Madame Périer, I knew in myself a double feeling, two neighboring feelings not at first reconcilable. I perceived that these facts were new to me. I recognized that these facts were known to me. I perceived that these facts were truly new to me. Yet I had read, or at least I had leafed through, in the days when I was a schoolboy, this long text printed fine, small, and dense, while I was preparing indispensable examinations and useful competitive exams. But the narration had not entered my deep memory.”
“That is not surprising, my friend.”
“That is not surprising. The competitive exams and examinations that we must undergo, and where we contribute to envenoming the ancient emulation, all the rivalries of childhood, all the scholastic competitions where we make ourselves accomplices of the old competition — these give, in spite of ourselves, to all the work we do to prepare for them, not only a superficial character, but I know not what of hostile and foreign, of pernicious, bad, malign, unhealthy. The authors are no longer the same, and there is always some hesitation when Blaise Pascal is an author on the syllabus. This incommunication is also a grave impediment to all teaching, primary, secondary, or higher. I recall very well that throughout my studies I reserved most of my authors for when I could read them man to man, sincerely. We have just done so, in first reading, for some passages of a history that is indeed a natural introduction to the Pensées. Shall we one day be able to do the following readings, the second, third, and following readings, always deeper? Shall we ever do some reading that is definitive?”
“I do not think our readings will ever be final. And first, do we know what it is to read, and to read well, and to read badly?”
“I do not know; but I know that at that time I did not read my authors well, that I reserved them for myself, and that now, when I have time, I read them better. But that was not, doctor, what struck me most while I listened to you. In these facts, which were new to me, I profoundly recognized the ancient events that had obscurely struck my contemporary childhood. The history of the great Blaise and the history of the poor lady, innocent and grown old in devotion, which I took the liberty of telling you — it is very nearly the same history. Admit that for a moment I am reserving the elements of this history that I believe pertinent to your interrogations. Admit that I leave aside the details. On the whole, this history is the same. The poor lady with the inflammation of the lungs, the marvel of the women who went to wash the laundry, the edification of the sour devout Bees, the glory of the countryside and the suburb, the scandal of shallow minds — ignorant though she was, bourgeois, old, poor in spirit, ugly no doubt, insignificant, insane if you will, an unknown provincial at the bottom of a provincial suburb, the poor lady ‘wrapped up by the priests,’ as they said — the poor lady nonetheless had all the passions, all the feelings, and almost all the thoughts of a Pascal. Truly they were the same faithful. Doctor, I wonder if the whole strength of the Christian communion, and in particular of the Catholic communion, does not lie there. The unhappy faithful woman had the same faith, the same yearnings, the same charity, the same sacraments. She too finally received the one she had so desired, whom she had desired in the same way. And without immorally playing with assimilations, I wonder if one or several similar socialist communions would not be powerfully efficacious in preparing the revolution of health.”
“I hear you poorly, and badly.”
“I am proposing to you, doctor, ill-prepared imaginings. I shall represent them to you later. But here, quite simply, is what I wanted to say: I noted, or thought I noted, that the close kinship of the Christian feelings of those we call the great to the Christian feelings of those we call the humble gave a formidable strength to the religion we have renounced; thus I desired that a close kinship be established or remain between the socialist feelings of those we call the learned and the socialist feelings of those we call the simple citizens. I count much on certain simple ideas. I count much on the diffusion, through teaching, of simple revolutionary ideas. I hope that the revolution will come about above all through the universal free adhesion, the universal free conversion to a few simple moralist socialist ideas. That is why I have sometimes been called an obscurantist, or an ignorantist.”
“Let us leave these wretched matters. I too do not believe that socialism is as clever as they often make it out to be. Let us leave these debates for today. You were able to distinguish in the narration of which I truly gave you knowledge two Christian tendencies, and two methods that combine. First method: the sick man takes care of his body, works as best he can for the recovery of his body, for reasons we are about to give. But as this first method is the only one that concerns us today, we shall first eliminate the second. Second method: the sick man perceives that the care given to his body or the attenuation of natural suffering constitutes a pleasure of the senses, or simply, if you will, the sick man, instead of considering care and remedies as being necessary for recovery, considers them as being a pleasure of the senses; then, in a spirit of penance, either he deprives himself of certain care, or else, which for us comes to the same thing, he imposes upon himself certain severities that attenuate, balance, or surpass the effect of the remedies and care. We shall leave penance for today. But we shall not neglect the first method. According to this method, the Christian gives all his care to the health of his body as well as you do. God created him. God brought him into the world. God keeps him in the world. God will recall him from the world. When He willed. As He wills. When He shall will. Human life is in a sense a deposit. It is in a sense a trial. It is in a sense an exile, a residence of captivity:
On the land of exile why do I yet remain? There is nothing in common between the earth and me.
The earth is a place of punishment. The Christian is a depositary. He is one on trial. He is an exile, one punished, one condemned for a term. He may become one condemned in perpetuity, one damned to eternity, one reprobate. He is not the master of the hour. There is no hesitation on this point: the Church, commanding for God, interpreting the commandment of God, the fifth law, Thou shalt not kill, forbids suicide. Now, to neglect the health of one’s body is exactly to commit a partial suicide, a preparatory suicide, a beginning of the execution of suicide. It is to advance the hour of the reckoning, the end of the trial, the return from exile, to advance the nostos always coveted; it is to diminish the time of punishment, to advance the hour of liberation. It is to make some miserable human fancy intervene at the heart of the divine decree. It is to encroach upon the power of the Creator. It is to commit a sacrilege and to fall into mortal sin. If your poor lady truly contributed to her own death, I greatly fear that, immediately after, her God received her very badly.”
“You quote Greek, doctor, no less abundantly than citizen Lafargue.”
“Citizen Lafargue is a learned man, and I am not surprised that all the intellectuals together have conspired to envy him his universal erudition, not being able to rob him of it. In the Researches he has made on the Origin of the Idea of Justice, and which he was good enough to give to the Revue socialiste for insertion, and which we thus came to know in July 1899, he revealed to us an intellectual honesty no less impeccable than that which shows through in the contemporary Manifesto. But what the best-informed eyes could not see in the Manifesto, which he drafted for a third party, the least intellectual eyes are compelled to note in the Researches, which no doubt he drafted for all three thirds. I mean here that incomparable erudition, that universal knowledge. Already it is like an exhibition, before the one to come. The author knows the savage and the barbarian; he knows the Redskins according to the American historian Adair; he knows the Fijian; the Slav women of Dalmatia; the Afghan proverb; the Semitic God; the Moabites; the Ammonites; the Hebrew like the Scandinavian; the Erinyes of Greek Mythology; the chorus of Aeschylus’s grandiose trilogy, crying to Orestes; Achilles, Patroclus, Agamemnon, the Achaeans, Hector and Troy; Clytemnestra; the Erinyes again and the shadowy Erebus; the Erinyes of Aeschylus again, and Orestes; and Attica; and the Semitic God and the poetic imagination of the Greeks…”
“Stop, doctor, I beg you!”
“I have twenty-three more pages of it, sir!”
“Have pity on an invalid!”
“I shall have pity. What I have told you, and which was so long, took up only two pages. Do not think, my friend, that M. Alfred Picard, the commissioner general, will ever succeed in fitting the universe into so small a space. And do not think either that M. Pierre Larousse, of happy memory, distributing human knowledge at the whim of alphabets, ever passed so rapidly from pole to equator. If only I could continue my quotations from these citations! You would have heard Vico in his Scienza nuova; you would have heard Aristotle and known the Word, and you would have known the Hecatoncheires of Greek Mythology, and Fison and Howitt, those conscientious and intelligent observers of Australian customs, and the wergeld, and Sir G. Grey, Dalmatia, the Scandinavians and the Eddas, Jesus Christ, Saint Paul and the Apostles. I pass over Lord Carnarvon, Reminiscences of Athens and Morea, and Sir Gardner Wilkinson, Dalmatia and Montenegro, and the ordinances of Edward I of England, and Cain, driven from his clan after the murder of Abel, in Genesis (IV, 13, 14). I pass over the Australian, and Frazer; and the shades of Achilles, and Polyxena, the sister of Paris; and Darwin reporting in his Voyage of a Naturalist a characteristic anecdote: he saw a Fuegian; Caesar and the barbarians he had before his eyes; the greatest chief of the Redskins according to Volney. We would have continued with Plutarch, Aristides, and Philopoemen; the thar, blood-law of the Bedouins and of almost all the Arabs; and we would have returned to the Germans and the Scandinavians. And we would have returned to Jehovah, who does not fear to contradict himself, and to Deuteronomy (XXIV, 16). Then we would have come back once more to Pyrrhus, the son of Achilles, lately neglected. But Cailliaud would have boldly led us to certain tribes of the African desert. And Frazer to Persia. And Lafargue to Norway. As for Athens, the civil power took charge of striking the guilty; the nearest relative attended the execution. And we would have set out from Athens again, without eating or drinking, without sleeping or thinking, disregarding ancient hospitality. Scarcely stopped at the Egyptians by Diodorus Siculus, G.-W. Steller would have carried us off, utterly exhausted, all the way to the Itelmen of Kamchatka. But you yourself, citizen convalescent — I must be tiring you?”
“Not at all: I am not listening. When I saw that you were ignoring my prayers, when I saw that you were having recourse to that miserable figure of rhetoric called, I believe, praeteritio or praetermission — a figure, as far as I remember, hypocritical, and which, as far as I recall, consists in pretending to pass over in silence everything one wants nonetheless to inflict on the listener — I went on strike as a listener.”
“That is a pity, sir. We would have continued. We would have devoured raw all this erudition. We would have instructed ourselves. And then we would have exclaimed: How beautiful science is! And we would have ended with the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, of the revolutionary bourgeois of 1789, and with Pope Leo XIII, in his famous encyclical on the condition of the workers. But you will not listen to me. Can it be true that you are an ignorantist?”
“Citizen Lafargue is not an ignorantist. He is not an ignoramus. And in all that you have quoted to me, doctor, there are hardly any spelling mistakes. I prefer to your ironic or serious quotations the modest Greek that you spontaneously, and no doubt without doing it on purpose, introduced into the fabric of your discourses.”
“Honorable, severe, gentle, and punctual professors, purely academic, taught me this Greek at the lycée. From the fifth form to rhetoric, slowly and communally, guessing and stammering, we read the Hellenic poets, at once foreign to us and youthfully hospitable to our young imaginations. The customs of the ancient men, of heroes, of kings, of cities, and of gods were new to us, for they differed notably from the bourgeois customs then flourishing in the good city of Orléans: the ancient poets seemed all the more beautiful to us. I remember very well that ancient exile then inspired a singular terror in the wretched and that the return, the nostos, was desired as the great happiness, as a rebirth. It seems to me that the Christians inherited these feelings, but that they divinized the terror and the desire. When the city had become, as you know, the universal, eternal city of God, the earth, which we plow, became, as we have said, the residence of exile, residence of terror, and death, which we dread, became the supreme return. But by what right return to the celestial city before the Master of the city had restored to you your citizen’s rights, or had conferred on you the rights of the citizen? Otherwise, what an intrusion! Will it suffice for the wretched intruder to embrace the altars of the gods or to invoke hospitable Zeus? In truth, I repeat to you: If your poor lady truly contributed to her death, I greatly fear that her God received her badly.”
“No, doctor, I am certain that her God forgave her; for this God, slayer of gods, inherited from the gods he slew; he became after Zeus the God of guests; and his hospitality is infinite; and he welcomes the wretched. He became infinitely hospitable, infinitely merciful, and he will have been willing to consider that since the beginning of grace he had admitted many saints who had fallen into the same sin, of having hastily desired the celestial city.”
“The Christian does not have to count on mercy in order to give himself the margin of falling into mortal sin. So Pascal believed himself obliged to do everything possible to restore his health. I keep to this expression. He was submissive to God. He had admirable patience. But he placed precisely his submission, and he exercised precisely his admirable patience in receiving well and in giving and having given to himself the treatments, the remedies, and the care that the doctors who came to visit him had prescribed for him. In doing which, he conducted himself as a perfect geometer and as a perfect Christian. He saw no less clearly then into the ordering of his piety than he saw clearly, despite the assurances of the doctors, into the progress and the worsening of his extraordinary illness.”
“What strange doctors, these doctors of Pascal. What quietude! And what misunderstanding. But we would be wrong to imagine that we would have said everything when we had said that they are also the doctors of Molière. Unwarned, modern or contemporary doctors would have been no less mistaken. They expected in Pascal common, ordinary illnesses. I do not know if he labored under those illnesses; but it seems to me that he labored above all under the malady of thinking and believing; he had begun with the malady of thinking; he continued with the malady of thinking aggravated by the malady of believing: these are formidable, if not inexpiable, maladies, and ones that the good doctors did not take into consideration. We who have the Pensées have thereby, on the life and on the death of Blaise Pascal, on the suffering and the dilapidation of his body, information that his doctors did not have; we have gleams they did not have; we have new understandings; and, without doing metaphysics, we know that his body labored under the suffering of his soul. The malady of believing is given to everyone, and my poor lady had it as Pascal had had it. It is a malady that has become rarer. The malady of thinking is not yet given to everyone. It has remained a little more professional. It is, to use the word, an intellectual malady. I do not believe it is dishonorable. Excess of intellectual work dilapidates the soul and the body without dishonoring the person, just as excess of manual work dilapidates the body and the soul without dishonoring the person. A stupefied intellectual worker is as wretched and is no more contemptible than an infirm mason or a hunchbacked vine-grower. But he is no more commendable either. Or rather, intellectual illness is no more commendable than manual illness or accident. For all workers, and for citizen Pascal himself, health, alone harmonious, is also alone commendable.”
“Let us suspend, my friend, these rash and vaguely religious affirmations. We are at the doctors of Pascal.”
“They were good people, and I could not say more. I wanted to make you observe with me, doctor, how dangerous it would be to carve up too neatly the methods we think we distinguish in reality. Your first and second methods combine for Christians by associating, by reinforcing each other, even by merging much more often than they conflict. The treatments, the remedies and the care, the tisanes, the nauseating drugs and the insipid potions serve them for two ends: naturally, the care prepares or makes the recovery; morally, or rather religiously, since the drugs are disagreeable, painful, distressing, they provide an exercise of penance.”
“The value of which is diminished accordingly for those faithful who would naturally be afraid, like you, of illness and death. Conversely, did you for a single instant, at the moment of danger, dread what a sincere Christian may dread?”
“No, doctor, not for a single instant did I dread the Judgment and the Reprobation. The thirteen or fourteen centuries of Christianity introduced among my ancestors, the eleven or twelve years of Catholic instruction and sometimes education sincerely and faithfully received, have passed over me without leaving any traces. All the comrades I had at the primary school, whether they have become manual workers or intellectual workers, whether they have become peasants or workers, whether they have become socialists and republicans or not, are no less rid of their Catholicism than I am. That is what makes so disturbing the incontestable invasion of the Catholic Church, and so formidable. Whatever the beauty of several individual Catholics, all the power of the contemporary Church is founded either on interested hypocrisy or on interested cynicism. See Jaurès: ‘To inoculate in the nascent people the religious hypocrisy of the dying bourgeoisie.’ Not only has this crime been attempted: its perpetration is not badly advanced. Will they go as far as consummation? Must we, upon my word, be Tartuffified? That too is a collective illness.”
“One of the gravest, and one of those that leads us most hideously to collective death. Most hideously and most surely.”
“I have a friend who has remained Catholic.”
“You have a friend who has remained Catholic?”
“I have a friend who has remained Catholic, or, which comes to the same thing, a Catholic has remained my friend. I see him for a few hours every two or three years, when he passes through Paris. For he too is a provincial. My friend is a priest.”
“You have a friend who is a Catholic priest?”
“I have a friend who has become a Catholic priest. He has remained my friend. It is a friendship that, for today, does not concern you. If I had remained Catholic, no doubt I would have become a priest with him. When I say that he became a priest, I am not well informed about it. We see each other so rarely. He was a seminarian. He advanced regularly from degree to degree, ritually, from the Church taught to the Church teaching. I do not know where he is. I believe he has finished. I do not even know these degrees. In which I am wrong.
My friend was ill. I recall very well now that he cared for himself punctually. He is still very young. He was deeply damaged. Chest and nervous system. For weeks and months, for years, furnished with his austere and wise gentleness, his unalterable and informed patience, his long and lofty submission, clothed in his straight, invulnerable, and slow fidelity, not only did he take care to treat himself with determined remedies and care, as in the time of Pascal, but piously adopting the most properly scientific data of modern science, he followed with the same submission and fidelity what we call a regimen. That is to say that instead of having, in his endangered life, hours when he would have lived and minutes when he would have medically cared for his body, far from it, all his minutes were given to care, and life itself was incorporated into the care. He followed a regimen. Hygiene was inseparably merged for him with medicine. He had submitted his whole life to the commandment of this regimen. He left his comrades, his friends, his masters, his parents, his country and went to shut himself up for whole half-years in the Luxembourg establishment where a Luxembourg doctor had introduced the latest arrangements for the sick. He abandoned for a long time his studies, which were nonetheless sacred studies. He tempered, he regularly and considerably diminished his exercises, which were nonetheless exercises of piety. I do not know if he had to ask dispensations for this from the ecclesiastical authorities. But what I do know well is that his prayer itself was submitted to the commandments of his regimen. And what I know for certain is that he had no natural attachment to life and that he had a religious detachment from it, and that prayer was infinitely precious to him. But evidently he thought and believed that he had to deprive himself of praying to God in order to remain faithfully on the earth where God had sent him.”
“Do not think, my friend, that the institution of the regimen is exclusively modern. The ancients already thought it necessary that the athlete follow a regimen. And in what I read to you on the life and death of Blaise Pascal there appears in fragments the concern for a regimen. The sick man did not only exercise his patience and his submission in moments of crisis to accept well the painful and distressing remedies as he accepted the sufferings themselves: he exercised patience and the same submission in ordinary periods; he then regulated his nourishment according to contestable laws, but which seemed good and wise to him, which no doubt corresponded more or less in his mind to what we call the laws of hygiene. He did not eat beyond a certain quantity, even when he was still hungry, and he always ate a certain quantity, even when he had no appetite.”
“I admit, doctor, that these laws seemed to him to intervene more or less as what we call the laws of hygiene and the laws of a regimen seem to us to intervene. I only note that these laws now seem crude to us in their brutality.”
“No, my friend: they are properly neither crude nor brutal. But they are as one had to and as one could make them in the time of Pascal. Do not forget that then the sciences we call natural were so to speak not yet born; natural history had not yet been born and human history was badly pursued; and chemistry too had not been instituted. On the contrary, mathematics, the mathematical sciences, mathematical physics, mathematical mechanics had suddenly given extraordinary results. Celestial mechanics had given admirable justifications. You cannot deny that the admirable coincidence of celestial phenomena with human calculations, that the fidelity of the wandering planets to their astronomical appointments, gave to most of these philosophers and scholars a satisfaction as yet unheard of and sometimes a new kind of pride. They were no doubt proudly geometers, and the resonance of this pride, equally inadmissible to Christians, to moralists, and to naturalists, resounds from Cartesian physics, metaphysics, anatomy, and physiology to Leibnizian philosophy and even to Kant’s Critique. Pascal escaped from it as a Christian, by the contemplation of holiness:
‘The infinite distance from bodies to minds figures the infinitely more infinite distance from minds to charity, for it is supernatural.
‘All the splendor of greatness has no luster for people who are engaged in the pursuits of the mind. The greatness of intellectual people is invisible to kings, to rich men, to captains, to all these great ones of the flesh.
‘The greatness of Wisdom, which is nowhere except in God, is invisible to the carnal and to intellectual people. These are three orders differing in kind.
‘The great geniuses have their empire, their splendor, their greatness, their victory, and their luster, and have no need of carnal greatnesses, with which they have no relation. They are seen not by eyes but by minds; that is enough. The saints have their empire, their splendor, their victory, their luster, and have no need of carnal or intellectual greatnesses, with which they have no relation, for they add nothing to them and take nothing from them. They are seen by God and the angels, and not by bodies or by curious minds: God is enough for them.
‘Archimedes, without splendor, would be in the same veneration. He did not give battles for the eyes, but he furnished all minds with his inventions. Oh! how he shone forth to minds! Jesus Christ, without wealth and without any outward production of knowledge, is in his order of holiness. He gave no invention, he did not reign; but he was humble, patient, holy, holy, holy to God, terrible to demons, without any sin. Oh! in what great pomp and in what prodigious magnificence he came, to the eyes of the heart, which see Wisdom!’
‘We know truth not only by reason but also by the heart.’
‘Those whom we see to be Christians without knowledge of prophecies and proofs nonetheless judge of it as well as those who have this knowledge. They judge of it by the heart, as the others judge of it by the mind. It is God himself who inclines them to believe; and thus they are most efficaciously persuaded.’
That is why your poor lady had the same feelings and so to speak the same thoughts as Pascal. You see that Pascal was not unaware of it.”
“I do not wish, doctor, to let myself be seduced again by comparisons from which I would make misplaced assimilations. But I know at present many men and many citizens: Those whom we see to be socialists without knowledge of prophecies and proofs nonetheless judge of it as well as those who have this knowledge. They judge of it by the heart, as the others judge of it by the mind. It is solidarity itself that inclines them to believe, and thus they are most efficaciously persuaded.”
“I hear you honestly and without any complacency and without welcoming an exaggeration, but I am not surprised, my friend, that solidarity seems to you to have for socialists, making the suitable mutations in the respective attributions, the same function that God himself had for Christians. For their God acted in them only by natural ways, which we call natural laws, and by supernatural ways of grace, to which charity responded. You know what perfectly efficacious meaning Pascal gives to this word charity, which so many Christians have diverted to vulgar meanings. We too, my friend, nothing prevents us from restoring to the word solidarity, which so many socialists have vulgarly debased, a meaning no less perfectly efficacious, no less precise, no less valid. Thus understood, thus loved, thus willed, thus known, thus exercised, thus deep and free, socialist solidarity springs frequently into the hearts of the humble and the poor, into the hearts of the ignorant.”
“That is indeed what I meant: we have our saints and we have our doctors.”
“But we must not neglect for all that reasoning, patient work, and knowledge. There are saints who are doctors; there have been saints among the Fathers of the Greek Church and of the Latin Church and of the Middle Ages. The two combine:
‘And that is why those to whom God has given religion by feeling of the heart are very happy and very legitimately persuaded. But to those who do not have it, we can give it only by reasoning, while waiting for God to give it to them by feeling of the heart, without which faith is only human, and useless for salvation.’
“I hear you as is fitting.”
“I continue:
‘It would have been useless for Archimedes to play the prince in his books on geometry, although he was one. It would have been useless for our Lord Jesus Christ, to shine forth in his reign of holiness, to come as a king: but he came indeed with the splendor of his order!
‘It is very ridiculous to be scandalized by the lowliness of Jesus Christ, as if this lowliness were of the same order as the greatness he came to make appear. Let one consider this greatness in his life, in his passion, in his obscurity, in his death, in the election of his own, in their abandonment, in his secret resurrection, and in the rest; one will see it so great that one will have no cause to be scandalized by a lowliness that is not there. But there are some who can admire only carnal greatnesses, as if there were no intellectual ones; and others who admire only intellectual ones, as if there were not infinitely higher ones in Wisdom.
‘All bodies, the firmament, the stars, the earth and its kingdoms, are not worth the least of minds; for it knows all that, and itself; and bodies, nothing.’”
“‘Man is only a reed, the weakest thing in nature, but he is a thinking reed. The entire universe need not arm itself to crush him. A vapor, a drop of water, is enough to kill him. But when the universe crushes him, man would still be nobler than what kills him, because he knows that he dies, and the advantage the universe has over him — the universe knows nothing of it.
‘All our dignity therefore consists in thought. It is from there that we must raise ourselves, not from space and duration, which we could not fill. Let us labor therefore to think well: that is the principle of morality.’
‘It is not from space that I must seek my dignity, but from the regulation of my thought. I would have no more by possessing lands. By space, the universe encompasses me and swallows me as a point; by thought, I encompass it.’”
“The passage you quote to me, my friend, is the best known.”
“I shall quote it nonetheless, citizen. I am perfectly determined to quote even the stanzas of Polyeucte, if they lie on the path of our conversations. We are not running after the unpublished; we are not running after the unknown; we are not running after the extraordinary: we are seeking the just and the fitting, and much that is just and much that is fitting was said before us better than we could say it.”
“It is not I, my friend, who will reproach you for it. I too do not run after the bizarre as such. But when the bizarre is just, true, fitting, harmonious, I welcome the bizarre and even seek it out; and when it is the known, the banal that is just, true, fitting, harmonious, I welcome this banal that I have not had to seek. I was only telling you that the passage you quoted to me is the best known. The vigor, the precision, the novelty, the freshness of the metaphor has installed it in the memory of men, and good examiners have often given it to be developed at the baccalaureate: Develop this thought of Pascal: Man is only a reed, the weakest thing in nature, but he is a thinking reed. Then one had to say again in six pages of bad French everything the great Blaise had said so well in twelve lines. This exercise conferred entry to the apprenticeship to the liberal arts. From the baccalaureate it ascended to the licentiate, thus exempted from military service for two years, conferred academic entry and the official right to teach. I am not sure it did not ascend higher still, to the august agrégation, where the good are decisively distinguished from the bad. Provisionally excluded from these greatnesses, my friend, we do not have to develop this thought of Pascal. We shall only note that it bears only on the distance from the first to the second order, on the distance from bodies to minds, and that finally this gap interests Pascal much less than the last distance from the second to the third order, the distance from minds to charity. To the point that in the passage I began to read to you, and which I am going to continue, a longer passage, without metaphor, more important, the infinite distance from bodies to minds only figures the infinitely more infinite distance from minds to charity, for it is supernatural. And believe well that if Pascal had known that the use of the metaphor would later displace in the memory of men the importance he wanted respectively to give to these two distances, he would no doubt have neglected the metaphor, for he was not a man to prefer the most beautiful of comparisons to the most insignificant reason. I continue:
‘All bodies together, and all minds together, and all their productions, are not worth the least movement of charity; this is of an infinitely higher order.
‘From all bodies together one could not succeed in producing a small thought: this is impossible, and of another order. From all bodies and minds one could not draw a movement of true charity: this is impossible, and of another order, supernatural.’”
“I hear all this as is fitting, doctor. It is true that socialist solidarity is in secularity as Christian charity is in Christendom, no less deep, no less interior, if I may say so, no less entire, no less primary, no less different in kind, and no less situated in a proper order. Thus science, the history of men and of societies, may lead and often does lead to the feeling of solidarity, but it is not the feeling of solidarity itself and cannot replace the feeling of solidarity.”
“We shall discuss this, my friend, when we discuss teaching: for the frequent and happy introduction of science to solidarity, but sometimes the incommunication of knowledge to action — this contrariety resides at the heart of teaching and manifests itself especially at the heart of teaching. Pascal had vividly and deeply felt what a leap must be made, at least in theory, by one who wants to pass from the second order to the third, to go from knowledge to action, from science to religion, from geometry to charity, which is human holiness. He had felt all the more properly what the intermediate gap was since he himself had been, and since he had remained all the same, a geometer, having abandoned rather the matter than the method and the sense of his former geometry. And here is where we find ourselves again. As he remained what we call a mathematician in the rigorously exact exercise of charity, so and no doubt involuntarily he remained an arithmetician in the administration of his stomach. Always the same quantity of food, whether the stomach wanted more or less of it, whether it wanted it or not. Evidently he considered his stomach as a simple machine, and not as an organ — that is to say, he did not consider it as a living machine, part of a living being, of a larger living machine. To be compared with Cartesian anatomy and physiology, simplistic. And he wanted to govern his stomach by the mathematical mechanical arithmetical laws by which mechanicians govern inanimate, inorganic machines. That is because he had escaped from universal mathematics only by the contemplation of holiness, by the sense of charity. Whereas we, who have escaped from universal mathematics and mechanics by the consideration of morality, by the will to action, by the sense of solidarity — besides this, we have escaped from universal mechanics, or rather modern humanity has escaped from universal mechanics, by the progress of physics itself and, a little more, of chemistry, and especially by the institution and by the progress of the independent natural sciences, by the freedom of natural history and of human history. And that is why we would not have the idea now of treating our stomach as one treats, or rather as one would not dare treat, a boiler of a steam engine.”
“Let us conclude, doctor.”
“No, my friend, let us not conclude. What would it be to conclude, if not to flatter ourselves with enclosing and fitting into two or three short, clumsy, inexact, false formulas all the events of the inner life that we have so lengthily and so carefully tried to elucidate a little? Let us not permit ourselves to make one of those summaries that are convenient to read when one is preparing an examination. We are not speaking for people in a hurry, for busy citizens who gladly read tables of contents. We are speaking for those who are willing to read us patiently.”
“Let us leave this, doctor, for when I shall tell you about the institution of these notebooks.”
“I admit that one may try to gather into formulas, which are simple, all the simple events, which are rather numerous, and all the simple duties, which are much more numerous. I admit in particular that one may try to establish formulas for practice, for morality. But how can one formulate all the nuances we have tried to respect; how can one formulate all the complexities, all the reversals, all the surprises, all the turnings, all the under-lyings and all the undergroundings we have tried to respect? At most we could say, altogether roughly, that it is properly Christian to care for one’s body as best one can, but that the attraction of Paradise seduces many Christians, among the best. Thus Christianity would be characterized in this regard by an exact official resistance opposed to illness and to death, but the application of Christianity would be compromised to the point of often presenting us with an incontestable complicity with illness and with death.”
“My conclusions, doctor, if you permit me to use this word, would, if you will, be much less favorable to Christianity. It seems to me that we have neglected an important consideration. Let us leave the more or less involuntary attractions that may seduce the Christian away from the earth and the more or less unconscious effect of these attractions on the illness and death of Christians. It seems to me we still have an important consideration to make. It seems to me that besides this, Christianity further disarms the Christian before illness and before death. Permit me, doctor, to remind you of what our good philosophy professors called the influence of the moral on the physical.”
“I remember perfectly, citizen: there was also the influence of the physical on the moral. That provided us with fine antitheses.”
“For once, doctor, the antithesis corresponded to a real contrariety. It does not seem to me that I am advancing rashly if I claim that the moral dispositions of a patient considerably influence his illness and his return to good health. Sadness, boredom, embarrassment, despair collaborate in decline, as joy and happiness work toward recovery. I believe I felt it myself at the time when I was in danger. It seems to me I feel it very well now that I am convalescing. And it seems to me that this is where Christians are disarmed, profoundly weak. Those among them who have a somewhat efficacious imagination must represent beatitude to themselves with such yearning that, even warned, even willing it, even trying, they must not have that deep taste for life and health that is no doubt a capital element of longevity.”
“Yes, you are right. A good Christian must lack a certain deep attachment to life, animal, and I would almost say a vegetable rootedness. Whence no doubt a certain hesitation in the best-intentioned defense, a certain uncertainty, inexactness, and clumsiness at living. Besides, it would not be difficult for me to find in Christianity a remedy for this. It is said that there will be few elect, and if Christians were not presumptuous, the fear of appearing before God would incite them to postpone as far as they could the hour of death. But many Christians are presumptuous. Besides, a certain terror, at the same time that it wants to escape death, may weaken the patient to the point of delivering him up inert, whereas a certain security, at the same time that it desires death, may comfort the patient and contribute to his recovery. You see how all this is always complicated. There are always crossings and bifurcations. — There are always crossings and bifurcations in our passions and in our feelings. But it seems to me incontestable that Christianity is particularly complicated. It embraces so many interior or introduced contradictions that it can of itself give an answer to everything. It embraces almost all excesses, and thus the excesses that give answer to contrary excesses, and it envelops also the temperaments, which give answer to all excesses, and it embraced the excesses, which give answer even to the excess of temperament. It appears at first sight as complicated, as rich as life. And that is why it often appears to suffice unto itself. It only appears to suffice unto itself, citizen, by the insufficiency of its requirement. Many men have imagined that it was a whole life. But it is scarcely even a whole world. And it is but a semblance of life, a crude image, a strange combination of unreasonable infinity and rather sickly life. I shall go so far as to say that it is a counterfeit, a botched job of life. Under the pretext that what is not living is in general much less complex than what is living, we are in general much too inclined to imagine that complexity — or even that interior contradiction — guarantees life. No: it is necessary there, at least to life as we know it. But it is not sufficient.”
“Note, my friend, that these Christians whom you reproach for having loved illness and death loved human illness and death, loved martyrdom — suffering, illness, and death for the testimony — only to introduce themselves to eternal life and thus to eternal health.”
“Do not be afraid, citizen: quote the Polyeucte.”
“I shall quote it:
Holy sweetnesses of Heaven, adorable ideas, You fill a heart that can receive you. Souls possessed by your sacred attractions No longer conceive anything that can move them. You promise much and give still more, Your goods are not inconstant. And the happy death that I await Serves us only as a sweet passage To introduce us to the portion That makes us content forever.”
“Note, doctor, for it is time to say it, that these Christians whom I reproach for having loved or well received human illness and death also admitted, above all admitted, that there was an eternal suffering, and an eternal illness, and an eternal death contemporary with, or, to speak exactly, coeternal with, all their happiness, their eternal life, their beatitude, and their health.”
“That, my friend, is an article of their faith.”
“I shall therefore attack the Christian faith. What is most foreign to us in it, and I shall use the word, what is most odious to us, what is barbarous, what we shall never consent to, what has haunted the best Christians, what the best Christians have escaped from or silently turned away from, my master, is this: this strange combination of life and death that we call damnation, this strange reinforcement of presence by absence and deepening of everything by eternity. Never will any man who has received as his portion, or who has given himself, humanity consent to this. Never will anyone who has received as his portion or given himself a deep and sincere sense of collectivism consent to this. No citizen who has simple solidarity will consent. As we are in solidarity with the damned of the earth:
Arise, ye prisoners of starvation! Arise, ye wretched of the earth!
entirely thus, and without letting ourselves be led by mere words, but modeling ourselves on reality, we are in solidarity with the eternally damned. We do not admit that there be men who are treated inhumanly. We do not admit that there be citizens who are treated uncivically. We do not admit that there be men who are repulsed from the threshold of any city. There is the deep movement that animates us, this great movement of universality that animates Kantian morality and that animates us in our claims. We do not admit that there be a single exception, that the door be slammed in anyone’s face. Heaven or earth, we do not admit that there be pieces of the city that do not reside within the city. Certainties, probabilities, or dreams, realities or dreams, those of us who dream — we are also perfectly collectivist in our dreams and in our desires as we are in our actions and in our teachings. Never shall we consent to a prolonged exile of any wretch. All the more shall we not consent to an eternal exile in a mass. It is not only individual, particular, national, international, political, and social events that have opposed the socialist revolution to the reaction of the Church. But these events are the expression and almost I would say that this opposition is the symbol of an invincible fundamental contrariety. The imagination of an exile is the one that is most repugnant to all socialism. Never shall we say yes to the supposition, to the proposition of this living death. An eternity of living death is a perverse, inverse imagination. We have quite enough with human life and human death.”
“For living death, the ancients had made a beginning — not only those you do not like, the barbarians, but those you prefer to them. So that the city of Thebes might resist the ravages of anarchy — already — King Creon had judged it indispensable that the fraternal and guilty Antigone be enclosed alive in a natural dungeon,
With food in just quantity So that her death cannot stain the city.
Have you a Sophocles, my friend?”
“Of course I have one, doctor.”
We searched a long time for the Sophocles I thought I had. There was none.
“I beg your pardon, doctor, for having been so presumptuous. I really thought I had a Sophocles. I remember the one I had at school, an old thin book bound in marbled paper, an old and bad edition that I read passionately. Since then I have so present a memory of the Greek text, so clear a representation, that I thought I had the text itself on some shelf of my library.”
“Your present memories would not even permit you to make me a correct quotation from memory.”
“That is true.”
“A good memory is not worth a good text. When you go to Paris you will buy for a few sous a new little school edition.”
“I shall not fail to. Let us not confuse, doctor: having a faithful representation of a statue or a text, with: being able to reproduce them. These are two distinct operations. To identify them would suppose that the representation of a statue is a little statue and that the representation of a text is a little text. Many ancients commonly imagined this. But we have renounced these somewhat childish psychologies. Often I prefer the representation I have to the object itself, which amounts to saying that I prefer the representation I have in my memory, the image in which all my memories have worked, to the new presentation I would have. But if you prefer texts, I shall buy a little Sophocles. The first time I go to Paris, I shall go buy one at the Société nouvelle de librairie et d’édition, 17 rue Cujas.”
“Why there, my friend?”
“For many reasons I shall give you later, doctor, but above all because this house is, to my knowledge, the first and only cooperative of production and consumption that works in the industry and commerce of books. While waiting for us to have the original text, let us content ourselves, doctor, with what we have: Antigone put on the French stage by Paul Meurice and Auguste Vacquerie, and we also have the music of Saint-Saëns, voice and piano score. I fear the verses may seem to you quite bad.”
“I shall content myself with them all the more willingly for today because this rather faithful adaptation was happily performed for us at the Comédie-Française. Let us listen to this Creon:
I know in a gloomy place and far from any path An underground cave surrounded by dread. I am going to have Antigone enclosed there alive…
Movement of fright from the Chorus. Creon continues:
By her dear god Pluto perhaps she will obtain That her airless prison not be mortal to her. If not, she will learn that they do not serve us, The sterile honors rendered to the Gods below!
Antigone laments:
Walled in a rock! Oh! what a cruel death! Mournful Niobe Perished thus welded to the stone.
Antigone laments, and her lamentation seems to me akin to the Christian lamentation:
What! their laughter follows me Without pity or remorse, Into my tomb-prison, dead for those who live, Living for the dead!
The condemnation pronounced, announced by Creon, seems to me like an indication of future damnations:
Do you not know that this funeral song Will cease only when death has silenced it! Come! carry out my sovereign order; Let her be borne at once to the underground vault And there leave her alone and close up the entrance. Then, let her die there! Or else let her live there buried! We shall not have her blood upon us. But let her eyes Henceforth have nothing more to see with the heavens!
Antigone laments, and the expression of her lamentation itself is at once pagan with Christian indications:
Tomb! my bridal bed! O underground couch Where death drags me for the eternal night!
And the chorus reminds her most opportunely that this kind of torture, which you will not prevent me from considering as a sketch of hell, had often been inflicted on great personages:
You are not the first Who lost the light And life at once. The misfortune that tries you Terrible, recurs Among gods and kings.
The chorus gives examples:
Like you condemned, Danaë was dragged She too, far from daylight And harshly captive Saw herself buried alive In a tower of bronze.
Which we can read at will, for there is a variant:
Like you in the stone Danaë all proud That the sovereign God Great Zeus had loved her Was nonetheless enclosed In a tower of bronze.
After a salutary reflection on the power of Destiny, the well-informed chorus gives a new example:
He had what is given you, This son of the king of Edonia, Insulter of the altar. And Bacchus silenced him By enclosing him underground In a cruel rock.
New salutary reflection and new and final example:
On the treacherous shore Where one sees Salmydessus Prey to all the winds, The unbridled stepmother Of the two sons of Phineus Buried them alive.
And their mother, my daughter, Was of the family Of Erechtheus! and her games, Boreas being her father, Braved the thunder On the stormy mountains!
On the ice, intrepid And proud and swifter Than a furious horse, She went fearing nothing. The Fate knew how to reach This daughter of the Gods!
Antigone exits.
My friend, these lyric verses of Messieurs Paul Meurice and Auguste Vacquerie are not worth the stanzas of Pierre Corneille. You know the causes of this disparity. Messieurs Paul Meurice and Auguste Vacquerie are not or were not poets comparable to the old Pierre Corneille. Besides, it is more difficult to translate as a poet than to give, to produce, oneself, as a poet. I assure you that these plaints and these consolations, if they may be so called, were formidable when they were sung on stage and when they were accompanied.”
“I heard them, doctor, in the days when I was young. The harmonious lamentations of Antigone and the cowardly harmonious consolations of the chorus seemed to me formidable, but not at all terrifying like the imaginations of the Christian hell. Never have the pagans, who loved life and beauty, been able or willing to succeed at such terrors. There must be at the bottom of the Christian feeling a frightful complicity, a hideous complacency with illness and with death. You will not make me unsay it.”
“The ancient lamentations and the consolations of the chorus seemed to you harmonious when performed on stage at the Comédie-Française. No doubt they were harmonious when performed before the Athenians. But I fear that from that time on, my friend, illness and suffering, death and exile, were not harmonious to the wretches who endured them in reality. There is a long way from tragic sorrow to the uglinesses of reality. You have not forgotten all the horrors of ancient history, the barbarous horrors that the Hellenes knew, and also the Hellenic horrors, the hatreds and civil wars among the cities and within the cities, the massacres and ravages, then the hatred and war of the poor and the rich, the tyrannies, the oligarchies, and the demagogies, and, already, the sad hard resignation of Hesiod. No, my friend, I am not fascinated by the memory of my Greek prose compositions to the point of having forgotten that.”
“Nor am I, doctor, and I did not wish to institute a harmonious and fictitious ancient city. But you are not going to institute for me either an ancient city identical to the Middle Ages of Christendom. Without doing any kind of metaphysics, I am compelled to accept that there was an ancient genius and a Christian genius and that the Christian genius is in many respects different from the ancient genius. This being admitted, I maintain, and I uphold, and I shall always uphold, that the Christian genius is much more favorable to every illness. When we say that the Catholic Church is opposed to socialism — and that is what makes so delicate the situation of sincere Christian socialists, very few in France — we do not mean only that it wants to keep militants exiled from the goods of this world: we mean more profoundly that it wants to keep former militants exiled from the eternal goods, that it admits side by side a Church Triumphant and a Hell, a residence of beatitude and a residence of illness and death. There is truly the non possumus. Imagined or not to frighten sinners, hell has frightened the best Christians even more.”
“You have already told me so.”
“I beg your pardon. But this terror grips my heart.”
“It prevents you from reserving that we do not believe in the propositions of the Catholic faith because it is not true.”
“I was only trying to compare, doctor, the idea we have of what we want with respect to illness and death to the idea that Christians have of what they believe in the same respects. Their terror grips my soul. There is not only, from Catholics to us, the distance from a vain imagination to a sincere universal criticism; that would be nothing compared to what there is: but truly there is the irreconcilability of a perverse imagination to a modest reason friendly to health. I thought much about this during several years when my friends Marcel and Pierre Baudouin were working on a drama in three plays that they finished writing in June 1897 and that the printers finished printing in December of the same year.”
“Good-bye, my friend,” said the doctor, “and take care of yourself. I shall come back to see you once more, for I know the honors that the healthy owe to convalescents. Then it is you who will come back to see me.”
“For I know the honors that simple citizens owe to moralists. Come back quickly, honorable sir, come back soon.”
“I cannot, for I have many errands to do in Paris.”
“Make haste, Mister Errand-Runner, make haste, for I am expecting my cousin.”
“Who is this cousin?”
“And when my cousin is here, doctor, one can no longer converse quietly. My cousin will not much like the slownesses and lengths of our attentive dialectics. He is an impatient fellow.”
“But who is this cousin?”
“I tell you he is as impatient as you. Know then, O doctor, that I have in the provinces a cousin whom I call respectfully and familiarly my big cousin, and who less respectfully, and more familiarly, calls me in return his little cousin. This title derives from the fact that he is older than I, and thus when I was little, he on the contrary was big. And we have continued to call each other so all the more conveniently because he is big and strong, broad-shouldered, while I am small and low. By trade he is a heating worker.”
“A heating worker?”
“A heating worker. As the name indicates, he works on all the apparatuses that produce smoke: chimneys, stoves, furnaces, and heaters. He is not at all coming to Paris, as a cunning reader might falsely suspect, to introduce some variety into our debates. For we have no need of varying ourselves, do we, doctor? — We do not converse in order to vary ourselves, but we seek the truth. He is hurrying to Paris for the Exhibition.”
“Naturally, since he comes from the provinces.”
“He is hurrying to Paris for the Universal Exhibition. That is to say, interprovincial, international, and also intermetropolitan. He has been told that at the Exhibition there are monumental chimneys, not counting the Eiffel Tower, extraordinary stovepipes, complicated furnaces, warmers designed for the greater glory of national industry, and heaters well made to testify to the greatness of the human spirit. As a man, as a Frenchman, as a heating worker, my cousin is hurrying to the Exhibition, already glorious with the common glory and the professional glory. My big cousin is a fellow who likes to see for himself. He was to arrive this week.”
“This week? The Exhibition doesn’t open until April 14.”
“Precisely. My cousin claims that to see these machines well one must see them before they have started. An idea of his.”
“How would he have gotten in?”
“There are arrangements. Some comrade in the heating trade would have lent him his exhibitor’s card. My cousin planned to come this week. He was counting on the usual softening of the temperature at this season. When the temperature is milder, heating work is less urgent. But the expected softening has not come. My cousin will arrive as soon as he can leave his work for a while.”
“What is his character?”
“I do not know if you will please him.”
“I do not know either if he will please me.”
“He is a big good clever fellow. A former pupil of the Brothers of the Christian Schools, he has for the dear Brothers a little gratitude and many harsh words. He got his elementary school certificate. He has read many bad novels, serials, which have left practically no trace in his imagination. He has a fine gentle handwriting that does not resemble him. He calculates perfectly, and it is he who does his employer’s accounts. A good primary education. A good worker, as a worker. Skillful with his hands. Since he works in a very small provincial firm — the boss, two journeymen, one or two laborers — he does a bit of all trades: mason, tiler, plasterer, marble-worker, locksmith, sheet-metal worker, and not only pure heating worker. Bold, and even reckless: such is the trade’s demand. Heating workers are even more reckless than roofers, since chimneys are higher than roofs. Besides, what seems recklessness in them is a particular kind of serenity, a habituation to remaining in the heights. He likes to talk. You speak to him, you go on, you go on, you speak before him. Finally at a word, at a gesture, you perceive that he was leading you on, that he was making you walk, that he was playing dumb, that he knew perfectly well what he made you say. It is a kind of humor that has seemed to me very frequent among workers, at least in this province, particularly among building workers. Building workers are natural makers of palaver, organizers of discussions. The public square and the street are natural to them. Much banter, often good banter, especially deadpan banter. Every day he buys his Petite République from the newspaper seller, who also keeps for him the popular novels appearing in installments. He must also buy the Socialist History, because it is socialist, because he likes history, because it appears in identical installments, because the publisher is the same — it is still Rouff. My cousin reads all this while eating, at lunch; reads the Petite République and rather believes that it happened; reads his installments and knows perfectly well that it did not happen; reads his History and entirely believes that it happened. My cousin is a registered socialist. He is coming to call me to account.”
“Call you to account?”
“Call me to account. My cousin is, as you may well think, a member — and a very active member — of the Group for Social Studies of Orléans, affiliated with the French Workers’ Party. A regular vote of the group, in which my cousin had taken part, had instituted me as delegate of this group to the future former General Congress of French Socialist Organizations. Fortunately, the National Council was watching. Along came the good Guesdist, the faithful duly recommended. The group had a second meeting, much more regular than the first, then proceeded to a second vote, much more regular than the first. The minority remained faithful to me. But the majority disowned me. My cousin, having been of the minority, claims that I was morally his delegate to the Congress.”
“I do not know very well what a moral delegate is.”
“Nor do I. But my cousin is stubborn. He will tell us what he means.”
“And how large was this faithful minority?”
“Though absent, I obtained four votes.”
“Admit that it is very few. The unfaithful majority was no doubt at least equal to five votes?”
“Equal to five votes, doctor, it would have been valid. But it was much more considerable: it rose to six votes — out of ten voters. There was no abstention. — Good-bye.”
The doctor, having left, came back on his steps:
“I was about to leave you the book I had brought. I was no longer thinking of it. I must return it before the Easter holidays to the library where I borrowed it. It is the Provincial Letters. When your cousin calls you to account, you will be able to make him some interesting quotations:
‘And if I had the curiosity to know whether these propositions are in Jansenius, his book is not so rare nor so large that I could not read it all through to enlighten myself, without consulting the Sorbonne about it.’”
“Do not think, doctor, that my big cousin or his comrades understand these allusions.”
“If he is as you have told me, I am sure he will understand at least what follows: ‘There was never a less juridical judgment, and all the statutes of the Faculty of Theology were violated. M. Arnauld’s declared enemies were given as his commissioners, and no regard was paid either to his challenges or to his defenses; he was even refused to come in person to give his reasons. Although by the statutes the monks should not be present in the assemblies in a number greater than eight, there were always more than forty of them, and to prevent those of M. Arnauld from saying all they had prepared for his defense, the time each doctor was to give his opinion was limited to half an hour. For this purpose a clepsydra was placed on the table, that is, a sand clock, which was the measure of this time; an invention no less odious on such occasions than shameful in its origin, and which, according to Cardinal Pallavicini’s report, having been proposed at the Council of Trent by some, was rejected by the whole council. Finally, with the design of entirely removing the freedom of suffrage, Chancellor Séguier, despite his great age and his infirmities, had orders to attend all these assemblies. Nearly eighty of the most celebrated doctors, seeing such an irregular procedure, resolved to absent themselves, and preferred to leave the Faculty rather than subscribe to the censure. M. de Launoy himself, so famous for his great erudition, although he publicly professed to be of another opinion than Saint Augustine on grace, also left like the others, and wrote against the censure a letter in which he complained with much force about the overthrow of all the privileges of the Faculty.’ Come, good-bye, good-bye. What I have read to you is not by Pascal. It is an account that Racine made in a History of Port-Royal that he left in manuscript and that has since been placed in his works. M. Havet gave us this account at the beginning of the remarks on the first Provincial Letter. When the government and the pope were in agreement, the rule made against the monks was not observed.”